450 Posts Found

Companies quickly realize that reporting can’t happen without strategy development. As firms start the process of putting a report together—talking to stakeholders, examining core businesses—they’ll have to back up and ask, What is our strategy on climate change anyway? What is our approach to managing this risk? The discipline of sorting out which activities are material to report on and in what depth, and what … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Alyson Slater | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Social Responsibility (ESG)

Socially responsible investing is neither as profitable nor as responsible as advertised. But if you insist, here’s how to do it right.

Content: Article | Author: Henry Blodget | Source: The Atlantic Monthly | Subjects: Finance, Social Responsibility (ESG) | Industry: Investing

The essence of a good reputation is not in trying to conjure up a good story to hide substandard performance, but in sensitizing management to the need to adjust performance so the deeds speak for themselves. It boils down to deeds versus declarations. A record of responsible deeds is the organization’s insurance policy when and if something goes wrong.

Content: Quotation | Source: Emerald Now | Subjects: Reputation, Social Responsibility (ESG)

The sweet notion that making a company environmentally friendly can be not just cost-effective but profitable is going up in smoke. Meet the man wielding the torch.

Content: Article | Author: Ben Elgin | Source: BusinessWeek | Subject: Social Responsibility (ESG)

Is management a profession? Should it be? Can it be? This major work of social and intellectual history reveals how such questions have driven business education and shaped American management and society for more than a century. The book is also a call for reform. Rakesh Khurana shows that university-based business schools were founded to train a professional class of managers in the mold of … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Author: Rakesh Khurana | Subjects: MBA Related, Social Responsibility (ESG) | Industry: Education / Training

The first problem with labeling a particular style of investing “socially responsible” is that it suggests that other kinds of investing are not. So it’s no wonder many people find the concept silly or offensive.

At some level, after all, our very economic system is socially problematic. The benefits accrue disproportionately to owners (investors, this means you), who make fortunes off the labor of rank-and-file employees. … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: The Atlantic Monthly | Subjects: Investing, Social Responsibility (ESG) | Industry: Investing

As a century of industrialism before the introduction of environmental and labor laws illustrated, the free market does not appropriately “price” the cost of natural resources or pollution. So the idea that responsible investment practices can be used in conjunction with intelligent regulation and consumption to serve the greater good is reasonable. The challenge comes in figuring out how best to do it.

Content: Quotation | Source: The Atlantic Monthly | Subjects: Economics, Social Responsibility (ESG)

But relationships that seem causal and permanent in one market era often vanish in the next, taking many “superior investment strategies” down with them. Today’s markets are also annoyingly efficient. The more studies that demonstrate that socially responsible stocks do better than regular stocks, the more investors will rush to buy them (and not just for “the greater good”). The resulting torrent of money flowing … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: The Atlantic Monthly | Subjects: Finance, Social Responsibility (ESG) | Industry: Investing

The fact that too many [students] believe that the way you go about your career is to learn, earn, and only later give back, is misguided. The heart of a profession is that it is in the course of doing one’s work that one is actually doing good and fulfilling the duty that is demanded of professionals.

Content: Quotation | Source: Harvard Business School (HBS) Working Knowledge | Subject: Social Responsibility (ESG)

We have many young people now getting their MBAs and looking toward a life in which they can do well and do good, working for a corporation that is socially responsible. I think they’re fooling themselves. I would rather those young people, if they’re genuinely concerned about the state of the planet, roll up their sleeves and get involved in either politics or some organization … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Across the Board (ATB) | Subject: Social Responsibility (ESG)

This content is restricted to site members. Please log in or register

Ratings of corporations’ environmental activities and capabilities influence billions of dollars of “socially responsible” investments as well as some consumers, activists, and potential employees. In one of the first studies to assess these ratings, we examine how well the most widely used ratings-those of Kinder, Lydenberg, Domini Research & Analytics (KLD)-provide transparency about past and likely future environmental performance. We find KLD “concern” ratings to … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Aaron K. Chatterji, David I. Levine, Michael W. Toffel | Source: Harvard Business School (HBS) | Subject: Social Responsibility (ESG)

One of the tests for whether companies are aligning themselves with a broader social engagement is the extent to which the doctrine of shareholder value loses credibility. I don’t think it’s going to be openly repudiated, but I suspect that, gradually, executives will stop making as much reference to it to justify their actions. It privileges one group, one constituency, over all the others, and … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Social Responsibility (ESG)

Incorporating corporate social responsibility into all strategic decisions is, arguably, one of the most difficult challenges a manager faces. Professor Tima Bansal discusses a research project that investigated how Canadian businesses manage that challenge.

Content: Article | Author: Tima Bansal | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Best Practices, Social Responsibility (ESG)

Two-thirds of the 250 largest companies in the world have adopted sustainability reporting as a tool to gauge future performance. This approach has little to do with vague concepts of corporate social responsibility or public relations ploys and everything to do with long-term business strategy. It is a crucial companion to financial reporting that provides data on nonfinancial factors related to environmental, social and governance … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Fay Hansen | Source: Business Finance Magazine | Subject: Social Responsibility (ESG)

In contrast to the more traditional shareholder approach, the newly emerging stakeholder theory insists that business is about more than just making money. It’s about all stakeholders’ interests, and declares that companies have a social and environmental responsibility to the community at large. In the paper “Maximizing Stakeholders’ Interests: An Empirical Analysis of the Stakeholder Approach to Corporate Governance,” Silvia Ayuso, Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, Roberto … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Miguel Ángel Ariño, Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, Roberto García, Silvia Ayuso | Source: IESE Insight | Subject: Social Responsibility (ESG)

The view of business as necessarily selfish, narrow and instrumental, is, as it always has been, nonsense. Business which is selfish in motivation, narrow in outlook, and instrumental in behaviour is rarely successful business.

Content: Article | Author: John Kay | Subject: Social Responsibility (ESG)

Your mother probably told you that it pays to be nice, but that may not necessarily be true when it comes to corporate philanthropy. Wharton finance professor Vinay B. Nair and two other researchers looked at whether being charitable — such as donating money to medical research or to organizations that promote economic self-sufficiency — helps a company’s financial picture. The answer: It all depends … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Geoffrey Heal, Raymond Fisman, Vinay B. Nair | Source: Knowledge@Wharton | Subject: Social Responsibility (ESG)

By building social issues into strategy, big companies can recast the debate about their role in society.

Content: Article | Author: Ian Davis | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Social Responsibility (ESG)

Doing well and doing good is a pretty popular notion these days, especially among the world’s largest corporations. That’s a good thing. After all, who else has the financial resources and the influence to tackle pressing problems like the AIDS epidemic in Africa, cancer and global warming? Forbes offers a special report on the businesses trying to transform themselves into corporate citizens.

Content: Article | Source: Forbes | Subject: Social Responsibility (ESG)