We created this newsletter to share with you the most important articles our team was reading each month. Across 2020, the push for improved ESG management has never felt more important. We hope you read, enjoy, and feel the same push for progress that our team does each day. – Ryan Miller
On ESG and Impact:
One year after the Business Roundtable’s call for ‘stakeholder capitalism,’ an argument emerges that the rules of the game must change for impact goals to be successful (Harvard Business Review)
Asset owners totaling nearly $1 trillion in assets under management have entreated US regulators to take action on climate change (Institutional Investor)
Asset managers are drafting responses to the Department of Labor’s “outdated” ESG proposal (Financial Times)
“ESG has hijacked the conversation by selling a data-driven, benchmark-hugging passive product,” said hedge fund manager Jeff Ubben, who now aims to create a ‘return-driven environmental and social activist firm’ (Institutional Investor)
A challenge has arisen for responsible investing: at most, 32% of global greenhouse gas emissions are produced for publicly-listed companies (The Economist)
Morgan Stanley commits to measuring the greenhouse gas emissions from its loan and investments, the first major US bank to do so (Politico)
On Private Equity:
From the New York Times Opinion page: ‘The private equity industry, which has led to more than 1.3 million job losses over the last decade, reveals the truth about free markets.’ (New York Times)
“If IRR metrics had any sound basis in fact, we would all be as rich as Croesus,” writes Jonathan Ford for the Financial Times (Financial Times)
A step-by-step walkthrough of how surprise medical bills make their way to patients reveals that third-party surgical assistants, many from companies backed by private equity, are a large piece of the puzzle (NPR)
On Business:
Homogeneity at Harvard Business School perpetuates a lack of diversity in corporate America (Business Insider)
A simultaneously entertaining and cautionary tale on the downfall of the Museum of Ice Cream illustrates how human capital mismanagement and cultural issues can destroy a business (Forbes)
The upsides and downsides of the great work from home experiment explain why employees are working from home successfully now when they have not in the past (Harvard Business Review)
Cognitive dissonance is created by companies who support progressive causes yet fund politicians openly opposed to those same causes (New York Times)