Hello Podcast Family,
A few years back, over a period of three years, I worked on the annual report for this big Fortune 500 corporation. But it wasn’t any annual report, it was the company’s Corporate Social Responsibility or CSR annual report. That was where the company tried to measure its impact on the environment, mostly, but other things, too.
Over the years, newer movements have tried to find ways to measure companies in ways other than just financial performance. From what I’ve seen first-hand, they’ve struggled to do so.
The boldest and biggest effort to do this was the emergence of ESG investing. This ESG stands for environmental, social and government investing.
And just like the other attempts before it, ESG has faced its own struggles, even with the biggest financial services firms in the world getting behind it. With that in mind, I saw a really great article from the man who will be our guest this Monday, and I thought it would be a great idea to have him on the podcast to explain it.
Sanjai Bhagat is Provost Professor of Finance at the University of Colorado, and he’s the author of the book, “Financial Crisis, Corporate Governance, and Bank Capital.”
But what caught my attention was something he wrote for the Harvard Business Review. In March of 2022, he wrote an article entitled, “An Inconvenient Truth About ESG Investing.”
In very analytical and objective terms, and told in straightforward language, Sanjai will explain on Monday just how ESG has not lived up to the hype.
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