Investing for a Sustainable Future
IN GENERAL, IT IS ASSUMED that every company’s top executives and its board of directors possess a keen understanding of investor priorities. Indeed, most would agree that this is one of their key responsibilities. Based on their understanding of investor interests, a leadership team will often focus corporate strategy and behaviour in one direction rather than another. For instance, if executives believe that their investors prioritize short-term profits, they will tend to organize sales, cost management, and research and development activities to maximize such profits rather than make certain long-term investments.
Today, many executives continue to embrace the conventional wisdom that mainstream investors care very little about an organization’s performance on environmental, social and governance (ESG) metrics. Investors won’t shift their investments, the thinking goes, based on ESG performance.
For the seventh consecutive year, MIT Sloan Management Review, in partnership with The Boston Consulting Group (BCG), conducted a global survey of managers about corporate sustainability. The response set included 7,011 respondents from 113 countries. Our resulting report, The 2016 Global Executive Study, is based on a smaller sub-sample of 3,057 respondents from commercial enterprises. Within this sample, 579 respondents self-identified as investors: most were strategic (39%), institutional (24%), or retail (11%) investors. Few identified themselves as ‘mission-oriented’ or ‘socially responsible’ investors. Our findings, which we will summarize herein, serve as a wakeup call: the time has come for corporate leaders to recognize that an increasing number of shareholders are (literally) invested in whether a company’s ESG activities connect with its financial success.
At least three factors are driving this growing interest in sustainability.
BIG DATA. Analytics and sophisticated modeling can now show how and when sustainability investments create shareholder value, and these models are meeting growing investor demand for data on corporate sustainability efforts that can be included in corporate valuations and comparative analyses. Large firms like Bloomberg and Thompson Reuters collect data on sustainability issues, and most big investment firms, including Black-Rock, have specialized departments examining these issues.
Today, a fossil fuel company is out
