ESG is a three-letter acronym that I hear day and night since we became involved in the promotion of Sustainable Entrepreneurship.
This is the metric the vast majority of people, mostly regulators and financiers, use to determine and measure sustainability and our progress toward a world that is decent to live in.
The term ESG was first introduced by Kofi Anan, then the Secretary General of the UN, for financial institutions to incorporate the values of environmental-, social-, and governance sustainability in capital markets.
Almost two decades later and the world has wholeheartedly started adopting ESG into everything. ESG Investment Funds, ESG Conferences, ESG Cereal…
In keeping with one of the core values of addVENTURES namely objectivity, I ask: “does this help?”
Do all these regulations and requirements actually make the world a better place or does it create the need for ESG consultants and a framework for companies to game the system?
If you just look at another one of the great problems of humanity, corruption, which is widely known to be correlated with complex regulation as stated in the World Bank article: Do more rules lead to more corruption? Evidence using firm-level survey data for developing countries, you start to think about the complex nature of ESG regulation.
Do you need a rule book to tell you if you are having a negative impact on society? Do you need a rule book to tell you that you are doing a great job and contributing to society?
So my wacky idea for #WackyWednesday is: ditch the rule book and forget about some arbitrary criteria that sound like Corporate Cantonese.
Rather ask the only person that actually knows the answer, yourself:
“Am I objectively leaving this place called Earth better than I found it?”
Just a wacky idea on this lovely #WackyWednesday
