Today marks a personal milestone. It is the North American release of my first book, ESG Mindset. No matter where you are in the world, you should now be able to order a copy!
You have at least three choices to purchase, but let’s have a little fun and add an ESG context to each:
Amazon allows you to leave a review, helping an ESG stakeholder out.
Bookshop.org is a B-Corp with a great Social purpose: supporting independent bookstores! I write about B-Corps in Chapter 11.
Kogan Page is the publisher, and working from a shareholder primacy perspective, you can take 25% off through May 2nd with the code KPSALE.
Decisions, decisions.
This book will not save the world
The first words you’ll see in the Preface are a pretty honest take on ESG:
This book will not save the world, at least not directly. So, to future generations, I apologize. The path to impact does run through ESG, but it’s a little circuitous. Still, it isn’t quite that simple.
If the past few years have proven anything about business risks and opportunities, impact, and resilience, it is that they are not quite that simple indeed.
For a long time, the narrative on Corporate Sustainability and DEI was that executing these ideas was concessionary. That opinion still exists, whether a transition is too costly or supporting diversity is at the cost of another group. ESG cuts through that noise and gives the company what it needs to execute in only the way it can: context.
The path to impact and ESG is circuitous, as was my journey in writing this book. As it turns out, this is only the first parallel between myself and the concepts put forth in ESG Mindset.
The building blocks of an ESG mindset
I graduated from Penn State in 1998 with a degree in English and immediately entered a career in technology due to my passion for the area and burgeoning corporate IT teams. Early on, my communication skills differentiated me from others who were more focused on the engineering aspects. However, in hindsight, it was another adaptive skill that accelerated my career.
Looking at complex challenges through various perspectives and building creative solutions helped me create new technology solutions, train others on their use, and troubleshoot (and there was A LOT of troubleshooting in IT).
Ultimately, I left IT and started on a path to Microsoft, joining the company in January 2018. My first role was selling to Financial Services customers. In my first review with my manager at Microsoft, she pointed out a unique skill that no one had recognized in me before. To paraphrase:
You have a unique skill for absorbing large amounts of disconnected information, processing it, and translating it back to companies in an accessible way.
I responded, “How do I make a career out of that?”
At the time, she didn’t have an answer, nor did I. Looking back, though, this skill would prove critical to understanding ESG and become a metaphor for how ESG data analysis works.
A front-row seat
Within a short time after joining Microsoft, the company, as it is wont to do, threw the sales organization up in the air, and I landed in Capital Markets. I went from supporting one of the largest asset managers in the world to supporting one of the world’s largest ESG data aggregators. This is where I found ESG.
I was instantly amazed by this idea. What fascinated me most was that there was an entire data industry and perspective on a topic I barely heard anything about. I reflected and realized that ESG topics had popped up over my career, but no one ever said “ESG.”
It became apparent to me that corporates didn’t understand it either. This topic addressed a company’s material risks and opportunities; the only ones talking about it were the financial markets. I wondered how a management team would know what to do in these areas. At the time, one ESG data aggregator told me that companies would not return their calls because they didn’t understand what ESG was, let alone how investors used the scores.
Even in a world of shareholder primacy, management teams didn’t understand shareholders. What a disconnect to uncover!
And so, I listened.
I listened to podcasts and webinars. I read ESG books, mainly from the perspective of financial services. I found one book, Gloom to Boom by Dr. Andrea Bonime-Blanc (she wrote the foreword to ESG Mindset), that contained practical advice for corporates.
To repeat, I found one book supporting the corporate perspective.
I listened to internal conversations and heard customers speak of ‘cultural alignment’ and ‘same goals.’ I quickly recognized that our sellers, their customers, and the company hadn’t quite put together the pieces of this value proposition, which was a brewing stakeholder risk.
Seeing this gap, I wrote a 49-page internal document at 16,000 words on potential approaches and intersections of Microsoft with ESG, which I think no one has ever seen. I figured out how to address and anticipate these topics when they came up on my sales calls and ran two internal sessions on researching and talking to customers with ESG in mind to help others understand what I was seeing.
Everything changes
In the book, I cover how scientists talk about climate tipping points, but for me, the social tipping points around 2020 - COVID, George Floyd’s murder, and the effect of extreme weather battering the Global North, really tipped ESG over.
Suddenly, companies were hit with new stakeholder topics that they could no longer ignore or relegate as irrelevant. Personally, as I suspect it was for many of you, this period shifted my perspective toward purpose and my life.
I could see something was going to come of ESG, but I wasn’t sure what. By this time, I had changed roles to be a Capital Markets Industry Advisor and spent time building two sales motions. One of those was related to ESG data.
Throughout COVID, I listened and learned. I joined the Enterprise Data Management Council’s ESG working group. Along with EY and Earth Knowledge, I co-authored a Financial Services and Biodiversity whitepaper (which is in the TNFD Knowledge Bank). I wrote Microsoft’s first ESG-related whitepaper, Accelerate Sustainability with ESG Insights, a precursor to ESG Mindset. This collateral was launched with our Cloud for Sustainability offering in October 2021.
Something else shifted around this time. I started speaking about this topic publicly in virtual webinars and conferences. The prep work for those events was no easy task and often led to more exploration and discovery.
When the opportunity came to join the commercial team working on the tool, I applied and was the first sustainability seller hired in the Americas. The originals from that team are in the book's acknowledgments.
Creating impact as only I can
As ESG tipped over across corporates and regulations began to arise, I felt the original meaning of ESG was never fully understood. Companies went from a high-level understanding of ESG as ‘those concessionary issues dealing with touchy-feeling topics’ to ‘we must report carbon to the nth degree for everything we possibly can.’
To the point of carbon myopia, it wasn’t only corporates. One asset manager I spoke with had just purchased some ESG data and was testing whether carbon reductions were tied to alpha. I asked them why they thought carbon management would be universally material rather than looking at the company’s material Environmental issues…and then their face went white.
This conflation of sustainability and ESG launched new investment products, CSR reports and filings, and news articles. Win-wins were touted without consideration of externalities or nuance, and values (and carbon still) led the narrative.
Then Liz Simmie, co-founder of Honeytree Investment Management, told me something that would shift my perspective: “Everything is ESG.”
Looking around with this new mindset, I wondered what I could do to bring the narrative back to the original intent of ESG. I believed that the path to impact if the company chose to pursue that, was through the unique understanding of the topic from their lens. In other words, every company needed to approach these topics through the lens of what they were good at first, their core business. By addressing these topics at the material intersection of the company, they could build resilience and create impact as only they can.
I realized I, too, had unique skills that intersected with this topic. At work, I continued to use my communication skills to bring new perspectives and expertise to my customers. Outside of work, two things happened. First, my LinkedIn posts and interactions went way up. I went beyond listening, connected with people, and had insightful conversations. Second, I started the ESG Advocate newsletter in the summer of 2022.
After all, writing was what I was good at. Just a few months later, Brad Smith, President of Microsoft wrote this about sustainability skilling:
Ultimately, it’s important to recognize that the sustainability transformation will need people who can combine specialized sustainability knowledge and skills with varying degrees of other multidisciplinary skill sets. These will need to combine knowledge from STEM and other fields in the liberal arts and encompass skills that span across business, the use of data, and digital technology. This combination currently is hard to find and often doesn’t exist naturally.
As you might imagine, this passage resonated with me. Little did I know that my unique education and career background would soon prove to be the unnaturally occurring combination that would lead to a book!
The network did its thing
The newsletter started as a means to update others on the weekly news but pivoted into tackling complex topics through an ESG lens. By that winter, I was writing about 2500 words per week and realized that was about half of a chapter of a book.
After graduating with that English degree 25 years ago, it was finally time to write a book.
My good friend, Theodora Lau, founder of Unconventional Ventures and author, introduced me to her publisher, Kogan Page, in early 2023. Things moved quickly as Kogan Page realized that there were not many books out there focusing on the corporate perspective of ESG.
The original book proposal was for twelve chapters at 60,000 words in 9 months. They came back with 80,000 words in 6 months. I agreed and met the timeline, working on approximately one chapter every two weeks, knowing I could at least write 5,000 words but hitting much more. I took advantage of my kids waking up at 5:30 AM for the bus and, most Saturdays and Sundays, constantly writing and editing. I did barely anything else besides write, work, and support the kids’ various activities. It was a team effort with my family (not to mention the publisher) to get the book over the finish line.
As I wrote, I continued learning and engaging in online interactions, forming new perspectives on the topic as I went and ultimately generating ideas that improved my day job.
During the summer of 2023, the anti-ESG pushback reached a fever pitch, and that nagging imposter syndrome was augmented by its presence. Theo and many others encouraged me to keep going with refrains that ‘ESG will not go away because it simply can’t.’
And so, I kept writing, even when my arms ached. I hit the deadline in September and finally came up for air, wondering what had just happened.
Once it came time to ask for endorsements, the support was incredible, and you can find all of these early readers on the book’s first few pages.
Like ESG, a team sport involving internal stakeholders and peers, writing a book is a similar effort. While one author’s name goes on the book, it takes many people to influence the progress.
The future is unclear
The last chapter of the book is The Future of ESG. ESG’s future is no less certain than the book’s. While I have grand visions of companies purchasing books for their management team and individual contributors, making predictions is difficult.
Still, I wrote the book to give corporates a fighting chance to understand their businesses through a new mindset, one that includes perspectives on globalization, intangibles, and interconnected risks. The traditional financial-only perspective is no longer the only perspective worth checking. Even if companies ignore ESG with the anti-ESG pushback, ESG issues will somehow affect the company.
This book is the one I wanted when I first came to ESG. It brings clarity and a consistent definition in a way that the financial markets haven’t been able to since the term was coined in 2004 when it was explicitly differentiated from sustainability and corporate citizenship in the UN paper Who Cares Wins.
On the 20th anniversary of ESG, let’s move the acronym to where it belongs in the corporate world. With an ESG mindset and a few unnaturally occurring skills like those that led me here, you and your peers can create ‘business resilience and sustainable growth’ (the book’s subtitle) and maybe save the world.
In the meantime, I will take a breath and celebrate, thanks to a timely reminder from a good friend - cheers!