Failure to deliver is nothing new
Revised plans for HS2?
With anger about HS2 being cancelled, a colleague suggested I look at what an Irresponsible Investor looked like and so I took myself off to Auntie Google.
You probably won't be surprised to hear the search for Irresponsible Investors delivered many, many results. The one that struck me was published by the New York Times magazine on June 6 2004 - see what I mean about nothing new?
The main thrust of the article is to highlight how the behaviour of investors can affect the outcomes.
''Outside pressures'' from investors, write the Google founders, ''too often tempt companies to sacrifice long-term opportunities to meet quarterly market expectations.''
So how will that impact the conversation about the macroeconomic environment that will take place between leaders Denise Le Gal Jamie Broderick Deputy Head of DIT Gus Wiseman and Morten Nilsson?
The American investor's short-term greed leads him to be more interested in the appearance of a business than its substance.
Is it reasonable to ask Fund Owners, Asset Managers, Advisors & Regulators to juggle the demands of long term Sustainable Development Goals while still putting plentiful food on the table of their investors & stakeholders?
A troubling picture for the importance for ESG
In a recent blog post on RAOGlobal, it Investors said that ESG is not a key driver of their decision making. Who can blame big Investors for feeling torn between pillar and post?
Investors, in their shortsightedness, encourage companies to neglect their social responsibility reports the NYT. To save themselves, the Google Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin concocted an extraordinary plan to contribute 1 percent of their company's profits to something called the Google Foundation.
This, they seem to think, would strike their audience as a radical idea because the audience consists, mainly, of investors. The Google Founders went on to say;
The investor, of course, likes to think of himself as a force for honesty and transparency, but he has proved, in recent years, that he prefers a lucrative lie to an expensive truth.''We believe strongly that in the long term we will be better served -- as shareholders and in all other ways -- by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short-term gains,''
To put the period of time into context for this radical thinking by the young Founders, the Republican ticket of incumbent President George W. Bush and his running mate incumbent Vice President Dick Cheney were elected to a second term, defeating the Democratic ticket of John Kerry, a United States senator from Massachusetts
Senator Kerry of course, is now better known for as a Special Presidential Envoy for Climate which most will has brought short and long term goals into sharp collision with the announcement the global temperatures are heating up even quicker than predicted.
Fundamentally, whether Responsible Investing is called ESG, Impact Investing or Sustainable Investing, sentiment and commitment are not always aligned - on all sides. In summary, the letter these revolutionaries published in their letter to stock market investors nearly two decades ago, summed up the challenge of responsible/irresponsible investors turns on its head the moral verdict of the Internet/investment boom: in the world according to Google, investors aren't victims but perps.
That's you and me by the way. Just saying.
