The Rhetoric on ESG Doesn’t Match the Reality
“Advising CEOs to listen to ‘stakeholders’ is of little use when it comes to raging geopolitical crises,” writes Alison Taylor, author of Higher Ground: How Business Can Do the Right Thing in a Turbulent World.
Illustration: Celia Jacobs for Bloomberg
In Higher Ground: How Business Can Do the Right Thing in a Turbulent World (HBR Press, February 2024), Alison Taylor explained how businesses wrestle with conflicting demands on their approach to social causes. Here she envisions a “Next Chapter” for her book that describes an ever more polarized landscape, with stakeholder capitalism caught confusingly in the middle.
If you were running a large Western multinational business five years ago, it would have been unthinkable to ignore the Paris Climate Agreement and Sustainable Development Goals. You’d be expected to respond to protests over climate change, #MeToo and divisive immigration policies. After the broad reckoning that followed George Floyd’s murder, you would have pledged to defeat structural racism by setting diversity targets. The prevailing trend in stakeholder capitalism would have informed your decision to close your Russian operations after Putin’s invasion in February 2022.