Real estate company names its first chief carbon officer. The building industry is responsible for a huge amount of the carbon emitted into the atmosphere.
One of the world’s biggest development companies now has a top-level official charged with figuring out how to bring those emissions down. Hines, the international real estate company with more than $80 billion in assets under management, has created a new role that could soon become common in the industry: chief carbon officer. What did we learn from COP26? Consider the three Ms. The recently concluded COP26 in Glasgow was, among other things, a festival of acronyms.
There’s COP itself (Conference of Parties). And also GFANZ (Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero), ISSB (International Sustainability Standards Board), and TSVCM (Taskforce on Scaling up Voluntary Carbon Markets). Watching from afar, I came up with my own acronym to define the key takeaways from the two-week confab: MMM. Momentum, money, and measurement. The role of companies in the 21st century economy and their responsibilities to stakeholders. What responsibilities does business have to society, and what benefits do companies deliver to stakeholders and society at large?
In this episode of the Inside the Strategy Room podcast, two authors of a new McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) report share recent research on how the value that companies bring to economies, societies, and households has changed over the past quarter century. Michael Birshan is the global coleader of McKinsey’s Strategy and Corporate Finance Practice, while Clarisse Magnin-Mallez leads the Consumer Packaged Goods and Retail Practices in Africa, Europe, and the Middle East and is McKinsey’s managing partner in France. The report they coauthored is the first in a series that MGI will publish on companies in the 21st century.
The following is an edited transcript of the discussion. John Doerr on fixing climate change: 'Execution is everything' In 2006, I hosted a dinner after a screening of An Inconvenient Truth, former vice president Al Gore’s seminal documentary on the climate crisis.
We went around the table for everyone’s reaction to the film’s urgent message. When it came to my 15-year-old daughter, Mary, she declared with her typical candor: “I’m scared, and I’m angry.” Then she added, “Dad, your generation created this problem. Author Talks: Can OKRs solve our planet’s climate crisis? In this edition of Author Talks, McKinsey Global Publishing’s Raju Narisetti chats with John Doerr, investor and the chairman of venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins.
In his new book, Speed & Scale: An Action Plan for Solving Our Climate Crisis Now (Penguin Random House, November 2021), Doerr offers an actionable plan to conquer humanity’s greatest challenge: climate change. What follows is an edited version of their conversation, with quotations from the book by policy leaders, entrepreneurs, scientists, and activists interspersed throughout (in blue). What gives you hope on this issue? There’s no guarantee we’re going to cut our carbon emissions in time. We’ve got a very, very long way to go, and we’re not moving nearly fast enough. Protecting people from a changing climate. The United Nations’ 2021 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report stated—with higher confidence than ever before—that, without meaningful decarbonization, global temperatures will rise to at least 1.5°C above preindustrial levels within the next two decades.
This could have potentially dangerous and irreversible effects. A better understanding of how a changing climate could affect people around the world is a necessary first step toward defining solutions for protecting communities and building resilience. Speed & Scale: An Action Plan for Solving Our Climate Crisis Now (9 November 2021) by John Doerr. ESG Investor Survey: The economic realities of ESG. For companies stretching to find their way amid similar trade-offs, our survey points to a few actions leaders can take immediately that will advance their ESG agendas and bring their investors and other stakeholders with them along on the journey. 1.
Harness the power of the C-suite. In our survey, 82% said companies should embed ESG directly into their corporate strategy. The ESG movement: Are you ready for the ESG revolution? Although it’s still early days for most companies’ strategic reinvention, one message is already clear: as the context within which business operates changes rapidly, so too must the strategic journey.
Leaders need to establish a constantly iterating process, underpinned by high-quality data, to assess, adjust, and flex strategic priorities and milestones that ensure resilience and success in a highly dynamic world. To bring that dynamism to life, we’ll describe the experiences of a chemicals company and an industrial company that have been revisiting their strategies with ESG in mind. Reformulating a chemicals company’s product portfolio To reformulate its strategy in the face of this threat, the company undertook a massive product portfolio review with several purposes: to establish where it was hurting the environment and what needed to change, to identify which products to reengineer, and to pinpoint where it was adding the most value and how it could remain competitive in its field.
Aligning climate goals and business imperatives. The fanfare surrounding the opening of the UN’s COP26 climate conference in Glasgow this week shows just how pervasive global concerns about the climate are.
The backdrop, of course, is that while it seems like a great deal of progress is being made on decarbonization, it isn’t happening fast enough. That’s one of the findings of the PwC Net Zero Economy Index 2021, released last week, which tracks the growth—or decline—of CO2 emissions among the 20 largest economies in the world. The good news? UN Global Compact—Accenture CEO Study on Sustainability.
Psyche Films. From outer space, Earth looks uninhabited.
Its marbled surface reveals little about the richness and complexity of life on Earth. Countries, cities, boundaries and people are invisible to the naked eye, along with the barriers of politics and religion. COP26: a glossary of climate change terminology. The ESG transformation - how to embrace it? We believe these crosscurrents are coming together to propel the next wave of corporate transformation: the ESG transformation. Like digital, ESG has the potential to revamp how successful organisations plan, implement and operate. Also like digital, ESG is a sprawling topic, making it challenging for organisations to know where to begin. In the case of digital, that uncertainty led many organisations to start small: they put a toe in, launching pilot after pilot—learning in the process, but also running the risk of being overtaken by more ambitious competitors who were quicker to grasp the opportunity to reimagine their business digitally.
Today, most management teams realise that capturing the true potential of digital calls for an all-in approach—a comprehensive program in which digital touches all aspects of the company, every business unit and function. Digital doesn’t just enable you to do the same thing faster—it changes what you do. Changements climatiques : et si la forêt se retournait contre nous? Bringing social impact into circular economy. Your CSR Strategy Needs to Be Goal Driven, Achievable, and Authentic. As more companies commit to adopting CSR strategies that address environmental and social issues, it’s becoming more important than ever for these strategies to be goal-driven, ambitious yet achievable, and authentic.
The author... We are in the era of impact investing and big pledges as companies step up to tackle the toughest environmental and social issues of our time. GM has vowed to be carbon neutral by 2040, Apple is investing $100 million in their Racial Equity and Justice Initiative, and Target plans for 100% of its owned-brand products to be designed for circularity by 2040. Board governance. Leading a New Era of Climate Action. Climate change is a global emergency. It’s threatening crops, water supplies, infrastructure, and livelihoods. It’s damaging the broader economy and company bottom lines today, not in some distant future. Does Your Social Mission Make a Difference? This Free Tool Will Measure It. Measuring the precise impact of your company's social mission can be especially challenging.
One venture capital firm has an app for that. Well, not exactly an app. City Light, a New York-based impact investing firm, recently launched an online tool that can quantify a startup's current and potential future impact. Prioritizing Societal Well-Being. For example, India’s green stimulus measures include investment in biogas and cleaner fuels, incentives for high-efficiency solar, and advanced battery production. South Korea’s “New Deal,” in addition to focusing on digitization, prioritizes initiatives that support a green transition, including investments in renewables and R&D funding for electric vehicles (EVs) and batteries. China’s green efforts entail substantial funding for EVs and related infrastructure, railway infrastructure development, and electricity transmission. In addition, China—the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases—recently pledged to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060 and the European Union has strengthened its commitments under the Paris Agreement by pledging to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 55% by 2030.
Despite these promising early signs, further action will be required. Extreme heat is becoming more frequent—and our infrastructure is going. How environmental, social, and governance reporting grew up. The ESG movement: Are you ready for the ESG revolution? The Ellen MacArthur Foundation and IDEO. Five steps to stakeholder capitalism. A Nigerian Model for Stakeholder Capitalism. Five steps to stakeholder capitalism. How To Protect The Planet - Pressures of Climate Change. It's Earth Day 2021. The Circular Economy Can Actually Save You Money. Will the future CEO be motivated by doing good? The ESG transformation - how to embrace it?
How Did Business’s Role in Society Change in 2020? Quels sont vos enjeux d'entreprise environnementaux, sociaux et de gouvernance (ESG)? Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance. How business leaders should confront climate risk. The Common Sense Framework. High stakes for stakeholder capitalism. Stakeholder Capitalism Gets a Report Card. It’s Not Good. The Shortlist - On corporate social responsibility (download link) Examples to create value in the circular economy (Cases) Welcome to the Circular Economy. How to Measure a Company’s Real Impact. Why Social Responsibility Produces More Resilient Organizations. Circular Economy Business Models. Socially Conscious Leadership in Today’s Challenging World. LinkedIn by World Economic Forum. COVID-19: Comment réduire les risques de la chaîne logistique. Study of the effect of corporate social responsibility on increasing the agility and efficiency of service companies. Agility & Corporate Social Responsibility. Agility Sustainability.