0:00:00 - Alex

Welcome to a lovely episode of Experience Focus Leaders. I'm delighted to bring to you my dear friend, laura Gitman. Laura is actually changing the world for better, for real. Every startup founder claims that Laura is chief impact officer of business for social responsibility, bsr. It's a global nonprofit organization that works with over 300 member companies. Who is who of Global 2000. And Laura launched their financial services practice, has been chief operating officer and knows everything you ever wanna know about all things sustainability. In addition to her Stanford MBA, she now teaches at an MBA at Sustainability at Bard and at Duke of Foquas School of Business. Laura, welcome to the pod.

0:01:03 - Laura

Thanks so much, Alex. It's wonderful to see you.

0:01:05 - Alex

Great to see you, laura. So you were at the center of what some of the largest and most important organizations in the global economy are doing about making the world a better, fairer, juster place. It's a highly sensitive political area. There's probably different opinions of what's appropriate and what's not, so tell us a little bit about how this works. Most people have not encountered an organization of that impact, maybe outside of World Economic Forum, and you're just looking at these member organizations American Express, coca-cola and so on. Just everybody knows these products and these brands, and so tell us, how did you bring them together and what are you guys doing together?

0:02:07 - Laura

Yeah, thanks, alex. Well, we have been around for over 30 years and, interestingly, our mission has never changed. So our mission when we were founded was to work with business to create a just and sustainable world, and so that mission is more relevant than ever and perhaps was a bit prescient at the time. But so everything we do is about working with the private sector. There are other organizations that work on sustainability from other angles, either from policy angles or from an advocacy angle.

We work directly with business, and particularly with big business, because we believe they have the scale of impact and the scale of ambition to be able to work and to be able to drive real sustainable change.

And so from that beginning, certainly the work that we've done with companies has evolved, but it's always been towards that same aim. So we work with companies in four real ways. At the core is a membership, and so companies are members of BSR. As part of the membership, they get lots of thought leadership, lots of advice, lots of opportunities for networking and collaboration. We also do consulting with companies, and when we started our consulting work, we were kind of one of the only organizations that really were around that could provide that kind of advisory to companies. Now every consulting firm in the world claims to do sustainability consulting, and so it's been sort of an interesting shift, and we tend to stay focused on sort of the leading edge work, and where other players start to do a lot of work in advisory, we let them do that work and then we continue to move to the other end.

0:03:52 - Alex

So you let McKenzie do the cookie cutter and you guys are doing the actual bleeding edge. Innovation is okay, got it.

0:03:59 - Laura

Exactly. And then we do what we call multi-company or collaborative work, where as a nonprofit we're actually able to bring together competitors to work together on particular issues, and so we can bring sort of a whole industry along or a whole value chain to solve a particular issue. And then, lastly, we do grant funded work, which helps us to do research and thought leadership again on some of those cutting edge issues that may not be ready yet for a company to take on themselves, but they will need to in a few years, and so the grant funded work lets us do that kind of research and stay ahead.

0:04:43 - Alex

And so who's your primary audience Like? Do you engage with the sustainability teams?

0:04:52 - Laura

communication teams. For the most part, it's sustainability teams, and so where companies have a chief sustainability officer, that's the function, but increasingly it's also investor relation teams, and it's also compliance teams. It might be procurement when we're talking about supply chain issues, and so it varies a bit, and most companies have a board committee or a cross functional committee that actually oversees these issues, and so we do a lot of work in some ways for that cross cutting committee as well.

0:05:27 - Alex

And so this is actually one really interesting area, because I think, stereotypically, when people are interested in sustainability, they kind of wanna join the sustainability team. But I have a quote from you, from one of your lectures, where you say I encourage students to go into marketing, finance or whatever they desire and to embed sustainability principles into their everyday work, and this is near and dear to my heart, to. We have an audience of CEOs, marketers, product leaders some of them in their personal lives wanna have sustainable impact, but many see opportunities to do it in their everyday work. And so what do you think for lay folks? What do you think are like the best practices that they could bring this into smaller organizations or large organizations or small organizations that support their large organizations in achieving their sustainability and ESG goals?

0:06:39 - Laura

Yeah, thanks for bringing up that quote. I feel pretty strongly that you do not need sustainability in your title and actually we're never gonna get there if the only people who think about sustainability are the people who have it formally in their title. So I think it very much needs to be embedded in the way you think about business and if you think about what sustainability is at its core, it's thinking about your impacts and the way the world impacts you in a broader perspective. Right?

And rather than only thinking about the financial impacts and the financial inputs.

It's thinking about a broader range of inputs perhaps inputs that you don't pay for but that certainly the world pays for and a broader range of outputs and impacts on the world.

And so I encourage whatever function you're in, to think about sort of the process flows and the value chain of the work that you do and where you might have a broader set of impacts if you simply expand the way of thinking about it.

So, if you're an engineer, thinking about materials and thinking about energy efficiency is a prime way to think about sustainability. If you're a marketer, thinking about access to your products or thinking about how to communicate some of the sustainability attributes, so I think it's important to simply think about where you have impact and to think about sustainability as well from the broadest perspectives. So when we think about it, we're not only thinking about environmental components Some people these days think about sustainability as only climate change, for example but we'll think about it environmentally, from both a climate change and a nature and a biodiversity perspective, but also the social impacts and the inclusivity impacts and justice. And so really important to think about your employees, your, the communities in which you operate the customers and suppliers that are a part of your products, and so you can think about both the environmental and social impacts across that whole suite of impacts.

0:08:46 - Alex

And so some skeptics which are out there will say, well, look, but these companies, they're large companies, let's say, they are named, they're talking about all this stuff, right? Or maybe some of them are not talking about it, but it's a lot of talk, a lot of talk, but then they go do whatever is profitable, right? So let's talk about walking the talk, right, and I have a great example of you guys walking the talk. Which I'd love to celebrate was how you're thinking about your own marketing and your own communications with your constituents. But tell me a little bit about it. How do you see some of your partners really embrace this and be congruent with the messages, with their goals and with their mission?

0:09:38 - Laura

Yeah. So first you said something that may be a misconception, so I wanna maybe just clarify, and that is that they might talk about sustainability, but then they go do what is profitable, and so I don't want us to imply that there needs to be a trade-off between those, and it is perfectly acceptable for it to be profitable and sustainable, and I think some of my students especially have a hard time with that. They think, well, if you're just doing this to be profitable or to make money, then it can't be sincere. I love it when a company does sustainability to be profitable, because it means it's gonna be sustainable and they're gonna keep investing in it and it's not just a fact.

0:10:18 - Alex

It's good business to do good very effectively yeah, and I'm personally I wanna air out the devil's point of view, but when we first met, I was at Stanford, interning at Salesforce, and right from the very beginning Mark set out a mission. One of the core missions of the company was to be a different kind of business that's socially responsible. And I think a lot of people were like, oh, this is BS, he just wants to sell more software. And nothing could be further from the truth. And having stayed in the Salesforce ecosystem, having had them as a customer and a partner, we just admire how they are actually bringing not just themselves but bringing the whole ecosystem of their partners, their customers, to think about business as a force for good. And it is one of the, in market cap terms, the single largest enterprise software accruer of market cap in that time period. So it's very much a success story. So I but that's an example that maybe is well known. What are some other examples when you see companies just really managing to combine it tremendously well?

0:11:49 - Laura

Yeah, and so we tend to avoid calling out individual companies as sort of doing really well, as best case, because we think every company is on a journey, and I think that's the other answer to your question. Right Is, of course, there are no big companies who are 100% entirely sustainable, because there are moving massive machines and they have impacts right now, and so a lot of it is understanding. Where are their most material? So what I don't like seeing is a healthcare company doing great on purchasing renewable energy for their manufacturing but not thinking about access to their medicine. Right, wonderful, important that they procure renewable energy, but that's not their most important impact, and so we really look for companies to move the needle on the areas that are most material for them, that are core to who their business is, and so companies that are setting ambition, holding themselves accountable, with targets of where they're looking to go and what the progress has been, being transparent around when they're not achieving that.

So a lot of companies over the past five years have set science-based targets, for example on climate change right, and they've said, okay, we're gonna align with the science, we're gonna align with the global climate agreements in order to do our share to reduce global emissions.

But the conversations we're having with all of them right now who have set those targets is they don't know how they're gonna get there, because they are continuing to grow and they're continuing to increase their emissions. Maybe not on a relative basis. They're making good progress on a relative basis, but it's still insufficient. And so, sort of collectively as an industry, we're looking at each other and saying what needs to change in the system. It's not that those commitments weren't sincere, it's not that those companies aren't trying, it's that they don't have all the levers to be able to make progress. And so I think that transparency and honesty around where are we making change and where is it not enough and where do we as a system need to do better that's where I get excited, because I think that's a way of rethinking and, in some ways, reimagining capitalism, reimagining industry to sort of collectively achieve what we need to achieve to have a sustainable future.

0:14:27 - Alex

So it's basically if I put a rudimentary spin on it you're trying to push people towards a Pareto, optimal, 80-20 type of principles where they can have the most impact and then equip them with imagination and comparison metrics of like, hey, here's for your industry. This is how you can achieve your goals right, because everybody's in a unique journey, every company is in a unique journey, every industry has its own set of constraints, and even in the ESG rankings, I like their industry. Peers is a very important dimension, so it sounds like this is part of the value in your in kind, of how you put the peers together in related areas or across related functions.

0:15:15 - Laura

Absolutely, I think, with the one exception that we can help them collaborate on, so it doesn't necessarily have to be done in a competitive way.

0:15:26 - Alex

Yeah.

0:15:27 - Laura

Some of this progress can be done pre-competitively, in order to move the whole system.

0:15:32 - Alex

And I love that. And we did notice that this is one of the great things. As we were working with Chief Sustainability Officers around their ESG communications, we noticed that, unlike some other departments right, there's a much broader spirit of let's work together, let's kind of advance our industry together, and that was really wonderful feeling. So we've partnered a little bit and this is kind of back to credit to you. But like you've outlined that one of your goals is to be the thought leader and kind of the spreader of ideas about what is appropriate best practices or guidances could look like, and instead of pumbling people with rent-first type of content, you're looking to innovate and get both your ideas in a more engaging way but also deliver them into what we call green digital, and so you've been experimenting with that.

When you look as a former CAO now as impact officer, how do you look at your overall organization and make sure that you're congruent? Because I think to ask, one of the tragedies sometimes is like, hey, I'm very exciting. Just look at this very boring 100-page presentation about how exciting I am, or I'm very sustainable. Here's a couple trees that we kill to print out this report, and it's sad because I think when people reflect on it, you kind of instantly feel like a lot of credibility is lost, and sometimes you don't even have the opportunity to get to the message, and so I think I want to celebrate that you're kind of really open to trying this out. And what else are you trying to do to get your message across in a way that's congruent with your mission and supports your audience of partners in the world?

0:17:39 - Laura

Well and thanks, alex, and we've been really pleased to be able to partner with you in that journey.

We are not an organization that thinks about that kind of innovation or communication.

First that we don't have a big team to be able to do that, and so making it easy and being able to partner with Relato has been just fantastic.

We think about thought leadership as a really critical part of how we achieve our mission, so we can't.

We're thrilled to have the membership that we have, but it's less than 350 companies, and so, while they're big and influential companies, it's still just a fraction of the kind of companies that need to be able to understand what's happening in the field, understand its evolution and be able to learn from one another, and so it's really important to us to be able to get out content in a way that is usable and actionable by our members, but also by the private sector more broadly, and we stopped printing things a long time ago, so we moved away from paper, but I don't know that we necessarily got anywhere in terms of engagement, right?

So certainly lots of posting of PDFs, emails that don't get opened and content that maybe someone would need to spend a lot of time reading and therefore never share with their colleagues and other functions, and so for us really important that we figure out how to make content more digestible, how to make it more searchable, more practical and, ideally, shareable, so that when our core counterpart reads some of our thought leadership, they send it on to their procurement teams and their IR teams and their CFO.

We want it to get to different parts of the organization to have the impact it's going to have, and that's not going to happen if it's done in, as you say, sort of a 90-page report that sits on a website, and so it's been fun to try to innovate. The other thing that we do is we have really evolved our approach to events and really try to lean into events that are way more interactive. There's lots of conferences out there with a panel of people all speaking about their best practices and showing essentially the same PowerPoint presentation. We have no interest in doing those kinds of events, but we do do events where we bring together our members in a much more interactive way to actually solve problems together, and so, again, how do we share that experience? In a way beyond the people who get to participate is another way where we're really trying to innovate in terms of how we share that thought leadership so that others get to benefit as well.

0:20:35 - Alex

Well, and I think what you've highlighted is really like for anybody who cares about impact in the broader sense of the world.

What you've mentioned and we've seen this with our ESG clients is that the impact only works if it goes across the organization and across the supply chain in some cases, and across even the customers appreciating why a company is making certain decisions.

And that just doesn't happen in a vacuum, so that ESG or whatever internal report, external report that gets read by an analyst somewhere, that's a step but it's not at all doesn't accomplish the mission of galvanizing a broad set of audiences to do something differently. And if anything you guys are trying to do to get the world to think differently, to act differently and then you brought up that the majority of the narrow audience is not always the audience. You need to enable your super champions and your super experts and the people who have sustainability maybe in their title to get this message out to everybody else, to get this in various messages, and the message is very different from social issues to sustainability issues to some folks, governance issues, different personas, from investors to your entire team and community of customers. So how do you find that was? Your agenda is very broad. It involves pretty much the whole spectrum of organizations activity. How do you get the right message to the right audience? That's not your perfect target, but, like the expanded circle of influence.

0:22:37 - Laura

Yes, I wish I had the perfect answer to that, because I think that's, in some ways, the holy grail. I think part of it is getting more specific, and so the work we do on human rights in tech product development is not going to be of interest to our apparel company who's looking at labor issues in their supply chain. And so being honest about what the content is and getting specific so that it is really relatable and practical for the audience, and so if you are in product development and a technology company and thinking about the ethical and human rights impacts of the technology you are developing, you want content that speaks exactly to that, and it doesn't have to matter what your title is, but you know that the content is really relevant and the examples are going to be relevant and so getting away from the general sustainability is important content that we see a lot of and much more specific to the particular issues than the particular industries that they are relevant for.

So some of our best content are primers for particular sectors on specific issues.

0:23:52 - Alex

I think other things. So subpoena butter is not thought leadership. Basically, is what you're saying. Real thought leadership is yes, you need an umbrella, maybe a framework, but then you need to drill in and really own a particular domain, whether it's industry specific or function specific.

0:24:08 - Laura

Yeah, and for us that has been. We've really leaned into our areas of expertise, and so for us that's climate, that's nature, that's human rights, it's equity, inclusion and justice, and then what we would call, more broadly, sustainability transformation, right. So that's sort of the nuts and bolts of the governance and board engagement on sustainability. But getting specific on the issues and getting specific on how they relate to particular industries has been really helpful for us. I think the other thing that has been really helpful is helping companies to make sense of the plethora of other communications out there, and so in some ways we are a curator and an interpreter.

You know, there's a lot happening in the regulatory space in Europe, for example, and it is incredibly overwhelming for companies, and so being able to distill from that what really matters to you and what are the implications for different functions, that tends to get very well received and really touch on what companies need to know now. So it's timely and related to specific changes that are coming and specific changes that they need to be able to make.

0:25:27 - Alex

Yeah, this is a very interesting challenge that we encounter in these large, complex organizations that tend to be your clients as well.

We see that on the one hand, especially in European countries where there's more technical approach to things, there's a strong desire to have detailed documentation and then, as you mentioned, there's regulatory environment that provides plenty of that.

But the senior decision makers even any decision makers they feel overwhelmed by that. So on the one hand they want the details, but they need the summary and then the ability to provide the details and have the evidence backing up. The summary is what makes a difference in sort of helping, especially around areas of compliance which are kind of you know, you can't just go and improvise on these sort of topics. So how do you deal with that challenge of combining robustness and almost scientific approach to keeping the evidence, letting people find the context with the simplification right? It feels like it's essential in any sort of field. But having read the 200-page ESG reports was like 300-page appendixes and then they're all part of like overall integrated report, which could be even larger. It feels very challenging just to navigate through that, even for people who have the best intentions in mind. What have you found that works in breaking through that, finding those nuggets in the noise but not losing the context.

0:27:18 - Laura

Yeah, so I think you're right. I think it's a huge challenge and when we think about our own team, making sure that we have both the breadth and the depth that you're describing, right. So not only do you need to be able to pull up a level and be able to understand, sort of organizationally, what matters most, but also to be able to see the intersection points between the issues, right and so there you know, when you only speak to sort of the functional detail, you could be a climate person who doesn't really pick their head up to think about oh, this actually connects to the justice issues that my colleagues are talking about, right, and so being able to pull up but also to see the intersection points is where we spend a lot of our time helping companies navigate and understand. I think there are a lot of new data tools. There's a lot of focus on sort of the detailed compliance level data gathering.

That's not necessarily where we're going to add value. We think there's a lot of opportunity for companies to take advantage of different data providers and to do the number crunching and to get to the specific details. What we want to do is be able to pull up and help companies think more strategically about where they're actually going to be able to create value from all of that, and so be able to. They need to be transparent, they need to have the data, they need to monitor progress, but what does that add up to? And?

what does that mean in terms of their strategic direction? And we want to focus more on okay, across all of that. Really, where are the big risks and big opportunities for you as a company? Because a lot of the data is, again, important to measure progress, but it's not moving the needle on truly material strategic direction. A few issues are, and so a company needs to be able to pull up from across all of that data. That, again, is important and needs to be there, but it's a separate conversation as to where you're creating value.

0:29:23 - Alex

So, greg, let's pull up a little bit at a global level Now. You've been looking at the space before it became popular and you know buzzy, 18 years or so.

0:29:36 - Laura

Yeah, crazy.

0:29:38 - Alex

So I want to come back, maybe, to some personal reasons why you chose this and why do you describe yourself as a pragmatic idealist? But you know there's a global variety, right Like so. We were meeting up in Paris the other day. We were talking about, you know, the how the French companies have separate regulatory pressures from the US companies. There is the political, cultural environments which is leading, you know, from terms like, you know, greenwashing to greenhushing, and these are sort of some of the you know buzzwords that are coming up where people are not as vocal about some of the initiatives that they're taking. So guide us a little bit on what you're seeing. You know, across this, you know amazing portfolio of the most important organizations, business organizations in the world. What are the trends that you know? Folks that are, you know, not as close to this could should be staying on top of.

0:30:42 - Laura

Yeah, it's a good question and it's been sort of a fascinating couple of years in the space, because it's my answer is very different than it might have been, you know, even two to three years ago.

One I'll say is companies want a global company, needs global certainty, right, and so they can't have a different approach in every region. They need to be able to manage their global business and so, in some ways, the regulations from the European market which are similar, I will say, to what California is putting in place, and so it's not only Europe but largely Europe are driving what most global companies are doing anyway, because they, you know, whether they're headquartered in Europe or simply have sufficient sales or revenue to be covered by the laws, most global companies, you know, are impacted by the European regulations and are therefore shifting their approach to be able to comply with the European regulations. So that's changing. You know, I just came back from Japan and the first question I got from every Japanese company to talk to was what do I need to know about the European regulations? And so it's, it's that's driving sort of a global increase in standards and expectation around what companies need to do, regardless of where they're located.

Then you've got sort of the, the regional flavors, which may be different in terms of how they might market it what they might focus on beyond what's required, but the compliance regulations are are fairly sophisticated, so they are not a low bar or a low expectation, but actually really pushing fairly advanced commitments and expectations, not just for, you know, being transparent about data, but actually being transparent around what activities and what kind of due diligence you are doing. So it used to be you'd be in compliance to say I'm not doing anything, and that would be in compliance as long as you, you know we're transparent about that. That is no longer sufficient. So now you actually have to be able to describe your human rights due diligence, your due diligence on environmental components, and so companies have to act. It's not going to be.

0:32:54 - Alex

so the compliance is drive. So sorry to interrupt, but it feels like compliance is driving. Communications anyway Correct, and actions right, like you know. So be like some kind of actions, at least some communications, so you can't really escape this with the floor.

0:33:17 - Laura

The floor is up, you don't have to market it to your consumers, but you've got to have a pretty high baseline of communication.

0:33:27 - Alex

What about marketing it to investors? Right Like is it? Because that's a very different audience? Investors they also. Yeah, yeah, tell us.

0:33:38 - Laura

Yeah, we haven't seen any slowdown on what investors want. So you know the ESG investing, or sustainable investing, has been booming for the past couple of years. It drove a lot of you know, prior to the new regulations, most of the progress and sustainability was driven by investor demand, investor and sort of big corporate customer demand. And investors, despite the current political situation in the US, have not really pulled back. So they're still expecting more and more and they've learned that getting ESG data is just a better way to understand how companies are managed and understand their risks, and so they're not pulling back either.

The only real pullback we've seen is in sort of the more public communications in the US specifically because of some of the political backlash, but I I think that will continue, at least through next year's election, where companies maybe historically felt like they needed to stand up more and be more public around some of their efforts and now are worried that they'll get backlash and by pursuing one group of customers they're upsetting another group of customers. And so there's a little bit less of that. But the investor communications and the investor engagement and the compliance engagement, those are both full steam ahead.

0:35:09 - Alex

And so for those of us that are less familiar with that. So when we say investor, there is asset allocators in there and then there's asset allocators for those asset allocators. So guide us a little bit of what you're seeing. Where's the pressure really coming from? Is it the sovereign wealth fund that invests in various private equity or other asset managers? Is it the pension funds or organizations that are university endowments that are historically, maybe in the technology community They've been very influential investors? Are they driving this agenda and it's dropping down to the individual asset allocators that are making the direct investments? Guide us a little bit of what the dynamic is there, because it feels like it's more interplay of different pressures that's happening simultaneously.

0:36:13 - Laura

I think it's coming from across the board. So I think maybe 10 years ago it was coming from European pension funds and European sovereign wealth funds, but now it's across the board. So certainly pension funds both university but also private foundations, family foundations, big sort of state pension funds that are saying, if we are, our fiduciary responsibility is to think long term, and so we can't be so focused on short term returns. We need to make sure that the investments we're making are aligned with our long term aspirations, and so I'd say any institution that has that long term perspective, any long term investor, really across the board, has shifted towards more of an ESG mandate. I think the second thing are younger retail investors.

And so as investors have gotten younger over time, they have started to say we care about the values that are represented in how we invest our money. And as they've gotten more wealth and started to demand new products, you've seen asset managers sort of respond with a slew of new products that incorporate ESG factors into their investment decisions. So it's both sort of big institutional investors, but increasingly also sort of a broader set of investors who are pushing it as well.

0:37:49 - Alex

So right and so just so, like we historically, when people think retail investors is like I go and sign up and have my account and I pick a certain stock, but what you're saying is actually retail investors that still go through a mutual fund or some other kind of stock index. Yeah, or they have an increasingly choice, when they're even picking their employee benefits and other things, to pick the types of options that are in line with their values, their organization's values and so on.

0:38:21 - Laura

Correct. Yeah, so they've demanded new products and the industry has responded with developing those products, and that's not going to change. It might change what they're called but the substance isn't going to change.

0:38:35 - Alex

And we're seeing this in the earlier stage in community and private equity and venture community, where there's a lot more due diligence kind of around those factors as well. So it's sort of it's trickling down from the larger institutions into smaller organizations as well. So now did you expect that like this is going to play out Like take yourself back to fresh out of Stanford GSB, just starting with BSR. What did you expect the journey would be like? You know, towards the world that we're in today Was? It was a quick, chaotic kind of at the time and that you were kind of one of the few misunderstood kind of folks and now it's like really empowering that you see, you know entire community built. Or did you expect that this would be just a question of time?

0:39:31 - Laura

Oh, that's a good question. I think it might be a little bit of both. So certainly it took way longer than I expected. So I was not expecting to spend so many years just trying to explain why this mattered. You know, I think I thought that would be quicker. Candidly, you know, I remember writing a research report what year was that? Maybe 2010? On.

You know, esg investment is just good investments and it took kind of another decade before the investment community really got there. And that's not to give kudos to myself, it's actually to say my God, what happened over those 10 years, right, why did it take so long? So I think that I was pretty convinced early on that this was good business and that we didn't have a choice, right? I mean, I think the you know, if you think about, you know the number of companies that are actually the world's biggest, largest countries if we were to compare them in terms of GDP. You know, companies are more global than countries. Companies depend more on the well-being of society than many countries, and so it was no question to me that companies needed to think differently about their risks and opportunities and to start to incorporate sustainability aspects in order to run a good business. So that was pretty clear, I think it, as I said, it took longer, I think, to get wider acceptance there.

I was not prepared for the backlash, so I was not prepared for, you know, the past two years where in the US you know governments that typically say, you know, let business make their own decisions and let investors make the best decisions they want, to suddenly say, except you can't consider ESG. It feels sort of counterintuitive to a free market, and so that I was not prepared for, I wasn't prepared for the politicization that we've seen. I don't think it's. In some ways maybe I should have been right. Once you get more mainstream, you get a backlash before it becomes truly integrated, and so maybe this is a bump we need to go through, but that I certainly wasn't prepared for.

0:41:56 - Alex

And I think this ties to kind of your self description as a pragmatic idealist, right? How do you navigate this right Like? This conversation is very practical, right, we're going into a lot of normal discussions. We're not like waving a flag particularly of one set of beliefs or another. There's an underlying mission, but you're very focused on tactics and strategy and getting things done. Is that a modus operandi in the world that you live in or are you more of an exception that you're applying this very pragmatic approach? You actually your clients pay you right? Like you're not just kind of collecting donations, right? Like you're actually creating a lot of value for the members for specific consulting projects. So it feels like it's a very well run, thoughtful, grassroots but business oriented approach to getting good things done. Tell me more like is everybody like that at BSR? Is that you know? Is everybody like that in the broader ecosystem?

0:43:17 - Laura

So everybody is certainly not like that. In the broader ecosystem I do think, and I think part of why I've been at BSR so long is because it is really core to our culture and our theory of change, and so I think we have a unique value proposition that happens to align with the way I see the world and how I think we're gonna get things done in terms of the corporate sustainability. So it's very much a BSR MO, but it's not in the field. And what we find in the field more typically are one of two things those who are only doing this because there's business opportunity and, again, there's value in that. But that becomes a little bit of telling a company what they wanna hear and not being willing to push them to be more ambitious and to have the kind of impact that they could have.

So if you're only doing it from a pure business perspective, I think it stops short of the systemic change and the kind of ambition that's necessary. So we are proud of the fact that we we have to earn our living right, so we don't do get donations. We advise companies and they pay us for what we do, but they also pick us because we're gonna push them and we're gonna tell them the truth and we're gonna lay it out in terms of the context of what society needs. We're not only gonna tell them what they wanna hear. So that's the sort of the business only side. The other side is a little bit more of a think tank or an advocacy organization. That, from my perspective, takes too much of a purist view.

So they'll only work with the companies that already are committed. They won't work with the companies that maybe have some black spots or need to really change their business model. Or they might put out a lot of thought leadership but don't actually know how to get it done, and we don't believe in putting out thought leadership. That's not about action. And so there's a role for that. There's a role for advocates, there's a role for thinking, there's even a role for some of those purists.

But we're not gonna put blinders on and only work with the very small percentage of companies that you could argue are already integrated and sustainable, because that's not moving the mainstream of business and we're never gonna get there if we don't move industry. So we work with and you can pick your favorite company to hate on right, we work with big pharma or big food or big ag or I don't know what they're calling tech these days sort of the big evil tech companies, right. So we work with whatever industry some of those advocates like to criticize, because we know that that's where real industry is, that's where the jobs are, that's where the impacts are, and yeah, so we're gonna be practical about being willing to work with them in service of our mission. We're not gonna work with them to cover up bad acts, but we will work with them to truly change and to achieve our mission.

0:46:20 - Alex

Yeah, change happens not just on the edges. Right, Like you maybe started on the edges, but we sort of reached a level where it has to be in the mainstream at this point. Right, and that's the exciting part. So let's say we're, you know, have an audience of mainstream entrepreneurs, mainstream marketing or communications leaders and they wanna do two or three things differently. Right, and let's keep it not industry specific, right, but what would be your playbook? Right, Like they don't have a chief impact officer yet in that organization. Like you know, BSR is fortunate to have you, so they have to be the chief impact officer. I feel like I am the chief impact officer at related Fortunately, we're mission driven but guide somebody how to infuse this in a way that you know it's a small step, it's a baby step in the right direction. Was out of title, was out a lot of dedicated resources, but it, you know you gotta start somewhere. What would be your top? You know, top few tips.

0:47:33 - Laura

Yeah, so I think about where you can have the biggest impact, right, so I'd look at you know your industry, sector, your company, where you're operating, where you're trying to drive change, and think about where you have the most opportunity for impact right, and you know you could look at the different topics as a way to just make sure you've scanned the different areas right so you can think about okay, is it about climate, is it about nature, is it about the human rights and social impacts, is it about inclusion? But think, pick one right and pick an area where you think your company is best positioned to drive change. So that'd be the first thing and that's sort of the opportunity angle. The other thing I would do is I would build in from the start, making sure that you have thought about your negative impacts right. So there's how can you have the most positive impact?

But I build in from the start ways to make sure that you are set up to minimize your negative impacts, because it is a lot harder to wait until you are 10 years old and much bigger to now try to undo harm. It is much easier to make decisions up front and have the right policies, approaches et cetera to prevent sort of negative impacts. So I come from both of those angles and do a scan and say, okay, what do we need to do? Whether it's putting in a certain hiring policy or thinking about accessibility of your products, or making a decision around what data center you're gonna use to make sure it's a data center that uses renewable energy, for example, right, make those decisions right from the get-go so that they are easier to scale.

0:49:14 - Alex

It's harder to rip up something that's been embedded? Yeah, and I think that's very appropriate, right, if you're more efficient than an average website in terms of CO2 consumption as part of that initial decision, and then you don't have to go and rip out AWS for Azure or something like that. It's just harder later. Yeah, absolutely. And what about communications? Right? Like, obviously, communications is near dear to us. Is this all about like a regular cadence? I think a lot of leaders have to repeat the same message multiple times in multiple ways and make it. I feel like it's not their message, but it's something that kind of gets really adopted. What do you see the most successful individual leaders do to get their passion and the strategies that we described just now to get it across?

0:50:14 - Laura

Yeah, so, as you say, I think it needs to be authentic, and so they need to be able to describe why it's good for the business. If it looks like it's a side pet project, it's going to be received as a side pet project. So being able to speak about it in the language of your particular business, in the language of your customers and your USP, is really important, and so I think leaders who get it maybe don't use the word sustainability right. They use the words that are relevant to who they are and what they're trying to accomplish.

I think the other thing is to think about communications not as a one-way push, but to really allow for input and dialogue, and so I think the companies that do it well don't think about this as a one-directional communication, but about engagement, right it's an opportunity to put information out there so that your employees, your customers, your business partners can realize the opportunities to help you and to give ideas, and to innovate and to collaborate. And that's where it gets really exciting.

0:51:25 - Alex

So yeah, so we want to kind of create an example. That jumps to my when we see some internal communications about various either social or sustainability initiatives. A very simple thing of like embedding a form that actually allows people to nominate success stories or tell that, or kind of sign up for projects or initiatives, immediately transforms it from information that gets forgotten if it ever gets consumed to okay, well, I can influence the next report, I can be. Our project is doing something great. Let's recognize the people that are driving this initiative, and I think that it feels like a lot of corporate initiatives have historically been very command and control structure, and so what you're saying is for meaningful change to happen and for this to feel like it's truly authentic to the entire organization, people need to find their own words, their own initiatives. Am I hearing this correctly?

0:52:27 - Laura

Yeah, it's really validating right To say, oh, I contribute to that right. So I'm not just hearing something and forgetting it, but I see my own connection. And again, that can be within employee teams, but it could also be you know your community partners or your supply chain or your customers, right, as a customer, I see how I am a part of your journey and your impact. That's gonna feel good, right, that's gonna feel validating and I'm gonna wanna continue to invest in that partnership.

0:52:56 - Alex

Amazing. Well, laura, thank you so much for sharing what you've done. What you're working on, being so authentic and being true to your passion was driving, you know, business-driven social change and social responsibility. How can people find what you guys are up to at BSR? Engage with you personally. Tell us a bit about that.

0:53:20 - Laura

So you can come find us at bsrorg. All of our thought leadership is publicly available there, so we really want it to be as widely utilized as possible. You can sign up for our newsletters. You can contact any of our team members, so if there's particular industries or areas of expertise that you're interested in, bsrorg is sort of a good one-stop shop for everything that we do.

0:53:45 - Alex

Amazing. Thank you, laura.

0:53:47 - Laura

Absolutely. Thank you, alex.