Cindy Moehring is joined by Alanna Fishman to discuss current environmental, social, and corporate governance, a practice that has gained increasing relevance in the business world. Alanna Fishmann is a Managing Director at FTI Consulting, where she works with businesses to develop strong, lasting ESG strategies. Topics touched on in this episode include sustainability, the value of ESG in today’s business world, the shareholder’s responsibility in implementing positive change, crisis management, why a diverse board is an advantage, and the most important elements of a successful ESG strategy.
Podcast:
Resources From the Episode:
- SMP
- Bank of America
- https://www.iccr.org/sites/default/files/page_attachments/equitystrategyfocuspoint_esg.pdf
- https://www.bofaml.com/en-us/content/reshoring/esg-factors-influence-shift-ethical-supply-chain.html
- https://www.privatebank.bankofamerica.com/articles/esg-investing-performance-trends.html
- https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-09-24/bank-of-america-says-investors-pay-up-for-high-scoring-esg-firms
- https://www.wlrk.com/docs/ESG_from_A_to_Z.pdf
- Harvard Business School
- Blackrock
- “NYSE (New York Stock Exchange) ESG Top 5” weekly publication
Episode Transcript:
[music]
0:00:15.7 Cindy Moehring: Hi everybody. And welcome back for another episode of The BIS, the Business Integrity School. And as you know, we're talking about all things ESG in this season, and I am excited today to introduce you to a managing director at FTI Consulting, Alanna. Hi Alanna, how are you?
0:00:33.3 Alanna Fishman: I'm good. How are you, Cindy?
0:00:35.0 Cindy Moehring: I'm just doing great. Thanks so much for being with us today, and congratulations on the new role at FTI. Before we jump into the topic though, let me just tell everybody a little bit about you and what you bring to this conversation. So, Alanna is a subject matter expert on ESG strategic planning. And she... As I mentioned, she's the managing director at FTI Consulting within their strategic communication segment. Alanna advises clients on the evolution of their ESG strategies and how to effectively communicate with all of their stakeholders. Prior to joining FTI, Alanna led Cornerstone Government Affairs ESG practice and client service integration across Cornerstone's communications and government relations practice. She's also served as a Director of Policy and Social Responsibility at HBW Resources and as a Global Business Analyst for Newmont, where she supported corporate environmental compliance, due diligence, organizational change management and stakeholder engagement projects. Wow. That's a lot. [chuckle]
0:01:40.1 Alanna Fishman: It always sounds good when someone else is reading your bio. You're like, "Wow." That's like, "I did that." [laughter]
0:01:47.3 Cindy Moehring: Alanna comes with a Master's degree from Johns Hopkins University in Global Economics, and she specialized in Energy Resources and Environment. So welcome Alanna. Welcome to the conversation. I'm just really thrilled to have the chance to talk with you today and understand a little bit more about you and what FTI... Your views, really, on ESG and where FTI kinda fits into the picture overall. So, I always like the audience to get to know our guests a little bit more and how they got to where they are in their careers now, just in terms of finding your passions. So can you spend just a minute or two telling us how you ended up landing in this space of ESG and what it means to you?
0:02:35.4 Alanna Fishman: 100%. Well, thanks again for having me, Cindy. I'm really thrilled to be here on this podcast and talking about ESG, it's certainly a front and center topic right now in the market place and so it's just... It's awesome to hear that this is becoming a real focus point in the academic space as well, and then for businesses who are determining how to best operate in the space. Hopefully, they find this conversation interesting. I actually happenstance found ESG when I... I worked at Newmont Mining before pursuing my Master's degree, and it was this time period when I was helping that company manage their environmental compliance and stakeholder engagement. And I always knew I needed to go back to get my Master's degree because I was very interested in environmental policy and social responsibility. But it always kind of... It seemed to be a segment of a company. It was always kind of like that adhoc add-on. Write a report, do the nice things.
0:03:32.1 Alanna Fishman: So when I went to Johns Hopkins, I was taking a human rights class to supplement my knowledge, and my professor of that class just mentioned very briefly, "There's this concept of ESG that's coming out and it ties financial value to social responsibility and best practices." And we moved right along to all these other topics. [laughter] So, I... After class, I talked to her about it and said, "That's fascinating to me because I just came from a company, Newmont, who... This is a balance for them, you know? How you allocate capital to sustainable business decisions, and that's a balance. So where can I learn more about this?" And it just wasn't enough of a subject yet. There was no coursework on it, only a few universities had it. So, I just asked if I could conduct an independent study, I did that. I had a couple of professors monitor me, make sure I was actually doing work in this area [chuckle] from an economics perspective. And I just ended up building my own coursework out from a series of universities, patchworked it together and I came out of grad school as one of the few people who had a really good idea of what ESG meant from a value perspective.
0:04:40.9 Alanna Fishman: Of financial perspective. So I just jumped right into consulting and started building out the service offering from that point on. So I stumbled into it. I still engage with students at Johns Hopkins and help them follow their own career paths too. You never know where your career takes you, but I...
0:04:57.4 Cindy Moehring: That's right.
0:04:58.5 Alanna Fishman: So, I came into it. So, it wasn't an obvious move, it was just kind of building it out myself, and it just happens to be a major topic now.
0:05:05.5 Cindy Moehring: Yeah, that is so interesting. And oftentimes, that's the way careers do get started and the way they change, they're not very linear, and sometimes you find your passion just by stumbling into it and you realize, "Oh, that's what I really wanna do."
0:05:20.1 Alanna Fishman: That's right.
0:05:20.3 Cindy Moehring: So, that's a really cool story. And it shows that you're sort of at the tip of the spear. Especially for a deep understanding of it. One of the things I noticed when I read a lot of the literature out there is, it's always in the title of whatever the article is, or the white paper, but when you actually read through it, it isn't as comprehensive as one might think. It may focus on a particular area. You know, the climate change. Or it may focus on the governance side. Or it maybe mentions social, but oftentimes the social issues end up kind of being the orphan child to the whole topic. So, it's like everyone's trying to figure out how all of these different pieces sort of fit together as a collective whole, and all of the whole companies are now being held, their feet to the fire because investors really wanna know about it.
0:06:11.4 Alanna Fishman: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. They're driving it.
0:06:12.8 Cindy Moehring: So... It's definitely driving it. Right. So, do you think it's here to stay? I guess is the question I have for you. Or do you still think it's gonna be this kinda thing that you felt like at Newmont Mining over there on the side. Is it gonna come, or is it gonna go, or is it gonna stay?
0:06:27.9 Alanna Fishman: I can confidently say to all of our clients out there, to anybody thinking about who's engaging in this space, this is not a passing thing, this is a paradigm shift and this is a new reality. And I think it might have been the CEO of Apple or... There was a meeting that occurred and the CEO said, "ESG is like gravity. There's no point in trying to fight against it, inevitably, it's just gonna take over." It's just what we've... It's what the marketplace is today. When there is... When someone discovers a better way of doing something, in this case, managing risk, identifying financial value, going back to the old way makes no sense because this is truly a holistic solution with proven benefits and the ability to create financial value that had originally been missed because ES&G was looked at, again, as a supplementary consideration, like a mission's management, water management, human rights, but now it's been identified, it's been linked to financial value, to cost, to revenue, profit, cost of capital, debt and equity indicators. And you can't turn that off now, too much education has gone into that.
0:07:45.3 Alanna Fishman: So not only that but from when I first started and there was, I don't know, 20 studies on this, there's thousands now that show the empirical capital market value of ESG and what it means if you do it credibly. So everything I'm gonna be talking about is not a greenwashing communications campaign, it is actually for the companies who go in and look at their operating model and say, "This is what we need to do better and this is how we're going to do better in these are our goals to get there," that's an ESG program and those companies that do that... And there's all these studies now on the market, I think S&P just did one that shows companies who manage ESG risks and who are in the top quartile of the index doing that, they've outperformed the lowest quartile of non-ESG risk-managing companies, like the lines go like this. It's just the capital market's gap between value creation, return on equity, volatility is... It's just... You can't dispute it. It keeps showing.
0:08:49.8 Alanna Fishman: And then probably the equally as important thing to mention is, let's just put that aside for a minute, millennials and Gen Z-ers are inheriting all the wealth of asset management eventually, that's just the next generation of people that are going to be doing all this work. And 80 plus percent of that cohort of people believe that ESG is a fundamental factor to investing in corporate strategy management, so there's really no point in trying to avoid the inevitable when we know that as the generation that's gonna be retiring soon moves out, the next generation moves in with the people who are driving this movement will just continue to be a part of our every day consideration.
0:09:28.7 Cindy Moehring: Wow.
0:09:29.9 Alanna Fishman: So it is here to stay. Companies need to... I think the paradigm shift between when I started this at Johns Hopkins to now is, there is no longer an opt-out clause. It is gone. The question is, how are you going to be engaging in this space, not if.
0:09:46.3 Cindy Moehring: Not if.
0:09:46.4 Alanna Fishman: Our job is to help companies figure out how, different strategies, but you can't choose to not do that.
0:09:53.7 Cindy Moehring: And I would say it's almost... It's not even a question of when. The expectations are now so it really has gone from "If" to a question of "How." Well, you jump right over the when because the when is [chuckle] almost an implicit understanding that it's supposed to be now. So, get on the boat. So what are some of the other studies, you mentioned S&P, but what are some of the other ones that you've seen that actually prove this capital market value creation that would be good resources to look at, do you think?
0:10:21.6 Alanna Fishman: Well, you know what I can do is, when we're done with this, I can send you a whole list of anybody who wants to see this list. Thousands.
0:10:27.5 Cindy Moehring: Yeah. That would be great, yeah. Well, what we can do is list some of the top ones in the show notes so that folks can easily find those resources.
0:10:36.2 Alanna Fishman: I'm happy to send that out because the message I'm constantly trying to promote in front of everything else is, this is not a white knuckle exercise, this is... This is a capital market's driven exercise so much so that regulators and legislators have come into play 'cause they create the rules that drive our capital market.
0:10:55.1 Cindy Moehring: Sure. That's right.
0:10:56.0 Alanna Fishman: So this is going nowhere. And these studies like for another S&P, fabulous. Bank of America has done a ton of fabulous studies in this area. All these different... Harvard, Harvard Business School has done a bunch of them to go from the academic perspective, BlackRock, an institutional investment...
0:11:14.3 Cindy Moehring: Yes.
0:11:14.8 Alanna Fishman: Manager has done a ton of them. I could go on and on, and the important thing...
0:11:19.1 Cindy Moehring: Well, we'll list some of them, like I said, in the show notes. But those are some really great ones just right there I think to start with in addition to the S&P are those others that you mentioned, so.
0:11:27.7 Alanna Fishman: 100%. I'll get those to you. I think it'd be interesting for the viewers to take a look at that and see for themselves what the numbers look like and what it means as they kind of move into the space.
0:11:36.2 Cindy Moehring: Yeah, absolutely. That would be great. So let's talk a little bit more about FTI specifically. And we talked about the big issue, I agree with you, I do think it is here to stay, it's kind of front and center into the heart and soul of businesses now. It's like not just, "Go do your business, do your business in the right way," where you're taking into account all of these other issues related to the environment or the social issues or the right kind of governance issues. But where does a company like FTI fit into the space of ESG and companies who are trying to figure out like, "What does that mean? What do we need to do and how do we do it?"
0:12:17.9 Alanna Fishman: Yeah, that's a great question. FTI... One of the reasons why it came to FTI is because as a management consulting company, they have built an ecosystem, if you will, of resources to speak to the different needs of ESG engagements for different clients. So let's just take it from the top. If a company says, "We need an ESG program," that's the first step. And most companies stop right there, they're like, "We don't even know what that means. We don't know how to do it, what we need from leadership, how employees play into it." So FTI comes in and provides a step-by-step partnership with our clients to say, "You're different than someone in telecoms, than someone in cosmetics, than someone in oil and gas." We help you figure out this bizarre, robust, complex network of frameworks, standards, guidelines, rating agencies.
0:13:15.9 Alanna Fishman: And we manage that in a way that allows us to be... Complete it in a timely, cost-efficient way, to be honest. It's so complex out there that most companies are like, "I don't know, I don't know where to start." So we act as a partner to make them feel like this is totally under control. But I think the reason why FTI is so unique is, and where the market is headed, and I feel like we have a good step in the future here, is we have a corporate reputations team so that when your program is in place we get the communications out. It doesn't matter if you do something right if you're not communicating it, particularly to the generation of social media. You can't just afford to write a report and shove it on a shelf and say, "We did it." You have to actually show the communities in which you operate, your investors, regulators, that you're doing all the right things that speak to these different groups. We have a team for that. We have economists that do scenario analysis for climate change impact and assessment studies.
0:14:08.8 Alanna Fishman: So it's no longer enough to say, "Sure, we support climate change," which is actually huge. A few years ago that was not even a thing, but companies now are doing that. You can't just say you support it, you have to show how your governance structure speaks to how you manage climate change, and how your emissions profile contributes to the 2 degrees or 1.5 degrees scenario. We have economists that do that. So it's not fluffy, it's hard facts that tie to your value. Data management teams that the ecosystem is being built around the center of our ESG engagement team, and we proactively pull the people who need to be pulled in to speak to the needs of what the client is trying to do holistically, 'cause the way we started this, Cindy, is ESG is no longer an opt-out clause because it drives value. Value isn't found in one aspect of the company, it's strategic.
0:15:00.4 Cindy Moehring: Exactly.
0:15:00.5 Alanna Fishman: And so anybody who tells you it's an easy implementation, that's not right, I'd caution companies against that, because this actually, it's a mind shift, how you perceive risk and value and drive to it. So that's how FTI does it. At least in my perspective, my priority is to make them feel comfortable doing this so that when we're done in our partnership, they can run and continue doing this long into the future and be sustainable and be good corporate citizens, and that's my goal as we partner with our clients to do this type of work.
0:15:34.4 Cindy Moehring: Yeah. Well, I find it fascinating that so many companies are still at the very... I would call it at the beginning of the continuum as you describe, by simply saying, "We don't have an ESG program and we don't know what that means, and how do we go about doing that?" I would suspect that once you get into it and start explaining to them what it really means, that isn't there some kind of awakening within them and saying, "Oh, well, you know what, we actually do that, we just haven't pulled that thread through the way you're talking about, and we may have a few gaps, but we're doing some of that and we're doing some of this and we're doing a little of that, and we just need to pull it together and then analyze our data and maybe find where the gaps are." Is that...
0:16:21.3 Alanna Fishman: 100%, you nailed it. [chuckle] This is why no company, no CEO, no anybody making this decision should shy away from it because this seems too big or too impossible. You're already doing 75% of this. You just didn't know that it speaks to E, S or G, and our job is to frame that in a way that's meaningful and authentic, and...
0:16:43.4 Cindy Moehring: Yeah, right, and find out where the gaps are.
0:16:46.2 Alanna Fishman: 100%.
0:16:46.5 Cindy Moehring: Because this is a journey, this is a huge journey, like no company is there yet, and so part of it is I would think probably also figuring out, once they understand it, apply their own data and information to it, then figuring out, "Okay, what does our picture look like now? Where are we on this continuum, and where do we wanna be, and why do we wanna be there, and how are we gonna talk about it once we do get there and explain where we are on the journey?" Is that different for different companies, depending on the type of business they're in?
0:17:22.7 Alanna Fishman: Oh yeah. I mean, I wouldn't say that there's a specific industry that I point to and say, "Yikes, you guys, you gotta ramp it up." I think one of the most interesting aspects of this entire paradigm shift is there are some companies who are leaders, just like any change management curve, they're out front and they're doing it, and they're figuring out the way to make this work and they're trail blazing, everybody's looking to them to say, "How did you do it? What are you doing?" The interesting piece of this is a lot of companies are waiting to see what their peers are doing, and a lot of peers are doing the minimum because that's what they had time to do, or that's what they felt comfortable doing, and why would you report out your full emissions profile if you think you're gonna get in trouble for it and if none of your peers are doing it? You'd rather impact how an investor looks at you, if you're trying to be the good guy and do a full transparent report when everybody else is being a little less forthcoming into what their full picture looks like, that's more of the issue that we're finding.
0:18:22.0 Alanna Fishman: And so the good news is is within this past year with BlackRock's support of this, with driving towards all the change and sustainability and the global focus on this, we're seeing companies say, "You know what, we can have one-off conversations with our investors to explain an event that might happen, an emissions event, a water event, a governance event, we'll put it out there and we're willing to stand by the fact that we have a framework to be repeatable and transparent in our processes." That's what matters. Every company missteps, it's just how do you manage to that? How do you make sure it won't happen again? How do you make sure that that doesn't sink your company? That's what's important. So industries, there are some industries who are a little bit more ahead than others, for example oil and gas is one of the industries that's been under the microscope for years, they had no choice but to engage in this space early.
0:19:15.6 Cindy Moehring: Yeah, and then Exxon Mobile felt it in spades this spring at their shareholder meeting...
0:19:22.7 Alanna Fishman: Engine No. 1 threw everybody for a loop. We're like, "Wow." And now look what happened. Everybody just kinda paused and said, "That's fascinating." So again, do engage in it. There's no reason why you shouldn't. Nothing good will come of sticking your head in the sand and staying quiet. There's no reason to do that, or as the stewards of the company, like board members and management, it's part of their fiduciary responsibility to lead a company responsibly and this is part of it, this is what it takes. So the key is capture what you are doing and not getting credit for and fix the things that need to be fixed to drive value and risk management in the future, it's that simple. And there's a way to manage that process and really hone in on the opportunities that present themselves within companies and industries.
0:20:13.0 Cindy Moehring: Yeah, but then you have to talk about it, like you mentioned, and I think that's where, to your point, companies are a little hesitant stepping out there first because they may be managing all of that internally, which they need to be doing. And many have been doing for years, but then the question is, how do you talk about that externally in a way that is gonna be transparent and authentic, but not create legal liability, right?
0:20:34.1 Alanna Fishman: Oh, 100%. Which is why... When we come into a company, we do this cross-functionally, and the legal team is one of our best friends. We keep in close contact with them because in no way are we gonna recommend a company report X when the legal team is like, "So, just so you know, that'll put us in this position, and this is what it'll lead to." The powerful programs, the most successful ones are the ones that are cross-functional. We have accounting, legal, communications, HR, health safety and environment, all those different segments come into an ESG working group. We provide advisory, support to that working group, and the most important aspect, beyond anything I can say on this podcast is, leadership has to disseminate and empower the company to make decisions on behalf of their ESG strategy. It comes from the top, that's the culture. So, that's the opportunity of... You're gonna communicate it, do it, but do it in a way that's aware. And that won't put you in a bad position because the whole point of this is to show that you're managing risk, not creating risk for your company. So it's the delineation.
0:21:48.1 Cindy Moehring: Yeah, but you can't manage that risk if you're not aware of the risk, right?
0:21:51.7 Alanna Fishman: 100%.
0:21:55.0 Cindy Moehring: You gotta figure it out first. So are there any other industries other than oil and gas that you think sort of stand out as being at the leading edge of dealing with ESG issues?
0:22:04.9 Alanna Fishman: There are industries that I think are doing a really great job in specific areas, for example, in consumer products, their supply chain work, fabulous. That is hard.
0:22:18.4 Cindy Moehring: It's hard. That's really hard yeah.
0:22:20.6 Alanna Fishman: I'm sure, as all your students know and businesses know, supply chain work is so wickedly complex, it takes commitment to do that, we're seeing consumer products, the verticals of consumer product really delve into that, like the Estee Lauder's, the L'Oréals, whatever. They're really moving into that space, Unilevers, they're creating those case studies that we're talking about before.
0:22:43.7 Alanna Fishman: What I really appreciate about the technology segment, like the Facebook's, the Microsoft's, technology and innovation is one that they're driving, they're showing the world what it can look like to use big data, smart AI to manage carbon emissions, to manage all these different aspects of aggregating data into meaningful pieces of intelligence and report that out, so that's the tech space, and they're really leading in that. I think a cross-industry topic that I'm proud to say is front and center now for the obvious racial inequality and injustice we saw last summer is DE&I. Every company that we work with and that we propose to work with has DE&I as a piece of their proposal and evaluation.
0:23:35.5 Cindy Moehring: Yeah, and they do it. And it was. I think that that is one of the issues that helped almost reach, helped ESG reach the tipping point, that and COVID combined in terms of just the way companies thought about health and safety and social justice, and then climate change, of course, is there. So, we talked at the beginning of this episode about ESG in the past, it was this new topic, it was sort of over here on the side, siloed a bit, not core to the business. And then I would say we sort of moved through a phase in Corporate America, at least for public companies, many of them putting out sustainability reports, however, if you looked at a lot of them, they were very aspirational as opposed to measurement of where they were on the journey. And so I think now this moment that we've arrived at, companies are recognizing that they actually need to be able to report out some measurement of where they are on different aspects, whether it's climate change or social justice or DE&I, or diversity of the board. So, for companies that are trying to move from aspirational to hard metrics, that's a bit of a transition.
0:24:48.5 Cindy Moehring: And so if a company like comes with that sort of a portfolio, where they've been sort of very aspirational on the marketing end of it, but now need to get all the way over here. And maybe their data doesn't look quite as good as they thought, what should a company do in that space? Do they scrap all of their aspirational sort of comments about where they hope they'd be and just start over, or do they try to fill that gap? What do you think?
0:25:16.4 Alanna Fishman: The most important thing that we talk to our clients about is be authentic. So, if we're working with a client that says, "We promised the world, we said we'd be net zero by 2022." It's like, that's a lot of... If they have just done a lot of qualitative, if you will, fluff with no data behind it, no strategy, no road map, no nothing, that now is a liability. That is a bad thing to do now, you cannot get away with that anymore. A few years ago, it was enough to say that you were thinking about it, it's no longer enough. You have to show your strategies. So, we go back to a company and say, "Let us conduct a few assessments that drive your value," which is a stakeholder engagement perspective, who do you need to reach out to? And have you been doing that? And what information are you giving them? That helps us assess what data each different group need. What communities are looking for is different than what investors are looking for.
0:26:14.0 Cindy Moehring: Yeah, it is.
0:26:15.2 Alanna Fishman: The metrics and targets that we use in that delineation change depending on their stakeholder groups. We determine, I'm sure you've heard the name, materiality assessment. It's no long enough to say, "I care about climate change. Emissions are bad and water should be fresh." It's like, Okay. But you're a telecom company. So that doesn't really make sense because you don't really drive huge emissions events and you don't use a lot of water. So, let's go ahead and identify the metrics that are valuable and drive long-term risk management opportunity for your industry. We go through and identify that so that they can meaningfully create KPIs and targets that show where they are today and where they can credibly be two, three, four, five years down the road. If you don't have measurable progress where you can see tracking and trending, your management will never know what's happening, they'll never know how they're improving or how they're declining. So creating metrics, we... I don't wanna say we start from scratch because usually, the companies who started off with those communication campaigns have innovative concepts as to where they wanna be they just didn't have a roadmap quite yet, so we leverage that work and take it to the next step and give them meaningful metrics to drive every decision that they're going forward of value creation. So that's how we would approach that a little bit differently.
0:27:33.5 Alanna Fishman: But we do try to tell our clients, "Be careful what you're promising, it is much harder to walk back a broken promise than it is to be authentic and proactive but also credible in what you can achieve. And we can always change your goals as you can see, they can be evolved. Don't break promises, that looks way worse." So that's how we work with our clients on that.
0:28:00.4 Cindy Moehring: So how do you measure success with your clients? How do you know whether or not your work has really helped them move along the continuum in this ESG journey?
0:28:09.5 Alanna Fishman: Yeah, there's a few ways that we track that for them. So first of all, just getting a report out there and helping them, what we talked about before, Cindy, of getting credit for what they're already doing, that's a win right off the bat. A lot of companies don't have that and it's our job, so we right off the bat know that that was what they needed and we get it out there. But that's where the interesting piece, this begins, once you're live, you're live. [chuckle] Now rating agencies come in, there's other groups like credit groups like the S&P and Fitch and whatever, who are looking and evaluating your company based on your disclosures. The next step of our engagement to determine if it's successful is, you're gonna get a number or letter saying how well you're doing, we help you continually tell your story to make sure that you're getting all the credit in that number. So these rating agencies use big data to gather what you're doing in your public disclosures. We make sure that if anything gets missed or if they have the wrong information on what you have been doing, we engage with you to continue your success and say, "No, they did have a climate change plan," or, "They do have a human rights policy. This is what you need to know about them." So...
0:29:16.1 Cindy Moehring: Got it.
0:29:17.2 Alanna Fishman: Success continues... Success is iterative. It just keeps going. You have... Once you do ESG, kinda like SEC reporting for your 10-K, you gotta keep doing it. It's just part of it and we keep up with them. We enable that success and just help them keep moving.
0:29:33.2 Cindy Moehring: Listening to this entire episode also makes me think about if companies, many of them as we talked about have been doing this, right? But maybe didn't realize it. And to your point, once you start measuring, you have to continue measuring, it's just like a SEC reporting. So aren't companies, some of them maybe lacking resources to do that because they haven't organized themselves that way?
0:29:58.3 Alanna Fishman: Yeah. That's probably one of the number one reasons there's been a slight lag and everybody just jumping into this right away. Not every company is an Exxon, not every company is an all-state, not every company has the resources to do this. The key thing is, what can a company do with the resources, human capital and financial resources that it has? The answer is, there's a solution for every size company. There are frameworks out there, the Sustainable Accounting Standards Board, SASB, that's the framework that BlackRock and State Street and Vanguard are promoting because they have done years of due diligence with all the important stake holder groups to say, "These are the top 10-15 metrics only that you need to touch on. Don't worry about building an 80-page report, don't worry about that. Just give us a report on how you're managing these top 10-15 metrics that have been identified in your industry as the most financially valuable risk-mitigating topics within your industry.
0:31:04.9 Cindy Moehring: Right. Yeah. So it's a great place to start. Yeah.
0:31:08.4 Alanna Fishman: Exactly. It gets them their foot in the door and it's all they need to do. You don't have to boil the ocean, you just have to start. And don't let the enemy... Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. You need to get in there. And the hard part is, is we're seeing that there are consulting firms that try to keep telling companies, "You gotta do this and this and this." The thing that I can say is, companies, [chuckle] if you're doing this, you know what you can put in time-wise, even capital-wise. There is a way for you to solve this. Start small, make it meaningful, make it credible, and go from there. That's what matters the most. And then you can take it year two and three wherever you wanna go, but just start.
0:31:54.7 Cindy Moehring: That is a great place to end this discussion, Alanna, it's been fabulous. And before we completely say goodbye to the audience, I always like to give the guest an opportunity to recommend some book or maybe something you've listened to like a podcast series or a documentary, something that you think would be a good additional resource for the audience to, you know, take a look at or read or watch if they wanted to learn more about this topic on their own.
0:32:25.7 Alanna Fishman: Well, podcasts are plentiful. And so again, I'll send you some examples. But one thing I would love, the New York Stock Exchange is gonna be thrilled that I'm promoting this, but I recently came across a weekly publication called the NYSE, New York Stock Exchange, ESG top five. In this day and age where everybody has a million emails and a million things to do, what I love is it's weekly and it's short. It's just five headlines of things that are happening all over the world related to ESG and they capture that in a synthesized way. It keeps you dangerous, knowing what's going on, it keeps you aware, and it allows you to speak to ESG in a way that's a current-event led-driven approach. So I would tell listeners, "Go look at that." Just make that a small piece of your day just to scan through that, it takes you five minutes and you really have a good feeling for what's going on in the space on a weekly basis.
0:33:20.2 Cindy Moehring: Yeah. And just be informed. Any student who's going to go join a company and anybody who's currently working but wants to understand the paradigm shift, that's a quick, easy way that they can sort of fit in to their regular routines and still stay current. So I love that suggestion. That's great.
0:33:36.3 Alanna Fishman: Great, it's my pleasure.
0:33:37.5 Cindy Moehring: Well, Alanna, this has been a fantastic conversation. Thank you so much for helping to share your wealth of knowledge and experience and help to educate our entire audience. I really appreciate it and it's been a real pleasure.
0:33:49.5 Alanna Fishman: Thank you so much for having me, Cindy. I had a lot of fun and I look forward to keeping in touch and let me know if you ever have a part two of these podcasts. [chuckle]
0:33:58.3 Cindy Moehring: Absolutely, we'll dive deeper.
[music]
0:34:00.3 Cindy Moehring: Thanks Alanna. Bye-bye.
0:34:00.8 Alanna Fishman: Thanks Cindy.
[music]
Cindy Moehring is the founder and executive chair of the Business Integrity Leadership Initiative
at the Sam M. Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas. She recently
retired from Walmart after 20 years, where she served as senior vice president, Global
Chief Ethics Officer, and senior vice president, U.S. Chief Ethics and Compliance
Officer.
