In real life the good guys don’t always win.
But sometimes they get the chance to do some good.
My timeline is full of people talking about just how hard it is to carry on the work of sustainability in organisations.
It’s not like the heady days of 2020-22, when we thought everything would change and money poured into ESG funds.
People said, they insisted, that ESG had alpha – that firms with strong ESG would outperform the market.
And that looked like it was the case, for a while.
But, would you bet your life’s savings on a thesis – on an expected future?
Life has an unwelcome habit of attacking you in the rear.
I’m quite conservative. I think sustainability is important – and embedding it in everything we do is the sensible thing to do.
But I’m not naive enough to think that the world works the way I wish it would.
I made my bet on the market. Just hold the index. If ESG firms do well, they will make up more and more of your portfolio. If something else does, you won’t lose out.
And that’s precisely what happened.
Few people – no one I knew – predicted that Russia would invade Ukraine in 2022. Sanctions would mean that a quarter of Europe’s energy imports vanished from the supply side.
The boom that followed was in the oil and gas sector, not in the clean and green one.
The last 6-12 months have been about geopolitics, about nationalism, protectionism and a backlash against regulation, starting with elements of ESG.
So, is all hope lost? Should we just give up?
Of course not. A simple constant in life is that one thing happens after another.
As long as I have worked, there has been crisis after crisis – all we know for sure is that something will happen that we didn’t or couldn’t predict.
Things happen in cycles. And being responsible for cleaning up our mess will come back into fashion.
In the meantime, businesses would do well to batten down the hatches, to run lean and figure out how they can do more with what they already have.
Handcrafted insight 