Green Mountain Summit Plateau; Business Values

Vermont is green with rolling mountains, a cross between Switzerland and South West England, with Ben + Jerry’s celebrating its colour and quirkiness. But once again this year for the Green Mountain Summit, leaden skies. That makes it 2 for 2 for grey & rainy skies at this conference for me, not sure about the other 4 years it has been running.

While last year I was excited to make my debut in front of a US audience speaking of my Pension Fund trustee paper for Villanova University's Center for Responsible Leadership and Governance, this year was less ambitious but more corporate. I was supporting Peter Kinder and Tom Kuh. Peter opened on Monday with the keynote of his Fiduciary Responsibility paper while Tom covered index issues on Tues afternoon.

The lack of buzz around the conference was palpable. SRI itself seems to have reached a plateau, with a Presentation Tues on the “Language of SRI” leading Steve Viederman to suggest banishing the words “socially responsible investing”. The SRI “brand” has become conflicted lately as the definition of what CSR and SRI means, more players entering the industry and how they each have a slightly different take on it. For me SRI has always been a wide umbrella: what does an environmental activist, a Catholic nun or gay rights activists have in common? Now with increasing mainstream investor interest in non-financial issues, and companies pushing back by challenging the investor impacts of the SRI agenda, the industry is reaching to distinguish between the values and the value side of the debate.

I see the industry segmenting into 2 categories:
1. those that want to include the widest range of stakeholder opinions into the corporate investment assessment; and
2. those with a narrower shareholder view of the company, but see the inclusion of a limited range of extra-financial issues as a way to identify hidden value or protect against unseen risks.

I was pleasantly surprised to see the paragon of US business has moved a long way in considering Corporate Governance and CSR. Business Week's April 14 Good Governance, Good Buys? argued for CG as an investment indicator, while May 23, 2005 editorial, cautioned against what they see as “cultural wars” that may engulf US corporations When Business Bows To Activists. They reference a recent Microsoft difficulty around legislation in its home Washington state about gay rights, and directs “corporate America to make decisions for business, not for religious or emotional reasons”. In the same item, they make the argument for diversity as being to the economic advantage. On the same editorial page they reference good work being done about labour rights Stamping Out Sweatshops by the Joint Initiative on Corporate Accountability & Worker’s Rights. This matches their positive coverage in A Major Swipe At Sweatshops with the teaser line: "If a project in Turkey succeeds, long-sought global labor standards could emerge."

So even as SRI seeks to understand what they do and do not stand for, it seems corporate America is being forced to interpret “business values”. Perhaps the flat feeling at Green Mountain fairly reflects a “gestation” period for both CSR and SRI.