So you want to work in SRI in 2005?

Hiring a crop of talented interns for the summer has me wondering what advice I will give when asked the inevitable question: where should I launch my career? Having been in the roles of pensions consultant, pension fund vendor, investment manager, and now on the socially responsible research side of the business, I hope my answer is honest and valuable. I'll be quick to point out that SRI is only a half-step from being in a NGO, but the higher-risk, higher-reward clean technologies field may offer more. Or rolling out hybrids, up 81% last year according to CNBC this morning. There are 2 questions you should answer:
1. Do you actually want to manage money?
2. How do you feel about working in Europe?

My first question is: Do you actually want to manage the money?
Does the ebb and flow of the market and the investors who lean on you sound like the right fit? If you prefer researching and presenting the ideas, then the analysis side is your bets fit. Sometimes you may flow between the two roles, but most often the tracks and the qualifications lead in to parallel but separate paths.

In SRI in particular the majority of SR investment analysts are from non-financial backgrounds, as a quick review of the SIRAN listserv bio's can attest. On the money management side, a key requirement is that the investor has confidence in your "numbers" ability. Evidence of this comes in the form of the new Chief Investment Strategist at Trillium Asset Management here in Boston. Adam Seitchik joined Trillium Asset Management in 2004 as Chief Global Strategist for Deutsche Asset Management in London, where he led a team responsible for over £40 billion in client assets. He also has experience as an analyst and portfolio manager at Wellington Management, and was the Director of Strategic Research for John Hancock’s Investment and Pension Group. More SRI is going to demand an interpretation into a financial answer.

As Jeff MacDonagh at Loring Woolcott said to me at the Net Impact SRI panel at MIT recently, too few SRI analysts have CFA qualifications. Steve Lydenburgh mentioned his efforts to get more SR into the CFA curriculum. I have suggested finding the alternative qualification in Europe and pursuing them on the basis of their greater affinity and sophistication around SRI/sustainability issues.

That leads me to the second major question: do you want to necessarily work in the US?
If not, then why not follow the leading thinkers in SRI and move to Europe. The City of London, while having some paroxsyms about CSR as evidenced in The Economists's recent diatribe "The Good Company: A sceptical look st CSR" in January 2005 is far more involved in the CSR/SRI debate. Developments like the second generation of SiRi company formed from a network of SRI analyst firms across Europe and North America suggests that the industry is growing and developing. The London Stock Exchange has developed CSR data-gathering software London Stock Exchange to launch Corporate Responsibility Exchange. After all, France has mandated CSR be considered by companies in their reporting, the largest Dutch Pension fund ABP owns a stake of a leading SRI research firm, and the Greens are politically relvant in Germany while the UK has a minister level post for CSR or "corporate responsibility" as Nigel Griffiths, MP likes to call it Nigel Griffiths MP replaces Stephen Timms MP as minister with responsibility for CSR
28/09/04.

Your other option to change corporate behaviour is in - it pains me to suggest we need more of them - law!. If I was just now coming out of Law School and not 10 years ago, I would be carrying the bag for Eliot Spitzer, attorney general of New York and highly effective scourge of corporate malefactors. What he has achieved has been remarkeable, and yes, not without incident or controversy. It has just lately been interesting to see the pressure ratcheted up on him, including some pasty looking publisher of CEO Magazine on CNBC. I smiled as I watched him try to convince SqwuakBox's Mark Hains that Eliot SPitzer had done something wrong by doing his job and simultaneously announcing himself as candidate for NY Governor.

SRI or Corporate Law, those are pretty much your options. CSR seems too compromised right now, although I'm watching it carefully, especially the Investor Relations side. Only two important figures in personal finance were named to Time magazine's recent list of 100 most influential Americans; TIME's list of the men and women whose power, talent or moral example is transforming the world. One was Eliot Spitzer. The other was Amy Domini, a founding mother in socially responsible investing. "I never knew I had influence," she joked. "My son was very impressed because some rapper singer was in there. He couldn't believe I was in there with them." She founded the Domini 400 social index, the conscience-driven equivalent of the S&P 500, and a set of mutual funds that also bears her name. She now manages investments totaling about $2 billion. And much to the chagrin of KLD, failed to mention the pivotal role that KLD and its 2 partners had in launching both the industry and her role in it.