Environment, social and governance in communications with Alison Taylor, Ethical Systems

On Top of PR with Jason Mudd

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Alison Taylor of Ethical Systems and Jason Mudd discuss how to tackle ESG (Environment, Social, and Governance) in the corporate communications world.

Guest:

Alison Taylor is the Executive Director of Ethical Systems, a research collaboration based at NYU Stern School of Business. She is also a professor at Stern and is writing a book for Harvard Business Review Press on how companies can do the right thing in a turbulent world. It will be published in 2023.

Five things you’ll learn from this episode:

1. What ESG is: a framework for investors to analyze a company’s environment, social, and governance risks and opportunities
2. How to start discussing ESG at your workplace
3. How the age of hyper-transparency affects business leaders
4. How companies can do the right thing in a turbulent world
5. How brands can build and sustain trust

Quotables

• “I would certainly advise companies not to try and boil the ocean, not to try and tick the box on 40 or 50 issues, not necessarily to listen to everybody that's yelling at you, but be really, really focused about how you can make money by providing more value to society or having a better environmental impact.” -@AlisonTaylor
• “Being transparent is pretty difficult because companies aren't really used to saying, ‘This is hard and we haven't got it right.’ Companies are used to saying, ‘We've got it under control and we're doing our best and here are all the great things we're doing.’ So, I think at the moment, we're in this really problematic situation where transparency is increasing, reputational pressure is increasing, but we don't necessarily have realistic ideas of what a business should and shouldn't be doing. It's really a kind of art form to tell that story well without exaggerating, without lying, without greenwashing, but also not implying that it is a company's job to solve every single social-environmental problem out there.” -@AlisonTaylor
• “I think both communication and sustainability professionals can end up feeling like Chicken Little, that they're running around the company saying, ‘You got to do this, you've got to do that, the sky is falling in,’ and the reality is you need to pick one to three issues where you're going to try and make a difference.” -@AlisonTaylor

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Guest’s contact info and resources:

• Alison on Twitter
• Alison on LinkedIn
• Alison’s bio and publications on Ethical Systems

Additional resources:

• Business for Social Responsibility: resources for understanding ESG and business sustainability
• Ethical Systems' monthly newsletter

Watch the episode here

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