ESG Returns Eventually Will Win Over Critics

I was catching up with a former student of mine, a star performer at one of the largest private-equity firms. She’d been trying to persuade an investment committee to pay more attention to a particular set of environmental, social, and governance, or ESG, factors that would make a material difference to their investment in a well-known consumer-goods company. But the reaction of the people in the room was to roll their eyes and say there was no room for do-gooders in sustaining their great track record of investment returns.