ESG: Do We Need It and Does It Work?

The Institute for Corporate Governance Public Lecture Series:

"ESG: Do We Need It and Does It Work?"

Alex Edmans (London Business School and ECGI) 

Thursday, 3 November 2021

Organised by

Jun Yang (Kelley School of Business, Indiana University)

About the Event:

The Kelley School of Business is proud to announce that its Institute for Corporate Governance (ICG), in partnership with the Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University and ECGI, will be sponsoring a public lecture series on corporate governance. The first lecture in this new series will be given by Professor Alex Edmans of London Business School. Alex has a PhD in Finance from MIT Sloan as a Fulbright Scholar and was previously a tenured professor at Wharton. He has spoken at the World Economic Forum in Davos, testified in the UK Parliament, and given the TED talk “What to Trust in a Post-Truth World” and the TEDx talk “The Social Responsibility of Business” with a combined 2.4 million views. Alex’s book, “Grow the Pie: How Great Companies Deliver Both Purpose and Profit,” was named a Financial Times Business Book of the Year in 2020.

Professor Edmans will compare and contrast the traditional model in Finance (that of shareholder primacy as propounded by Nobel laureate Milton Friedman) with his "pieconomics" model in which he contends that organisational leaders should pursue the strategy of "growing the economic pie." He will suggest that since economic activities are a positive-sum game such pie growing strategies will in the long run create both profits and serve society more reliably than will a narrow focus on profit maximisation.