Unlocking the hidden value of ESG for your organization | Majid Mirza | TEDxWhyteAve

[Music] so we're going to talk about environmental social governance esg but before that let's roll back a little bit to how i got involved in this space i grew up in a small tiny city in pakistan called karachi no i'm lying it's 20 million people it's not tiny at all and i know there's some pakistanis in the audience and they're going what do you say and the thing about growing up in a country like pakistan is that there's a lot of paradoxes there's a lot of extremes you have extreme wealth extreme poverty extreme sort of

hospitality and extreme close-mindedness and what that allows one to do is to really see how can you translate best practices across the spectrum how can you take from the rich gift to the poor take from good practices and and replace them and it's it's much less homogeneous than many places i'll give you a few examples so pakistan is known for some of the most favorable food a rich fusion of our neighbors basically india iran afghanistan and but it's also known for some of the worst food poisoning so be careful if you travel and have street

food in addition to that just going back to the city in the south close to the coast you have cities like karachi where i'm from which are hot populated noisy and completely chaotic but as you just go four to five hours by playing up north you have the most calm serene and untouched places in the world truly untouched i visited places like this trust me it's not photoshopped they actually look like this the pictures i took with my phone looks similar and this is about seven hours closest to the nearest phone signal so you can

truly go places where people are living in a subsistence way and and learn so much from that and then let me catapult all the way from when i grew up to 2010 where pakistan experienced some of the worst floods that the world had ever seen u.n secretary ban ki-moon described them as the worst disaster he had seen at that time and 20 million people were displaced with one-fifth of the country's land mass underwater i was there at the time and i was working for a corporate foundation we were trying to work in relief and rehabilitation

because the corporation had fertilizer and agricultural input seeds fertilizer sales happening to farmers in this area and they were also procuring dairy milk from the farmers so they really wanted to help re-establish these supply chains i'll tell you a quick story when we traveled from the city multan to just about one and a half hours away we were traveling from a five-star hotel with breakfast buffets while this is going on when we reach the refugee camps we give out the infamous biryani do any of you know what that is it's a mixture of rice and

meat and when the children received the biryani and their little plates we saw them separating the rice from the meat thinking that they wanted to eat the meat at the end saving it for last but something really weird happened they actually threw away their plates with the meat inside it in the garbage bags and we went and said what are you doing thinking maybe they're vegetarian and they said sir we don't know what this is they had never seen meat and it was just a dark fleshy spongy sort of substance to them because the livestock

that they have is their bank account so they don't eat that they don't slaughter that for food they use it for an emergency for a wedding they had never had meat before so these are the sort of experiences i grew up with and i started thinking like willis harman the futurist says the reason why business is responsible for environmental and social good is simply because it's the biggest entity in the room and the way humanity is structured the biggest and most influential entity in the room is responsible for humanity's wellness so businesses now are bigger

than governments in terms of their influence in terms of their capital and as i finished university in in canada um in around 2009 the world of impact investing and responsible business and shared value and esg environmental social governance investing was taking root i had the chance to work for over the next 10 years in impact investing in environmental social governance starting right at the grassroots in rural areas all the way to doing a phd in the topic and managing my own company helping companies track their environmental social governance performance so today instead of boring you

with phd type data which is all out there and now after saying that i'm still going to get mention it data like a 24 trillion dollar wealth transfer to millennials over the next 10 years out of which 78 of millennials say they would not work for a company that does not have good sustainability and esg performance these are very real sort of realities in the evolving age on top of that 98 of institutional investors say they take they do not invest in a business without looking at their esg performance and on top of that you

have almost 70 or 80 percent of retention being due to non-financial factors like employee engagement and esg so all of those that data exists and i mentioned it anyway but today i wanted to share with you three stories about e s and g from my travels around the world in over 20 countries all the way from small businesses to very large corporations and the reason for sharing these stories is that although you might hear a lot of criticism about esg in the news we can take these principles into our own hands and take control over

them we don't have to reject things just because large corporations might be using them for the status quo and to gain more consolidated power we have to be able to go to the roots and see can we implement esg in a way that can benefit society and environment so let me take you to a visit i had in asia to someone called mo who reached out to me through a friend very proactively and said magic i own a gym and it's a small gym but i'm very concerned about my carbon footprint can you have a

coffee with me and help me think through it so we met up and we realized that the biggest carbon footprint that mo had was his members driving to the gym every day back and forth from home from work so mo decided at the smallest level with only four employees to start a bike program to encourage his members to start riding to the gym rather than driving but the result of that was not just reduced carbon footprint it was also that he started recruiting new members through the bike program which were not gym members before in

addition he also started creating more social networking and linkages within his biking program so it's not just an environmental door that opens up most of these things are interrelated and that's what we also see in the research everything is interlinked and the intersectionality is key let's move from asia to north africa and the middle east where i visited a company let's call them automan just for confidentiality's sake and they ran a series of automotive repair shops but the one thing they kept hearing from one segment of their audience which was women is that why do

we have to deal with 10 men all the way from the front desk to the mechanics to the senior management are there no women around here who would be willing to work at the auto mechanics shop and so what they decided to do was to take a leaf from gyms again tying back to mo and they started an exclusively women's auto repair shop or a woman and in that every single employee from the front desk staff to the mechanics to the executive management up in the offices were women not only are they able to become

more inclusive but they made a lot of money doing the process as well so the notion is can we still do well while doing good and in many cases it's a resounding yes finally let's go to a last story going from small to medium to large corporation my team was once doing uh extensive carbon emissions analysis for a large financial institution and we found that most of their carbon emissions are coming from oversea from long-haul flights so it was over a thousand metric tons in carbon emissions and we had two recommendations offset emissions by purchasing

credits and also try to reduce travel to non-essential to essential travel only the first recommendation was readily accepted but the second one they rejected outright and they said every all of our travel is essential but one thing i want to tell you that's really interesting this was two months before pandemic hit three months later the ten percent that we had recommended in reductions for travel went down to zero percent and guess what happened three months after that one quarter later when they were reporting their quarterly performance i was in the investor meet and their team

was reporting how costs had gone down how employee satisfaction had gone up how productivity had gone up and how customer satisfaction had gone up as well so by going to zero travel and zero travel related emissions they were actually able to improve in their business what this taught me is that esg as a new shift from shareholder capitalism to stakeholder capitalism can today sometimes provide us a lens into the future of what our businesses might look like and what are going to be the important factors driving our business aside from profit it's been a 50-year

journey where in early in the 1970s the most famous economist said the social responsibility of business is to make profits and profits alone but now is a very critical time where it's not just about the business case but about adopting esg as our own regardless of whether you work or own a small business a medium business whether you volunteer at a church whether you run a large corporation or whether you work for a university or a student and how do we do that let's take a quick look just think about very simple things whenever you

make a decision think about what is the impact on waste water energy and emissions get the team together and have a brainstorming session you'll be surprised what comes out of it number two on the social side every time a major business decision is about to happen or a major project is about to be launched think about how it impacts minorities gender issues and people with special needs it's very simple but most of the time we don't do it and finally on the governance side remember to try to remember how we can act ethically how we

can follow all regulations and how we can be more transparent with the decisions we take so that everyone across the board from the bottom of the pyramid to the top of the pyramid knows the decisions that are happening so with that let me leave you thinking about mo and auto man and auto woman and our large financial institution customer so that you might think how can you do well while still doing good thank you [Applause]