Tag: Impact Investing

Above: View of Kravis Hall and the lawn at Columbia Business School, seen against the Hudson River and the Riverside Drive Viaduct. The facade is adorned with “bandages” of translucent glass, indicating professors’ offices. Photo by Zack DeZon for The New York Times

On the developing Manhattanville campus, the architecture of Diller Scofidio + Renfro reinforces a social movement in business education to do good as well as make money.

One zigs, the other zags. One teases the passer-by with bands of translucent glass wrapping a core of clear windows; the other, with floors angled in and out — a gentle architectural mambo. The pair of buildings that comprise Columbia University’s new business school, on its growing Manhattanville campus, exude a nervous off-kilter energy.

The 11-story Henry R. Kravis Hall, named for the co-founder of the private equity firm KKR, rises in front of the delicate steel-arched viaduct carrying Riverside Drive. It is separated from an eight-story structure named for the entertainment mogul David Geffen by a circle of grass, trees and benches embedded in a plaza. The ensemble joins a sleek new campus that so far includes a neuroscience research center, an arts center, and a think-tank-style building, called The Forum, devoted to academic discourse.

But the real story of the business buildings lies within. Appearing wraithlike behind the glass, stairways in both wind over and around themselves like crinkly strands of DNA as they ascend full height. These are what the architects, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, working with the FxCollaborative architecture firm, call “network” stairs. Twisting through ceiling surfaces curved and warped to accommodate them, they beg to be used. Their design reflects the close fit of the architecture to person-to-person connection and intensified interaction — what the school’s leadership sees as essential to the sprawling aspirations it has for its graduates to do good as they make money.

The design of the complex just blocks north of Columbia’s main Morningside Heights campus coincided with business schools around the country coming to terms with a rising chorus of criticism that companies are too predatory, exploitative and monopolistic, and that business education had to change.

“The forces at work in the world are necessarily causing a rethinking of the foundations of the economic system we’ve had,” Lee C. Bollinger, Columbia’s president, said in an interview. “Climate change, issues of social justice and what globalization means for societies — all of these are raising profound questions about the nature of what the future can be.”

Glenn Hubbard, the former business school dean who brought the project to fruition, saw the need to break free from fealty to the unregulated free market economy that over decades has led to extraordinary wealth concentration. The idea that business should focus only on making money, attributed to the economist Milton Friedman, “was a simple and direct idea that took over business, banking, even corporate law,” Hubbard explained. “We are trying to come up with a framework that can be more about flourishing, not just profit.”

“The vision now is to bring people together and debate issues going on in the world,” said Costis Maglaras, who was on the faculty as the project was being designed and who succeeded Hubbard.

Just as critics of capitalism are thick on the ground (Thomas Piketty, Tim Wu, Anand Giridharadas, to name a few), business education skeptics ask whether schools can actually get beyond delivering job-ready M.B.A.s to trading floors and consulting firms.

“A piece of me thinks this is great; it’s what they should be saying,” said Steven Conn, author of “Nothing Succeeds Like Failure: The Sad History of American Business Schools.” “As a historian I’ve heard this before, and it didn’t amount to much. Institutions are very difficult to change.”

In a Times Opinion essay on business schools, Molly Worthen, a history professor at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, wrote, “it is hard to teach narrow, applied skills and also encourage students to wrestle with giant, ambiguous questions about ultimate values and hierarchies of power.”

The architects have taken Columbia’s aspirations to heart in their design. That’s where the twisty stairways come in. They open onto informal lounges and numerous six-person study rooms at the landings, all walled in glass, that are popular even when the adjacent classrooms are empty. (All spaces are completely accessible to people with mobility impairments.)

Taken together these venues ease an informal, even serendipitous mixing of teachers and students. “All these varied spaces are visibly locked together,” Charles Renfro said. “We made that the iconic element of the building.”

At $600-million, the complex is anything but bare bones. Yet there are none of the trappings of schools that aggrandize the M.B.A. aspirant as a master of the universe in waiting: grand atriums, leather-chaired lounges, chandelier-festooned ceilings. “The buildings are seen as tools,” Renfro said. “They are about problem-solving and being in the world.”

No professors preside from corner offices. In Kravis, the architect said, “We shuffled together faculty and students on alternating floors.” Thus, professors and students constantly encounter each other in offices, lounges, cafes, and the network stairs. They also constantly encounter the city thanks to the stairs, which kaleidoscopically unveil views of the campus, a tangle of nearby viaducts, as well as brick tenements and public housing towers — in the process reminding people of the messy world beyond.

None of this was possible in Uris Hall, the business school’s reviled 1964 tower on the Morningside campus, with its austere corridors good only for shunting students from class to class. Faculty was sequestered in their own high-floor aerie.

To showcase the school’s integration of social concerns, the architects have made an innovation hub prominent. It unites the Eugene Lang Entrepreneurship Center, the Tamer Center for Social Enterprise, and the Columbia-Harlem Small Business Development Center on the second floor of Geffen, with a network stair swirling through it within a glass tube.

Seeing the hub along their accustomed route, it was easy for students to engage. “The prominence is really helpful,” Bruce Usher, the faculty director of the Tamer Center, said in an interview. Even those devoted to the accumulation of lucre might discover how they can bring business skills to needy communities — at least that is the hoped-for outcome.

The centers run programs on managing nonprofits, addressing climate change, and improving employment opportunities for formerly incarcerated people. The Columbia-Harlem center coaches local producers of food, gifts and cosmetics. (Several products that were introduced with the help of the program are sold in a ground-floor public cafe and in nearby Whole Foods stores.)

Manhattanville’s 2007 master plan, by the Genoa-based architect Renzo Piano Building Workshop and New York-based Skidmore Owings & Merrill, also encourages the school to display its community commitments. It eased access to the campus by retaining existing streets, in contrast to the introverted main campus, designed in the late 19th century as a walled acropolis atop Morningside Heights.

Piano devised what he called an “urban layer,” the idea that all the new buildings would float above tall glass-clad street frontages that were largely committed to facilities open to the public.

As Columbia has built out Manhattanville it enlivened its streetscapes with several eateries, a rock-climbing wall open to all, a storefront and traveling “biobus” that introduces children to science, and a wellness clinic focused on the needs of nearby residents whose chronic conditions (often associated with poverty) go untreated.

Kravis is devoted mostly to classrooms and faculty offices while Geffen includes administrative functions, but both buildings are similarly extroverted. In a high-ceilinged corner of the Kravis Hall ground floor, students gravitate to curving, cushioned benches that rise in terraces and look out at people sunning on the lawn of the plaza that unites the two buildings (designed by the landscape architect James Corner Field Operations). Or they can chat with colleagues flowing up and down the adjacent network stairs.

Its counterpart in Geffen is a plaza-facing Commons — a large auditorium walled in glass. Both these spaces try to blur the boundary between inside and outside, town and gown. Passers-by can see who is speaking in the Commons and hanging out in the Kravis terraced lounge. (Academic areas are generally off-limits to the public.)

The tall glass ground floors throughout Manhattanville amplify street-level energy by capturing the slanting sun and refracting fragmentary images of people and activity. Appealing as that is, the contemporary sleekness of the campus sets it apart from the gritty, red brick surroundings. With Manhattanville scheduled to grow over the years to 6.8 million square feet across more than five blocks, a comfortable intermingling of the campus and its neighborhood may develop only slowly.

Neighbors who resisted Columbia’s expansion can take some credit for Columbia’s belated recognition that it had to be better connected to the city it makes home.

Columbia promised that it would develop more opportunities and break down barriers to advancement in the Manhattanville campus for people living and working in the neighborhood who feared displacement by collegiate gentrification. Noisy protests threatened to derail the Manhattanville expansion in the mid-2000s — a reflection of the trust Columbia had failed to build since it lost a battle to build a gym in Morningside Park in 1968.

Skeptics will be watching the pivot of Columbia and other top business schools, like the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard, to more high-minded teaching methods. It may be all too easy to default to the comfort of traditional quantitative modeling and case-study what-ifs. After all, schools are also buffeted by those who continue to worship the ideology of unfettered markets, and loudly proclaim social and environmentally focused teachings to be excessively “woke.”

But Margaret O’Mara, a history professor at the University of Washington who writes about politics and the tech sector, sees generational change. “Students really want to make the world better,” she said, summing up the challenge as, “How do I find personal and professional financial stability and not sell my soul?”

With starting salaries for graduates at elite business schools topping $155,000, the basis of all-important business school rankings, “Where is the institutional incentive to put out graduates who want to work with NGOs in Africa?” asked Conn, the author. On the other hand, he wonders if climate change and “authoritarianism 2.0,” are among challenges that businesses can no longer ignore, and which might alter those incentives.

The Tamer Center’s Usher sees no turning back. “The broader concern with the world is well integrated into core courses, and we have six electives on climate change alone,” he said. One reason is that “students are more desirable hires with this background.”

Columbia has chosen the programs it has brought to Manhattanville to “ask questions people did not think about 20 or 50 years ago,” Bollinger, Columbia’s president, said, pointing out that the business school is near the future home of the recently established Climate School (to be designed by Piano).

Bollinger is stepping down in June 2023 but feels sure Manhattanville will continue to “bet that these will be the big problems and the big endeavors.”

A correction was made on Jan. 6, 2023 An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of an economist who is critical of capitalism. He is Thomas Piketty, not Picketty.

 

James S. Russell, The New York Times – James writes on architecture and cities. He is writing a book on how city culture influences business success. 

This year, we saw companies double-down on purpose amidst a rise in consumer skepticism and politically motivated attacks on ESG. Below are six notable trends and what they might mean for 2023.

Purpose-driven marketing and stakeholder relationships to ESG have seen escalating evolution through the pandemic — with increased challenges and opportunities this year. In 2022, we saw brands double-down on purpose-driven initiatives as they worked to drive consumer loyalty, retain top talent and create exponential impact — all amidst a rise in consumer skepticism and politically motivated attacks on ESG.

Below are a few of the notable trends from 2022 that the Allison+Partners and Headstand Purpose Center of Excellence is tracking, and what they might mean for 2023:

Anti-woke ESG backlash

 Jamie Berman, VP, Boston

Politically motivated backlash against climate-smart investing and corporate climate action reached new levels in 2022, with at least 17 states adopting anti-ESG regulation. Legislative blockades, state-driven boycotts (such as those against BlackRock and others) and other political targeting of net-zero and related climate initiatives have set up a potential blockbuster year in 2023.

The new year will certainly be a reckoning of sorts for ESG, as a GOP-led US House of Representatives comes into power and begins probing investors’ and companies’ ESG commitments. We’ll see more conversation around the role of ESG within investors’ portfolios and its effects on the bottom line as ESG-minded organizations push back on conservative criticism, and the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s pending mandatory climate disclosure rule will also bolster this narrative, especially where allegations of greenwashing are concerned. Even with political headwinds, hope remains strong that ESG investments trends will continue their upward trajectory: In 2021, 49 percent of institutional investors reported incorporating environmental and governance factors into their investment decision-making processes, up 7 percent from the previous year, and ESG investments are predicted to more than double over the next three years, showing a continued momentum for ESG causes moving forward.

New chapter in capitalism

Katy Mendes, VP, San Francisco

2022 was the year that Yvon Chouinard donated 98 percent of his $3 billion company, Patagonia to a new organization, Holdfast Collective — which he said will be “dedicated to fighting the environmental crisis and defending nature” — with no tax deduction, because Holdfast isn’t a normal nonprofit. The entirety of the company’s voting stock, equivalent to the rest of the shares, went into a newly established entity known as the Patagonia Purpose Trust. A statement from the new company shared, “Every dollar that is not reinvested back into Patagonia will be distributed as dividends to protect the planet.”

This incredible move, where Patagonia became a 100 percent-for-the-planet business, signals that a profit-for-purpose business model is entirely possible. While not every executive is positioned to be as transformative as Chouinard, this reimagining of capitalism can hopefully inspire more purpose-driven companies and business leaders to redefine their profit models to more directly and aggressively address urgent social needs in the face of an accelerating climate crisis.

Climate impacts to frontline communities

Megan Rufty, VP, Washington, DC

This past year, we saw the very visible impacts of the climate crisis — from floods to drought — to record-breaking temps and every natural disaster in between. With clear signs pointing to the impacts of climate change, 2022 also saw a growing understanding from activists, government and corporations alike of the frontline communities of the environmental crisis — those that experience the “first and worst” impacts of our rapidly changing climate. Frontline communities are disproportionately carrying the burden of climate change, are more exposed to the physical impacts from natural disasters and pollution, and are often underserved communities of color, without access to protection.

While the direct impacts of the climate disaster were harsher than ever, we saw this year more concerted efforts to protect these at-risk communities. The US passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which will make much-needed funds available to in part serve frontline communities. For example, the Act will invest directly in programs to reduce pollution in these areas. This includes the creation of climate and environmental justice block grants to support community-led projects; and funding for fence-line monitoring near industrial facilities, air-quality sensors, new and upgraded multi-pollutant monitoring sites, and monitoring and mitigation of methane and wood-heater emissions in disadvantaged and disproportionately impacted communities.

In addition, at COP27, negotiators established a loss and damage fund to support the developing world as those communities face and try to rebuild from the effects of climate change. In 2023, the urgency to protect frontline communities will only increase. While 2022 saw government action, this coming year companies have a major responsibility to use their power and platform to advocate for and directly benefit the communities who need it most.

Illustration by Melanie Lambrick

This story is part of the Cities+Solutions series, which chronicles surprising and inspiring climate initiatives in communities across the U.S. through stories of cities leading the way.

Governments the world over have made a lot of great-sounding climate commitments. In Pittsburgh, for example, an ambitious plan adopted in 2018 outlines objectives like 100 percent renewable energy in municipal facilities by 2030, a fossil-free fleet, and zero-waste operations. But setting goals is one thing. Implementing the programs and infrastructure needed to reach them is another — and that work costs money. 

“We had a large, ambitious agenda, but very little resources that went alongside it,” says Grant Ervin, Pittsburgh’s former chief resilience officer who oversaw creation of the 2018 plan. “Following the completion of our resilience strategy and our climate action plans, we were asking the question: Where is the money to help implement these different initiatives that we had identified?”

Answering that was tricky for this midsize post-industrial city, which was designated as “financially distressed” from 2003 until early 2018. For Ervin, the challenge went beyond raising funds for new initiatives. He wanted to ensure the city’s spending — all of its spending — aligned with its climate and equity promises. “If we’re going to address the climate challenge,” he remembers thinking, “we’re going to have to start to leverage our existing resources to do the things that we know we need to do.” 

For Steel City, that meant scrutinizing its entire spending plan through a climate lens with the help of a method called priority-based budgeting. 

The challenge: budgeting for a cause

There are several ways an organization can slice its budget. One common approach is incremental budgeting, wherein the previous year’s budget provides the baseline for the next, with incremental adjustments. It’s easy to imagine how that might lead to inefficiencies when line items get carried over year after year. 

Priority-based budgeting, on the other hand, maps every single dollar a city spends to a specific program — everything from “rodent baiting” to recycling collection — then scores each one according to how it achieves the city’s priorities. Although the method could be used in the private sector, it was developed for local governments, which work toward the common good rather than a profit margin. 

“We’re going to have to start to leverage our existing resources to do the things that we know we need to do.” – Grant Ervin

“There are so many societal objectives that are really up to local governments to mount a charge to try to solve,” says Chris Fabian, who developed the approach to budgeting around 2010. After years in the public sector, he saw that municipal budgets were not designed to reveal how much money was going toward objectives like climate action, equity, or resilience. Such efforts were often bundled into many different line items, making accountability difficult. He wanted to develop a system that would help cities see how they could redistribute resources to finance their top priorities — from general goals like fostering safe, healthy communities to specific projects like addressing homelessness. 

Fabian cofounded the software and consulting company ResourceX in 2015 and has since helped over 300 local governments across the U.S. and Canada adopt priority-based budgeting. Common priorities the company helps cities advance include equity, safety, and thriving economies. “It does vary,” Fabian says. “If you go into some conservative communities, they might not feel that they have a role in economic vitality. They’re like, ‘The business sector should figure it out on their own.’ Whereas other places invest heavily in visitors bureaus and convention centers and so on.” 

Climate, he says, is something of a new focus for the municipalities he and his teamwork with. In 2020, Pittsburgh became the first to use the process to develop a climate-first budget for the entire city.  

Pittsburgh’s goal: a zero-carbon budget

When Ervin worked for the city of Pittsburgh, he visited towns around the world to learn how they were integrating climate priorities into their spending. Although some Scandinavian cities employ “carbon budgeting” — a greenhouse-gas accounting system that resembles a fiscal plan — Ervin never found an example of a comprehensive financial plan that accounted for climate and equity priorities. 

“One of the things that we had as a goal was to eventually have a zero-carbon budget” — one that wouldn’t cause any net increase in carbon emissions — says Will Bernstein, who became an advisor to Pittsburgh through its participation in Bloomberg Philanthropies’ American Cities Climate Challenge, and is now the city’s climate and energy manager. “But we didn’t really know exactly how to get there in terms of understanding the budget, and how you construct that and how you measure that.” With the help of a $50,000 grant from the challenge, Pittsburgh hired ResourceX to pursue its goal.  

“They reached out and said, ‘We found you guys through a Google search,’” Fabian recounts, “‘and it seems like you might have the tool that we’re looking for, to get budget alignment toward a priority. Have you ever done it on climate?’” 

Over a period of roughly three months in the fall of 2020, city officials tracked nearly every dollar in the $600 million operating budget to a specific program, then scored each program against Pittsburgh’s climate and equity priorities. Of 27 departments, only four did not participate in the process. Then, in early 2021, over 50 representatives from those departments joined a series of workshops to pitch ideas for where costs could be cut and revenue generated, and how that money could finance the city’s climate goals. Pittsburgh identified $41 million that could be reallocated toward climate and equity initiatives. However, those dollars didn’t move right away — and some still haven’t. 

“Sometimes it’s difficult to see a one-to-one transition,” says Patrick Cornell, deputy director of Pittsburgh’s Office of Management and Budget. The goal of a priority-based budget isn’t necessarily to kill any program that doesn’t score highly and move the money to ones that do. It’s an iterative process, more akin to what Ervin hoped to do with the budget: see where the city’s spending might be running counter to its climate objectives, and how that could be fixed over time — whether by ending a program, or changing the way work gets done. 

One example of a relatively straightforward shift is electrifying the city’s fleet. “Currently, any sedans that need to be replaced are being replaced with electric,” says Rebecca Kiernan, assistant director of the Department of City Planning, who leads the sustainability and resilience division. But, she adds, the budget is always tight, and the city was already decades behind in updating its fleet. She and her team are also accelerating the EV transition with the help of federal money. This year, the city is getting eight electric recycling trucks, with funding from the American Rescue Plan and the EPA’s Targeted Airshed Grants Program. “Those are gonna be our first [electric] heavy-duty fleet vehicles. So that’s really exciting,” Kiernan says.