Teachers are found everywhere, in the classroom, seminar hall or the conference room or the boss’s office. I have been fortunate to have learnt under the shadow of generous teachers who have opened doors, given second chances where I deserved none and hence I am still around. Not the best student at all, but a person who had eclectic interests, I have learnt more by osmosis from watching leaders around me then in the classroom.

Dazzling teachers such as Dr K or Prof Sidaway at NUS stand out, in the recent past. All my consulting bosses have been great teachers. Salaam to all of them.

Bakhour.

ESG is the sharp end of stakeholder/responsible capitalism, as metrics, although limited does drive performance. The imperative of quantification, the technology of global governance called indicators works well for carbon as instrumentation sensors and software do the trick. For social metrics, quantification is partial at best. The social indicators operationalize with dignity in the everyday, and ESG is about risk abatement for the investor community as the money makers coined it.

There is always the story behind the data, and real resilience is when professionals think with culture and the entanglements between the various indicators, which amplify/accentuate/attenuate the metrics regard risk.

ESG data looks below the bonnet of a car called the enterprise. But the mechanics of why the firm is not zooming on the growth highway, is in the story.

What is your ESG Story? Think about your social metrics to begin with.

Sustainability Professionals, like every other subject matter expert, think that doing good is the purpose of a business, it is a priority, but the purpose of a business is to serve the customer in the best way so that the customer comes back.

The real bottom line is financial, the companies in the climate zeitgeist think about ESG as its better access to capital and markets. As Sustainability folks let us not delude ourselves, and in turn incapacitate us in helping organizations in the ‘responsible capitalism turn’.

We lie to ourselves; we think of the impact of a career and a business. But 90 percent of the problems in life are to do with money. As a lot of us grew up in paucity of the resource, the relationship is deeply problematic. The focus must be thus about creating freedom.

I had no money education while growing up. But it must be as indispensable as math or language.

I have worked with migrants on the research and emergency welfare side of the spectrum for a decade plus in the Gulf and SE Asia and when I read migration studies literature, I see theorizing which hardly has any representative voices. A literature gap certainly there.

And the removal of the migrant as category separates from the mainstream where these migrants care for the families while parents earn, and build your cities is perpetuation of racial biases, and needs decolonizing. Can it be done with scholars who are western or white or both, while they have the confidence of parachuting in and harvesting data is another question altogether.

I am a third generation migrant and a migration scholar, always in that order.