Eggs, CEOs, learning photography at Harvard
Meeting CEOs. Thoughts on class Streaming. ESG paper, Alex Edmans Me on podcast, more ESG. Tea eggs. Chris Kilip.
My old photography teacher, exhibition, Chris Kilip
Meeting CEOs
Thoughts on class Streaming
ESG paper, Alex Edmans
Me on podcast, more ESG
Chinese Tea eggs
Links:
This week, I met with a chair of a UK plc. They affirmed and committed to their net zero and climate transition plans. They suggested they get more pushback from those claiming they are not going fast enough. They highlighted their work on purpose and culture. They observed how important it is for recruiting younger generations.
I met with a new CEO of a European large mega- corp that has been around for over 100 years. When asked, their eyes lit up on the importance of diversity and inclusion. They are hiring a new Chief Sustainable Officer role, and Chief D&I role as new C-suite level positions emphasising this importance in running their business.
Critics dismiss woke capitalism and, or, stakeholder capitalism. Other critics dismiss late capitalism and growth. My impression is that business leaders faced with uncertain and tricky trade-offs are still thinking about how to create “long-term value” and that is by serving the people related to their business: customers, supplies, employers, regulators, communities and when you take away the verbiage that is still what most people want even if they disagree about how to do it.
I recently made “Chinese Tea Eggs” for the first time. I devoured them all. Almost hard boil your eggs and then soak in spiced tea with soya sauce. Mine didn’t quite look as fancy as the ones in the books. The tea eggs have a marbled surface which can look quite pretty. They are simmered in a tea with star anise, cinnamon sticks, peppercorns, and soy until soaked with the flavors of the spices and a refreshing tea fragrance.
I managed to catch the Chris Killip photo exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery, London. Chris taught me photography at Harvard in 2000. I learned much about looking at art, making art and absorbing yourself in making. ( I spent hundred of hours in the darkroom in 2000 and also 1995 and 1996, and quite a few hours over 1997-1999). I also first started thinking hard about making art as part of your community or as yourself as the material, and photos or art where you are passing through or a voyeur. Chris introduced me to the notions of a “beautification of poverty” and the way that photos with a connection to community are different. Nan Goldin was also teaching around that time. Her pictures of a life so far from my experience (yet close in other ways) but also authentic, being part of her community, were impactful. Chris is famous for work documenting the Isle of Man, (declining) industry in New Castle and the the ‘seacoalers’ of Lynemouth (picture above).
“…By collecting and reclaiming waste coal that washed up on the coast, these men made a small amount of extra income. But when Killip first showed up, the men in the community weren’t overly pleased. Killip arrived with a camera, and the blokes summarily chased him off the beach.
Not a man to give up, the photographer came back the following day, and again, and again, for seven years, to no avail.
On year seven, after hurting himself while running away, he decided to go to a pub to try and talk it out with the locals.
He found out the community’s suspicion of outsiders and photographers was justified – most of the people who were on the beaches collecting coal were on welfare, and if the police or authorities caught on to their undocumented income, as small as it was, they wouldn’t receive their unemployment benefits.
Despite his continuous affirmations that no one would come to harm because of the photographs, and that he wasn’t connected with the authorities, their answers didn’t change.
That’s when, in 1982, divine intervention saved the day.
“A man who I didn’t recognise came into the bar, looked at me and said ‘what are you doing here?’. He asked me if I remembered him, and I said no – he was bigger than all of the others and quite bold looking, and it really worried me because I was certain I had never seen him before in my life,” Killip tells me.
Turns out he and the man in question, Trevor, had briefly met at the traveller’s Appleby Horse Fair while taking shelter from the rain. “He bought me a drink, turned to the guys at the pub and said: ‘the photographer from the Isle of Man will be with me on the beach tomorrow from 8AM onwards, does anyone object?’. No one did.”
“It was very strange how I was allowed in – it had proved impossible for me to get entry into this place and now, because of a casual conversation with this guy who had obviously taken a liking to me, I had someone able to vouch for me.”
Killip proceeded to buy a caravan, living in the area for 18 months. This allowed him to actually get to know the community, helping him and portray his new neighbours in a way that was faithful to their reality…” Article here.
I think indirectly I learned so much from Chris (and Gideon Lester in dramaturgy, Adrienne Kennedy in play writing, Forrest Gander in poetry, Patrick Strzelec in sculpture) about thinking on being a creative. I’ll think about a longer post on this at some point.
I came to John Berger and Susan Sontag at this time both via Chris and Forrest and all of that echoes in the work I do today.
It’s only showing a little while longer in London (Photographers’ Gallery). If you want to glimpse some communities which are no more, or were in flux this is definitely worth seeing only until Feb 19. https://thephotographersgallery.org.uk/whats-on/chris-killip-retrospective
You can also listen to me/read me on ESG here with Algy Hall and Citywire.
“…a company can potentially overborrow from one of these sources of extra financial capital or from one of its stakeholders. So, you can think of-, it’s not like overborrowing from the bank, but you can borrow from the environment, by not cleaning up after yourself. You can borrow from the future by not investing in R&D. You can borrow from your community by antisocial work hours or borrow from your customer for poor customer service or borrow from your employees by cutting training and benefits and their salary.
If you think about all of those borrowings, a lot of them could raise cashflow, say, in the short-term. In the quarter that you cut employees’ salaries-, your cashflow will go up and in fact, that might look good for sales and margins and earnings, but if you think about it, particularly if it was unfair, then your employees are not going to be happy. Typically, your best employees will probably leave. They will probably say don’t go and work for this company and you will have destroyed long-term value. So, one way of thinking about that is, you’ve created an extra financial contingent liability. Something which doesn’t appear on the cashflow balance sheet, but is going to impact negatively in the future.
If you think that’s true about a negative value or risk, you can see how the opposite would also be true. So if you’re investing in the future, investing in your people, investing in natural capital, you’re creating an extra financial contingent asset. Maybe you could call that an ESG asset, which is going to produce future value over the long-term and again, doesn’t appear in the cashflow and balance sheet. One of the important aspects of the fact that it doesn’t readily appear in the cashflow and balance sheet is that it becomes a hard-to-measure element. So, one could argue, it’s difficult to measure, it’s difficult to manage, maybe we can’t really value it. On the other hand, something which is less transparent and harder to get to particularly for an active manager, might be a source of an inefficient market. It’s not efficiently assessed, there’s not all of that information around. So that could be a source of edge, being better risk-return or better alpha…”
Jade on changing her view on class streaming:
“…I felt quite strongly about streaming for that reason; that I felt like teachers are very overworked especially for how much they get paid. There's a lot expected of them. They have a huge amount of responsibility and theyre expected to do a lot just in terms of all the subjects they're teaching, all the parents that they're managing, all of the sort of pastoral side of things, and then all the paperwork that goes around it as well. One of the biggest things teachers have complained about is their hours and how hard they work. They're always going over their contracted hours. The contract hours you think, "Oh, okay, we're a teacher. You get so much holiday and your hours only are until sort of..." I don't know what your contract says, but it's generally eight until five. "Oh, that's not that long." But then you think, well actually for what you are paid and the hours that you do, you sort of expect to be working your contracted hours which is never ever the case as a teacher. So to be expecting to go over and above, I think is quite a big ask especially how much time you're expected to spend within full-time education to get to that qualification.
So streaming, I thought I would be really pro streaming because streaming reduces the amount of hours a teacher needs to spend on lesson planning which is a really big complaint that a lot of teachers have. It’s they spend so much time lesson planning and they need to tick so many of their school's internal boxes on their lesson plans and how their lesson plans are set out and all the different things that they cover off to show they've done differentiation, they've put vocabulary, they've done assessment for learning, they've done a conclusion at the end, that it's properly evidenced in the books, that there's the date written in the right way in their books, and all these things you need to jump through in a 30 minute lesson when a child might be throwing a chair in the corner and another child crying in the front. It is a lot of things to be getting through in 30 minutes. So I thought I was really pro streaming because it would just make everyone's life easier and every child would be able to get a much more personalized lesson because it would be better suited to them.
But actually in practice having been in classes, I believe that mixed classes are better for everyone to an extent assuming that all the children can access the curriculum. The higher attaining students add this spark of competition to the rest of the class as to what the other children want to get to or what the other children want to then understand. I found my highest students will be asking questions that all the class will sit up and think, "I don't even understand the question, let alone what the answer would be." It really makes a class-- I think it just sets the whole class's standards a lot higher for every single student because within a classroom there's so much competition. I think even if I'd been asking these questions, it wouldn't have the same effect as an actual student asking those questions or responding in a very eloquent way to a question or coming up with a really in depth answer. I think there's no substitute for that within a classroom and I think it just makes everyone want to do better within the class and aspire to have that understanding of what's going on. Kids really have a hard mentality. Most children don't want to stand out-- primary school children anyway. They don't want to stand out and they don't want to be different. They really, really want to conform and I think that is one part of it.
A lot of studies have been done. When I did my thesis I was looking at a lot of different studies. I had slightly different opinions, but generally they found that putting the higher attaining children all in one class will benefit the higher attaining children slightly more. But the lowest group of students it disadvantages hugely. So actually in terms of overall equity, it's much better to just have a mixed class if that is what you want is overall equity…”
ESG thoughts from Alex Edmans. Alex applies some mainstream business school and economic thinking to various ESG debates.
"Interest in ESG is at an all-time high. However, academic research on ESG is still relatively nascent, which often leads us to apply gut feel on the grounds that ESG is so urgent that we cannot wait for peer-reviewed research. This paper highlights how the insights of mainstream economics can be applied to ESG, once we realize that ESG is no different to other investments that create long-term financial and social value. A large literature on corporate finance studies how to value investments; asset pricing explores how the stock market prices risks; welfare economics investigates externalities; private benefits analyze manager and investor preferences beyond shareholder value; optimal contracting considers how to achieve multiple objectives; and agency theory examines how to ensure that managers pursue shareholder preferences, including non-financial preferences. I identify how conventional thinking on ten key ESG issues is overturned when applying the insights of mainstream economics."
-Shareholder Value is Short-Termist (No, shareholder value is a long-term concept).
-Shareholder Primacy Leads to an Exclusive Focus on Shareholder Value (No, shareholders
have objectives other than shareholder value).
-Sustainability Risks Increase the Cost of Capital (No, sustainability risks lower expected cash
flows).
-Sustainable Stocks Earn Higher Returns (No, sustainability may be priced in; tastes for
sustainable stocks lead to lower returns).
-Climate Risk is Investment Risk (No, climate risk is an unpriced externality).
-A Company’s ESG Metrics Capture Its Impact on Society (No, partial equilibrium differs from general equilibrium).
-More ESG Is Always Better (No, ESG exhibits diminishing returns and trade-offs exist).
-More Investor Engagement Is Always Better (No, investors may be uninformed or undermine managerial initiative).
-You Improve ESG Performance By Paying For ESG Performance (No, paying for some ESG
dimensions will cause firms to underweight others).
Link to paper etc. via my Linkedin.
Links:
I’ve been impressed with the ideas behind Civic Futures. I’m unsure on how they will execute but assume they will do this well. If so, I think it could be very fruitful for early-mid career people looking to be involved in civic life.
Strangely interesing on a good tax infrastructure. Easier because they are a small island, but worth considering.
A film on UK’s ARIA, UK science agency.
Harvard NetZero