A Saudi revolution in convoluted times

Collaboration and Communication

“It’s a good time to be a woman in Saudi Arabia,” said the CEO of a bank over dinner at Riyadh’s fashionable Cipriani restaurant. She – for it was a she – is not alone in thinking that. In fact, the most senior role in the Saudi diplomatic service, Ambassador to Washington, is held by Princess Reema Al Saud, another foreign educated female in her 40s.

A policy including transport subsidies, childcare support and employer incentives for hiring women has resulted in the proportion of Saudi women in work doubling in only four years to 33 percent, exceeding the 27 percent average for the Middle East and North Africa, notes the IMF.

The role of women is not the only change in a country undergoing a seismic shift into a technologically-driven, innovative land. Demography, purpose and funds are the three foundations upon which Mohammed Bin Salman’s Vision 2030 is being built.

Demographic Dividend

Two thirds of Saudi Arabia’s 36m population is under 35 years old. With a fertility rate of 2.3 per woman, the young will continue dominating, although the birth rate has fallen substantially over the last years and that fall will likely accelerate as women take up more working roles. This is one reason for the Crown Prince, known as MBS, to pursue his framework for development at a brisk pace – one look at archenemy Iran provides another.

Iran’s population numbers a heftier 86m, but it has a similar age profile: 60% of its people are under 30. However, without a modernising agenda chock-a-block with opportunities for the young, and with no steady sources of income due to sanctions, its rulers, if they survive, will continue facing riots and revolts – like that sparked in September by the death of a young woman, probably due to religious police brutality.

Purposeful Activity

The second leg of the Saudi development stool is purpose. Vision 2030 envisages the country weaning itself off its dependence on oil revenues and diversifying its economy into sectors including science and technology.

The aims for the tourism sector are among the most ambitious – doubling the number of UNESCO world heritage sites, establishing the largest Islamic museum in the world, and promoting cultural and entertainment activities. This has a couple of advantages. Tourism employs large numbers of people, most likely the young, from both skilled and unskilled backgrounds, while also encouraging an openness to the world that will be hard to row back on.

One of the chosen areas for tourist development is in the northwest, around the town and oasis of AlUla, a stop-off on the historical Incense Road. Old shops are being restored, and local women in full hijab and increasingly more liberal outfits are given the task of running them with the rent and stock subsidised by the state. Cool cafés and restaurants abound, staffed by a mix of foreigners and Saudis, many of the latter on a steep learning curve.

On our recent visit, the tour guide showing us the nearby Nabatean tombs at Hegra – like Petra in Jordan but without the crowds – was a historian whose mother was a Bedouin and father a local. The Royal Commission AlUla (RCA) sends 500 students abroad annually for degrees, mainly to the US, a practice that the central government had been applying for years, resulting in a skilled, English-speaking youth. One of our Uber drivers in Riyadh, between jobs as a town planner, had studied at university in Texas on a full scholarship.

The cleverness of Vision 2030 for youth is that it not only hands them a purpose – pride in their country’s history and beauty, and it in its rapid modernisation – but it also provides entertainment. An example is Boulevard Riyadh City, a 900,000 square metre outdoor area of shops, laser shows, and concerts, built only three years ago and constantly increasing in size and offerings. A couple of weeks ago a female DJ in black leggings and a long-sleeved T-shirt was busy spinning and boogieing to what sounded to our untrained ears like Saudi house music.

The biggest boost to tourism will come from the lifting of the ban on alcohol, rumoured to be happening within the next two years. This will probably apply to tourist areas only, rather like Dubai and Qatar.

Expats make up around 38% of the population, ranging from the most menial jobs to the highly paid consultants from firms like McKinsey and Bain, who are making eye-watering amounts from their work.

Oil Funds

And Saudi Arabia has the money to pay them. The third leg of its development stool are the vast amounts flowing into its coffers due to the energy crisis. Saudi Arabia is making about $1 billion a day from oil exports, according to Bloomberg, marking a 123% increase year on year. The IMF estimates the country will be one of the world’s fastest growing economies this year, with GDP growing at 7.6%.

This is evident everywhere you look, whether in Riyadh or Jeddah, the second largest city on the coast, or AlUla. A plethora of architecturally stunning new buildings spring up continually and the air of excitement is palpable. This year’s annual FII conference, nicknamed Davos in the Desert, was the largest ever, with over 7,000 delegates from all over the world.

What could go wrong?

In a world awash in recession and inflation, Saudi Arabia stands out as the promised land, where vast funds are being applied to create a “vibrant society, a thriving economy and an ambitious nation.” What could be more symbolic than its football team beating World Cup favourites Argentina only a few days ago?

There is, however, one caveat to the fairy tale. “It all depends on one man,” noted a Saudi top executive.

Vision 2030, launched in 2016, was developed with the input of the Council of Economic & Development Affairs, and constant feedback from business, but MBS is key to its implementation. He took power away from the Council of Senior Scholars, the supreme religious body; from the Mutawa, the religious police; from the Saudi financial and political elite, many of whom are part of the royal family, with a well-publicised kidnap of around 500 of the country’s elite, held hostage in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. Those actions should ensure that the 37-year old Crown Prince will be appointed King by the Royal Court when his father dies.

That ruthlessness was also apparent in the 2018 murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul, with the CIA ascribing blame to the Saudi ruler. Public opprobrium followed, but was short-lived – most evidently when this summer, vociferous critic Joe Biden travelled to Saudi Arabia to fist-pump with MBS and plead for higher oil production; most recently with rival Turkey gratefully accepting a purported $5bn transfer to its central bank reserves.

Saudi coffee, delicious as it is, is unrecognisable as coffee to Western palates. Saffron, cardamom, ginger, and other spices, add an entirely different dimension. So it is proving with Saudi Arabia’s revolution. An awe-inspiring local creation, but one that won’t suit all palates.

Quantum Matters

This is an abbreviated version of my opening remarks to The City Quantum and AI Summit, which took place at the Mansion House on October 11. A recording of the event is available here. 

Thank you to all who have come in person – and virtually, from India to Bulgaria to Nigeria – for joining The City Quantum and AI Summit. And thank you above all to our sponsors, who allow this Summit to be free, so all students can join, and Diversity & Inclusion can be central to it.

We are celebrating the summit in the Mansion House, the palatial home of the Lord Mayor of the City of London, to bring together the financial and quantum sectors and thus leverage the heady advances we have seen in quantum over the last year.

However, quantum has limits. As you will all be aware, we in the UK have had a few issues with recent government announcements and policy, a plummeting pound, mortgage withdrawals, borrowing cost rises. In fact, Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng rang me this morning. Karina, he said. Can a quantum computer solve these issues?

Sadly, not yet. But what can quantum do? It can help deal with a world of increasing complexity, geopolitical divisions, and environmental harm.  

We don’t have a state of the art quantum computer today. But what we do have is different versions of a basic quantum computer – with a raft of improvements being announced every day – and advances in quantum software. That software can often be used on classical computers. Not just quantum ones. And participants should not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. 

I won’t anticipate the panel discussions, but we are seeing developments in at least three areas of interest.

+the formation of new medicines, where you can create a ‘digital twin’ of a human body to conduct virtual drug trials.

+supply chain issues. A boring topic, till the pandemic and Ukraine brought it all home. For instance, optimising a supply chain, so that cargo ships are fully filled with the right containers and don’t sit around the Port of LA for weeks on end. Not sexy, but with an incredible effect on the bottom line of the companies involved, and on the carbon footprint of humankind. 

+Finance. Given the roller coaster of all markets, who wouldn’t want to de-risk portfolios, price options infinitely better, hedge forex risk properly…

Why are we here? The City, and the quantum sector together, can create the economic growth that governments in the UK, the US, and Europe, and other countries, are looking for. How?

Communication, collaboration, immigration.

Communication.

The quantum sector needs to communicate better with the financial sector, and the wider world. The City Quantum and AI Summit is one of the foundations of that. 

Collaboration.

The more we do together, the better for quantum, the better for the financial and professional services industry. And the more transnational that is, the better. I note the UK and the US Technology Partnership, announced last year, and which will hopefully include other countries, was just updated last week. In the words of Jay Lowell of Boeing: “The economy of ideas does not follow geopolitical borders.”

Immigration.

We need to get real on this. We – and I mean ALL the industries represented here, don’t just need quantum PhDs, we need marketing people, we need HR, we need PR. In the FT yesterday, President Obama’s Chair of the US Council of Economic Advisers, Jason Furman, noted that immigration is so much more important than any other measure to increase productivity. 

Communication, Collaboration, Immigration. 

In the last three weeks, we’ve seen the Nobel Prize for Physics given to three pioneers of the quantum industry.

We’ve seen the European Commission announce six sites where quantum computers will be located in the EU.

We’ve seen the creation of UKQuantum, a consortium to accelerate UK innovation. 

That is just three announcements in the sector. Even more important is the increase in defence budgets on the back of our uncertain world. Money matters. As we saw from the Apollo Space Mission, defence spending can be a propulsor of amazing innovation for civilian use. In fact, space missions brought us CAT scans, water purification systems, and even Baby Formula! 

There is, as The Quantum Insider puts it, a fundamental discrepancy between the rapid advances in quantum technology and the adoption by commercial customers. But today, you are going to here from those who are adopting it. Those like Bosch, Standard Chartered, and Boeing, who are going to have a quantum advantage in competing in our disrupted world.  

US General Eric Shinseki had a great phrase: “If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.”

Let’s get on with being relevant. Thank you.

Karina Robinson is the Founder of The City Quantum and AI Summit and a Senior Advisor to Multiverse Computing

Why the Benefits of Age Diversity Need to be Shouted from the Rooftops

Speech delivered on Champion Age Diversity Day

Age has been in the news.

In the UK, we just celebrated the Platinum Jubilee of our queen, now 96-years old, and still delivering value in the workplace. In her case, that happens to be the balcony on Buckingham Palace.

In the US we have the oldest man to be sworn in as President at age 78. At age 29, Joe Biden was one of the youngest people ever elected to the United States Senate. He may be domestically unpopular - hugely unpopular – but I am not alone in being grateful that an experienced statesman is in charge during the biggest crisis to face the West since the Cold War.

And on a June weekend, we saw a critically injured 36-year-old beat a 23-year-old at Roland Garros to walk away with his 14th French Open win, and thus be called the GREATEST OF ALL TIME, the best tennis player of his generation: Rafael Nadal, with two grand slams more than his closest opponents.

Yet we live in a world that worships youth. That dismisses the middle aged and the old. A world where if you are over 50, its going to be a nightmare trying to find a new job. And chances are, if you are employed, with stagflation, recession, whatever is coming, your employer is more likely to dismiss you if you are over 50, than if you are younger.

AGE DISCRIMINATION EXISTS AND ITS THRIVING

If I say to you, youth and innovation, youth and entrepreneurship, you won’t bat an eyelid.

If I say to you, an older worker and innovation, older worker and entrepreneurship…well, it doesn’t exactly slip off the tongue, does it?

In fact, I have my own story of age discrimination. In a bid to cut back on the household bills, I thought I would go grey, give up those boring visits to the hairdresser – boring and expensive – every six weeks. I bought a grey wig, to see what I would look like. Let me show you, as I showed my family.

(At this point in the speech, Karina put on a grey wig)

I admit it is a cheap, nasty wig. But what was even more horrific was my 21-year old son’s reaction: “Mama, you are supposed to be at the forefront of social change in the City, of Diversity and Inclusion. If you let yourself go grey, you won’t have any credibility.”

Let me repeat that:’ you won’t have any credibility. ‘

The conclusion is that if you are older, you don’t look like an agent of change, you don’t look like an entrepreneur, you don’t look like an innovator.

WHAT IS THE REALITY?

Let me give you 3 doses of reality.

First. The average age of a successful start-up founder is 45, according to a 2020 research study by Economica. Note the word ‘successful’.

Let me quote: ‘Among those who have started a firm, older entrepreneurs have a substantially higher success rate. Our evidence points to entrepreneurial performance rising sharply with age before cresting in the late fifties. If you were faced with two entrepreneurs and knew nothing about them besides their age, you would do better, on average, betting on the older one.’

Second dose of reality. The future of work. There is a lot of talk about automation taking away jobs from human beings. And about the older generation not being digital natives. We are digital immigrants. All true.

However, according to a study by The Inclusion Initiative at the London School of Economics, brains and heart win in the future of work.

Jobs that require abstract thinking, people engagement and soft skills are less likely to be automated, according to research. The authors also find that combining ‘heart’ with ‘brains’ will future-proof your job further. ‘Heart’ relates to jobs that involve soft skills and are high people engagement.

Now – and what I am going to say ain’t no research study – if I look at my peer group, we don’t need to prove ourselves anymore. We’re comfortable with our faults, with our qualities. We’ve either made it or we haven’t. We don’t take things as personally. We enjoy laughing at our own absurdities.

In a multigenerational workspace, that lack of ego, that lack of the need for struggle, can be very helpful.

Third dose of reality.

We have a vast, skills shortage in the Western world. Labour markets are in flux from the pandemic fallout and technological upheaval. Up to a billion people will need reskilling and life-long training by 2030, according to the OECD. We need more carers; we need more marketing executives; we need more quantum scientists.

And in parallel, on the plus side, we have a healthier population of people over 50, over 60, over 70, some of whom want to work longer, some of whom must, due to financial necessity, and many of whom will reinvent themselves.

As a microcosm of my third ‘dose of reality’, let me give you an example I have become very familiar with. The world of quantum computing. I won’t bore you with the details of how a finance and politics journalist has reinvented herself as a quantum guru – quantum involves geniuses with double PhDs, molecular simulation and Star Trek scenarios. Way out of my comfort zone.

In this ecosphere, the CEO of Google’s quantum spin out SandboxAQ, recently said, “The number one concern we have going forward is the skills gap. When people ask me, “what keeps me up at night?” – that’s what keeps me up at night – the lack of a talent pipeline in quantum and also lack of diversity in that pipeline.”

SEIZE THE OPPORTUNITY

What’s Jack Hidary’s solution? Work with universities to increase the pipeline. But also work with what he calls the “existing adult working population”. While at Google, they trained numerous staff in various quantum and other advanced math courses; they trained customers; they upskilled engineers and scientists that were already- ALREADY – in the workforce.

THAT’s the biggest opportunity. THAT’s the key to the skills shortage. Upskill, training, reinvention in any shape.

In Top Gun Maverick, the much-publicised blockbuster, ageing star Tom Cruise is dismissed by a younger protagonist with the words, “The future is coming, and you’re not in it”. Who can doubt that he, at 58 years old, saves the day?!

Not only are we, the older generation, the future. WE are the key. WE are the opportunity. WE are the solution.

This is the keynote speech delivered by Karina Robinson, Co-Director of The Inclusion Initiative, on Champion Age Diversity Day, as part of a panel on Valuing Age Diversity in the Workplace.

It was sponsored by The Age Diversity Forum and Hansuke Consultants.

Refugees can be a welcome boost for companies seeking talent

Letter to Hugh

The Inclusion Initiative & a better world

Darling Hugh,

You saved me from isolation and irrelevance when we met at The Hotchkiss School in 1981. A bit of eurotrash from Madrid, raised in Dictator Franco’s traditional Spain, I was lost amid all the preppies in that Connecticut boarding school. You offered me your beautiful (like all of you) hand in friendship and I survived my oddity, with the help of our escape once a term for wild nights at Studio 54 in New York.

What I never realised till recently is how deeply you affected my life, all the way up to the present day. I thought the personal motivation for being a Diversity & Inclusion campaigner came from being a woman and an immigrant in the City. You, in fact were the springboard. Although I had guessed, it took a year for you to tell me you were gay, out of fear that I would turn away in disgust as others had. Your East Coast establishment upbringing did not help.

Only now am I aware that the horror of realising how cruelly you had been hurt and excluded has led me through the years to this week in 2020, with the launch of The Inclusion Initiative (TII) at the London School of Economics. The research centre, which I co-founded, will bring behavioural science and data together to create more inclusive cultures in the City for sustainable profits.

We are already working on a four-year project with Women in Banking and Finance, The Wisdom Council, and a number of firms ranging from BlackRock to Barclays, to evaluate the causes of gender difference in progression and then trial and evaluate solutions. And we are in talks with a number of financial and professional services companies on partnering in projects from making venture-funding more open to BAME entrepreneurs, to disrupting how new work projects are assigned and how employees are rewarded, to better measuring the link between culture and risk.

Words or acronyms like ‘data’ and ‘LGBT+’ seem so cold, and if I wrote about another project to use ‘AI’ to promote inclusion in the workplace, these terms would be meaningless to you. ‘Profitability’, however, would be a familiar word. The aim of The Inclusion Initiative is, ultimately, to create more inclusive workplaces in order to boost the bottom line, a point amply demonstrated in studies from McKinsey and others.

In a business sector dependent on innovation and collaboration, diverse voices need to be heard. The mark of a good meeting is not necessarily one filled with bonhomie and agreement, while the mark of a good Chair is to create the psychological safety to allow all present to speak up. Behavioural science teaches us that discomfort is often the prelude to learning. Discomfort was the least of my feelings as I sashayed into the school cafeteria in a pretty dress on the first Sunday in the school year, to find America’s young elite dressed for brunch in the oldest sweatshirts and jeans they could muster. Sunday best had a rather different definition in Connecticut than in the Madrid of that era.

There is a world of difference in LGBT+ rights in the developed world and in business compared to the early 1980s. The City now has its own Pride in the City organisation to promote Diversity & Inclusion. Yet only last year an openly gay candidate to be Lord Mayor of the City of London was asked in his interview process how he would prevent the role being “hijacked” by the gay community, while the US Labor Department proposed a rule cancelling an executive order banning anti-LGBT+ discrimination among federal contractors.

I last saw you, Hugh, in New York in 1988. You told me you were HIV positive and I asked what that was; its ravaging effects in the gay community had yet to be felt and chronicled in Europe, and you were ablaze with apparent health and on your way to being a successful painter. Over the next years you chronicled the AIDS era in figurative, bleak works which you described as having that ‘soft glow of brutality’ characteristic of American painters like Edward Hopper.

I called in 1995 to say I was coming over to New York again. But you had died at 32 years old of AIDS-related complications. I wish you could have lived on to find a partner, and to walk down the street hand in hand, to entertain at home and to call him your husband. The jargon of inclusion should not hide the fact that we are creating a better world.

Karina Robinson is Co-Director of The Inclusion Initiative at the LSE along with Associate Professor Grace Lordan. Hugh Auchincloss Steer’s work hangs in the Whitney Collection of American Art.

Overcoming tribal challenges

The LSE’s new Inclusion Institute

The most successful species on this planet revels in the comfort of conformity. Just think of the boost and subsequent bonhomie that comes from a ‘successful’ meeting where everyone agrees. Yet with instability as the defining condition of our times, executives must evolve to become comfortable with discomfort.

Who, in the City, would hire someone who had failed a Maths O level? Twice. Yet that is the case of Sir Robert Stheeman, one of the most successful and trusted CEOs of the Debt Management Office, which is responsible for issuing UK government debt. It didn’t seem to affect the £2 trillion – give or take a few billion – that he has issued over 17 years in the job.

He is not alone in believing that a contributory factor in the 2008 financial crisis was the increased conformity in the hiring of talent. ECB President Christine Lagarde famously quipped that if Lehman Brothers had been Lehman Sisters the crisis would have looked quite different. Studies from business consultants like McKinsey and respected academic institutions like Harvard Business School conclude that better business decisions result from more diverse and inclusive companies.

And yet how laborious and demanding it is to create this change. The overarching reason is biology. Humans are wired to align individual with group interest, to achieve hyper-sociality, in the words of Mark Pagel, head of the Evolution Laboratory at the University of Reading. Arguably as powerful as the Darwinian natural selection gene is culture, “that software collection of ideas, routines, rituals and behaviours written into our brains – it is the most successful way there has ever been of making more people.”

We are programmed to accept and celebrate the culture of our birth, our tribe, even though it is an arbitrary accident – not to mention the resilience of culturally defined emotions which range from healthy nationalism to xenophobia and racism, notes Pagel.

It is no coincidence that Ursula von der Leyen mentioned Winston Churchill, Soho bars and her discovery of the British sense of humour in the first speech she gave on British ground this year. Titled “Old friends, new beginnings: building another future for the EU-UK partnership,” the EU Commission President reminisced about her time as a student at the London School of Economics, suffusing the room in the warm glow of cultural unity, before delivering the harsh message that “the more divergence there is, the more distant the partnership has to be.”

So how to achieve the cognitive diversity that is necessary to deliver better company returns in a transformed digital marketplace? It is most likely to occur when you mix gender, generation, ethnicity and sexual orientation on boards and teams, and ensure they feel accepted, or included, and thus able to speak up. An uncomfortable meeting is more likely to deliver innovation.

The Financial Services Skills Taskforce report which was published at the end of January was damning of the City’s talent recruitment and retention. Mark Hoban, a former City Minister who chairs the FSST, put it bluntly: “There is no doubt that the financial services sector is facing an existential skills crisis.”

Alarmingly for a sector that depends on talent and innovation, it has the third lowest training spend per employee and the second lowest spend per trainee compared to other sectors of the economy. Meanwhile, fewer than 40% of students associate creativity and a dynamic work environment with working in banks, but highly value these in any future employer.

The demand for talent already exceeds supply and this trend is set to become more acute. “The lack of gender and ethnic diversity is both a social issue and a skills issue. Talent that the industry needs is not being utilised,” argues the independent review commissioned by HM Treasury.

A number of firms are working hard at changing this. Charles Martin, Senior Partner at City law firm Macfarlanes, is clear about the value of hiring a more diverse workforce. “Firstly, it feels right. It doesn’t feel sustainable to work in a market where we don’t look like our clients or the world around us. Secondly, more diversity makes for more balanced decisions and less group think. Thirdly, we need to have the best people working for us. If we are failing in diversity, we will fail in business terms.”

MI5 plans to hire 50% more behavioural scientists in 2020 to help it analyse the vast amounts of online data generated by terror suspects. Marrying psychology and the increasing amounts of data available on diversity and inclusion is just as relevant for City firms.

These are the reasons why, with Associate Professor Grace Lordan, I am co-founding The Inclusion Initiative institute at the London School of Economics. In association with some of the most advanced City institutions we seek to merge data and behavioural science to help change culture for future success.

The City is responsible for well over 10% of the UK’s tax revenues and continues to be one of the global go-to centres for finance. With just a bit of hyperbole, Byron’s lines about the importance of the Coliseum to Rome come to mind: “When falls the City, London shall fall; And when London falls - the World.”

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Can I take the opportunity to invite you on the 5th of March at 6pm to come to the LSE and join me for the launch of the Inclusion in the City report, which I am co-authoring with Dr Grace Lordan. This will be a panel discussion event, chaired by Dame Minouche Shafik, and feature four senior leaders from the City of London giving reactions to the messages in the report. 

The 5th of March event is ticketed and part of the LSE Festival. This year's Festival will bring together global leaders, innovators and change makers to investigate how we can learn lessons from the past, tackle the challenges of today and shape the future. You can get a free ticket online now by following this link.

It is also the night The Inclusion Initiative will be announced, a new institute at the LSE which I am co-founding. It will bring behavioural science insights to the City of London in partnership with City firms. Do get in touch if your company might be interested in exploring working together. Here is the pamphlet.

The City’s New Face

Marrying public and private ethics

Does it matter what the chattering classes are talking about? From the 1970s, column inches and speeches were dominated by Chicago economist Milton Friedman and the principle that companies should focus on shareholder returns and forget about suppliers, customers and community – they would benefit tangentially. This was famously encapsulated by legendary American CEO Al Dunlap´s 1990s outburst: “The most ridiculous term heard in boardrooms today is stakeholders. How much did they pay for their stake?”

Shareholder primacy and the Washington Consensus on economic growth had their time in the sun. Today, a couple of years after the election of Donald Trump and the Brexit referendum, we see an avalanche of books with titles like “Democracy and Prosperity – the Reinvention of Capitalism in a Turbulent Century” and articles in the mainstream press headlined “Populists have a point, the system has to change.”

At the end of last month Christine Lagarde, Managing Director of the IMF, quoted Aristotle on the need for a personal sense of purpose to be linked to a social purpose. Speaking in the heart of the City at the annual World Traders’ Tacitus lecture she called for the financial sector to develop “broader social responsibility.”

She noted that Fintech is producing cheaper and more accessible products to drive an inclusion revolution; that a higher share of women on boards is correlated to more financial stability and sustainable growth; that the younger generations prefer to invest in financial instruments with social impact.

Today, achieving social cohesion in our societies is key. The widening of the net of financial and societal gains of the last forty years is essential to underpin democracy and sensible government.

How should the corporate and financial sector react? Here are four suggestions for companies already on this journey, and for those who are being left behind.

1. Add a dollop of emotion to any policy changes. Making the world a better place is no longer the monopoly of charitable bodies and starry-eyed university students. Company actions need to be marketed emotionally as well as financially, not least because so many experts have been found wanting and ‘facts’ are under attack from the echo
   chamber of news.
   

2. The audience is both internal and external. Millennials and Generation Z – those who are working for your company, those you want to be working for your company. Politicians – who after the financial crisis dare not mention the financial sector as a source of growth or responsible capitalism. Investors – often cited as a barrier to change, because of their short time horizons. They are altering as well, ranging from Black Rock Chief Executive Larry Fink’s 2018 letter to CEOs calling on them to make positive contributions to society, to a family office that handed nearly a billion dollars to a Swiss private bank with the proviso that the bank itself must have a sustainable culture or the money would be withdrawn.

3. Be ahead of the curve by making clear that the costs involved in becoming sustainable are investments in growth opportunities. And that change cannot be immediate. Unilever is a much-cited and much-deserved, case in point. The consumer goods company proudly notes that on average it pays 27% corporate tax worldwide. It is very open about its shortcomings. For example, they overcame the innate contradiction in producing Vaseline, an extract of crude oil, by setting up a health initiative to send the crucial product plus health kits to disaster zones.
   

4. Diversity & Inclusion may sound like politically correct balderdash. Not true. Inclusion means creating an atmosphere where all can thrive and be themselves. This includes Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME), older workers and the white middle-aged men who form the backbone of the City and are wondering where they belong in this new world. Don’t leave them out.
   

5. Measure the impact of changes in diverse ways, such as lowering company risk, increasing well-being (an OECD-approved policy), helping achieve the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and boosting employee loyalty. Stakeholders will all have a specific measure that engages them more than others.

To reach middle age and find yourself and your peers veering leftwards politically is a shock, not least because of that well-known phrase about a young person who isn’t a socialist hasn’t got a heart; an old person who is a socialist hasn’t got a head. But this isn’t socialism. It doesn’t mean voting for Jeremy Corbyn in the UK or Bernie Sanders in the US. It doesn’t mean throwing profits and return on equity out the window.

It does mean marrying private and public ethics. The divide in the moral codes between home and business is over. In the words of Christine Lagarde, the financial industry can be economically rewarding and ethically right.