{"id":8670,"date":"2016-12-21T21:15:13","date_gmt":"2016-12-22T02:15:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/test.greenmoney.com\/2025\/?page_id=8670"},"modified":"2018-06-21T20:19:09","modified_gmt":"2018-06-22T00:19:09","slug":"how-to-shut-up-and-other-lessons-from-the-godfather-of-impact-investing-jed-emerson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/test.greenmoney.com\/2025\/how-to-shut-up-and-other-lessons-from-the-godfather-of-impact-investing-jed-emerson\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Shut Up, and Other Lessons From the Godfather of Impact Investing \u2013 Jed Emerson"},"content":{"rendered":"
>> Back to January 2017 Issue<\/a><\/div>\n

After decades of pioneering the \u201chow\u201d of impact investing, Jed Emerson wants us to shut up and ask \u201cwhy\u201d and other the deep questions about values.<\/em><\/p>\n

If you want to know what Jed Emerson thinks about impact investing or social entrepreneurship, read his seven books or one of his numerous papers. He took a lot of time to write them, so the least you can do is get up to speed before asking for his input. Of course, his perspective has already evolved since writing them; it\u2019s always evolving. It will have evolved between when he spoke to Amber Nystrom in August 2016 and when you actually meet him (should you be so lucky).<\/em><\/p>\n

When it comes to life-long learning and new ideas, his taste is expansive, his appetite insatiable. But his ever-shifting thinking is also partly a sign of what his mind is like these days: Open. Reflective. Curious. After decades of pioneering the \u201chow\u201d of combining purpose and profit, Emerson now finds himself more interested in the \u201cwhy\u201d \u2014 the deep questions about values and meaning. He\u2019s pulled his nose out of the weeds and is busy exploring the meadow. After enjoying an afternoon wandering alongside him, we collected this bouquet of his thoughts on the future of conscious business, authentic leadership, and why it\u2019s important to create the space for yourself to grow.<\/p>\n

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Amber Nystrom: These days, we hear a lot about impact investing. Since we\u2019re speaking about conscious companies, what\u2019s the link that you see between impact investing and conscious business or conscious companies? Are these one and the same? Are these related? <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Jed Emerson:<\/strong> Conscious companies are the vehicles through which impact capital can express itself. They are the organizational entities that hold within them the values and the business strategy and the market intent for what could be. It\u2019s this idea that within the organization, we need to operate on a holistic, integrated basis, perform for financial returns together with social and environmental impacts, and manage our people in a way that is more mindful and enlightened as opposed to viewing staff and personnel as one more resource that you\u2019re going to exploit in the pursuit of your business model. In those ways, I think conscious companies manifest the aspirations of impact capital.<\/p>\n

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Amber Nystrom: Within this unified field \u2014 conscious companies, authentic leadership, impact investing or conscious capital \u2014 what do you see as some of the primary challenges, the things that we really need to break through if we\u2019re going to take this to scale?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Jed Emerson: <\/strong> Obviously there are a host of operational issues. How do you measure performance? How do you incent people on a both-and proposition, as opposed to simply financially? How do you create investment vehicles that can bring investors financial return with a true measure of the extra financial value that\u2019s being created by that capital?<\/p>\n

There are a host of those issues that I think people are grappling with, and that I\u2019ve been a part of grappling with for fifteen years, if not longer. I actually don\u2019t think that\u2019s the problem in the current conversation. I think those are all things that we can figure out, that you can think your way through. I actually, over the last year or two, have been really refocusing my own energy less around the \u201chow\u201d of execution and more around clarifying, for myself and the folks I\u2019m working with, the question of the \u201cwhy.\u201d I think that these issues, both of execution and of why we are executing these strategies, are really paramount to not simply being able to do the job at hand, but being able to do it in a way that is sustained and will have longevity and will allow for long growth and career and personal development for all of us.<\/p>\n

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