Hi – it’s Alison Omens, President of JUST Capital, filling in for Martin with a dispatch this week from Washington D.C., where JUST Capital’s media partner, CNBC, hosted their second annual CEO Council Summit. Given our location and the upcoming election, much of the conversation centered on how CEOs can navigate the political environment to lead in transitional and turbulent times.
The Managing Director of the IMF, Kristalina Georgieva, kicked off the morning with a challenge to leaders that I appreciated. She noted that this decade is still being defined and that the Twenties may come to be known by one of three ‘T’ words: turbulent, tepid, or transformational. She urged business leaders to steer toward the latter path.
But other leaders had a different message.
In their own ways, Speaker Mike Johnson, FTC Chair Lina Khan, and Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter, who leads the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, all signaled the importance of business staying in its lane without running into enforcement challenges or overstepping on social or political matters.
This message left an interesting challenge in my mind, something that JUST Capital spends our time on – understanding what business leadership means today.
There were two additional ‘T’ words that Georgieva didn’t use, but I think are highly relevant here. One is transition. This moment is transitional for businesses, whether transitioning to an AI future, changing demographics, climate, or shifting political winds. To navigate these transitions, I recommend looking at JUST Capital’s extensive polling of the American people for guidance. The public is clear, regardless of ideology: focus on your own workforce. Create jobs with good wages and benefits in communities that need them.
The second ‘T’ word, also derived from the polling, is transparency. Transparency signals priority and direction, and Americans clearly believe it to be a necessary part of effective business leadership today (check out this Agenda Week article about the importance of transparency on workforce and human capital issues with JUST Capital’s data).
Each business leader needs to forge their own path on how to guide their organization through challenging times. Through the turbulence, focusing on workers and transparency will be key.
“If all the women are secretaries, and all the men are executives and you don’t tell us that, you have not given us the information that we need to assess whether or not you’re really an employer that values all types of people.”
Two weeks ago, we released the CRE Alliance Standards, which is a roadmap for businesses to advance equity and inclusion, combat discrimination, and embody the best of socially responsible business.
But, to bring these standards to life, we must work together.
Contribute to the development of the standards by taking part in our public comment period. If you want to lend your perspective on the topics of corporate governance and leadership, internal infrastructure, workplace culture, workforce diversity, job quality, products and services and/or a socially responsible value chain, take our online survey or sign up for a virtual roundtable discussion before September 13.
Read the standards and take the survey inside.
Business Insider highlights a McKinsey study that says AI has the power to disrupt the job market by 2030 as severely as COVID did in 2020.
The Washington Post reports that a dozen of current and former employees at OpenAI and other prominent AI companies warned that the technology poses grave risks to humanity in a Tuesday letter, calling on these businesses to implement sweeping transparency changes. Learn more here.
Bloomberg is reporting that key engines of US spending are declining all at once, alongside increases in credit usage as disposable income declines.
Meanwhile, Walgreens joins Target and several other retailers in slashing prices on over 1300 common items within its stores to help out their customers. CBS News has the story.
In possibly the strangest business story of the week, the CEO of Chipotle had to answer questions about “shrinkflation” in Fortune this week after several Tik-Tok videos went viral claiming that the chain was skimping on meat in their orders.
This chart comes from a deep dive into the data within our JUST Jobs Scorecard via Gretchen Lenth at Agenda Week, highlighting which data points different companies are disclosing across industries. Explore this interactive chart and others in the full article.
At a private JUST webinar this week, Brookings Institution’s Xavier de Souza Briggs (also a JUST Board member) and Molly Kinder (read her latest article on how Hollywood writers went to war on Gen AI here) joined MIT’s Tom Kochan and Stephanie Bell from Partnership on AI to expound on the impacts of Gen AI on America’s workers.
The central question? How companies can think about their human capital as a value creator in the implementation and deployment of generative AI technologies. The discussion highlighted the importance of deliberate implementation strategies and highlighted the potential for empowering workers by incentivizing their engagement with AI in their respective roles.
We often dwell on the possible negative societal impacts of AI when we contemplate its future – instinctive fear of the unknown perhaps – but there are also some clear and very immediate positive applications.
The mission of Karya, for example, is bold and simple: they are tackling poverty in India by working with big tech companies (who spend billions of dollars to collect training data for their LL models) to bring that digital work to local communities. Their partnerships with Google, Microsoft, The Gates Foundation, and the Government of India will help bring digital employment to 100,000 low-income Indians this year.
Humanitas.ai, led by Bay Area tech leader Phil Chow, is exploring the application of Gen AI in America to create personalized support for frontline workers and their families in accessing benefits, emergency needs (such as food), and other forms of urgent care. Turnover and unused benefits cost employers hundreds of billions of dollars every year; Humanitas.ai’s concept could help corporations improve efficiency and directly benefit the lives of millions of their workers.
These are just two examples of how companies could find alignment between driving business value and deploying worker-centric AI. JUST’s work will help make sure the issue remains a priority.
Be well,
Martin
“Technology fosters jobs. It fosters opportunity. I think gen AI is the biggest opportunity. It is the iPhone moment for enterprise for sure. In terms of reskilling and retooling people, that will have to happen. Six out of 10 people will need to be retrained for this new economy, but it is a great opportunity. Most of the jobs they’re doing right now are soul crushing.”
CNBC covers the leaders in our Top 5 Companies for Parents list and explores some of the policies each company has on top of parental benefits, including specific pay equity initiatives.
JUST Board Member Dan Hesse interviews Ambassador John Negroponte as he shares life and business lessons from four decades of diplomacy.
Fortune examines how the AI data center revolution is happening in people’s backyards, as major server farms are being installed in the same areas where enormous shipping warehouses were erected over the past two decades.
Fast Company sits down with four CEOs of publicly traded companies to hear their vastly different ideas of how AI will impact their business and their workers.
The New York Times takes a closer look at the growing trend of CEOS staying longer than a decade at their company and the hidden downsides–like becoming more risk-averse–this can have on corporations.
Impact Alpha covers the latest report by WORC (Workforce & Organizational Research Center), “Thinking Beyond the C-Suite Pays Off”, which examines the role of human capital management in value creation at private equity firms with more than $5 billion in assets.
Fortune chronicles the uphill battle facing Nasdaq’s diversity rule, where every company listed must list and meet certain representational quotes in the boardroom, and why its greatest legal challenges are coming up.
Fast Company explains why, on average, most workers want a boring boss.
This chart comes from Axios, and shows the stock market hitting a new record high, something almost unthinkable two years ago, despite general economic pessimism from workers and a divisive election later this year. Learn more inside.
We appreciate that many of you eagerly await the arrival of our newsletter every Friday morning and so are grateful for your patience and flexibility to let us bring you CNBC’s latest coverage of our newly released report – in honor of Mother’s Day – on how companies are really stepping up to support working moms (and parents overall).
Our Top Companies for Parents report (NBC coverage inside) spotlights some of the leaders, including S&P Global, American Express, Deckers Outdoor Corp., Goldman Sachs, and Splunk Inc. All offer flexible scheduling, as well as benefits such as fully remote or hybrid working arrangements to help parents and working moms in particular navigate work-life balance., They also provide 20 or more weeks of paid parental leave for both primary and secondary caregivers, parental leave parity for all caregivers, backup and subsidized dependent care, and more.
Beyond this, many companies are also doing more to explicitly accelerate progress for women within their workplaces. Deckers, for example, sets quantifiable and time-bound targets to achieve gender parity in leadership positions and its Board of Directors. Goldman Sachs sets hiring goals for women in both entry level positions and senior management. And S&P and AmEx disclose conducting pay equity analyses to ensure fair compensation regardless of gender.
At a time when many forces seek to divide us, this feels like something we can all join together to celebrate. Explore the list here.
Be well,
Martin
(Bright Horizons)
“This is really a wake up call to all employers that they need to move both quickly and substantively to offer these kinds of benefits. The pandemic afforded working parents some flexibility, that in many ways, has started to dissipate or has fully dissipated in this return to a more traditional [work] environment. Employers leaned in during the pandemic, and are now leaning back out, but are not placing supports to compensate for that change.”
The New York Times takes a look at the impact generative A.I. is having on the climate, now that the implications of the technology are becoming clearer.
Nasdaq examines the ways that Artificial Intelligence could be used to improve ESG assessments and keep appetite strong for new funds.
According to Fortune, Millennials need to boost their AI skills to avoid having their jobs swallowed up by Gen-Z.
Harvard Business Review releases a fascinating bit of research that shows that when employees identify with their company, they are far less likely to recognize gender discrimination at their office, or forms of disrespectful conduct that have an underlying bias. Learn more here.
The Washington Post chronicles how corporations are scuttling their DEI language, as many are starting to view it as more of a risk than a benefit, at the same time that McKinsey’s initial research on the benefits of DEI has come under scrutiny for having results that cannot be replicated. Meanwhile, Fortune takes a look at how diversity chiefs at some of America’s largest companies are preparing for an incredibly divisive election season among their staff.
Yahoo reports that Apple’s latest stock buyback plan is the largest made by any U.S. corporation ever, approving $110 billion in repurchases.
This chart comes from a collaboration between The Harris Poll and Bright Horizons examining the state of childcare across the U.S. for working parents. The research was featured in Fortune and includes an interview that you can read here.
The “ROI” of being just is critical to our overall strategy. Understanding if and how just leaders perform better financially than their peers supports the investor case for stakeholder capitalism and helps guide corporate executives and boards on where and how they can allocate capital to generate the biggest impact. That’s why JUST’s investment analysis – expertly led by former portfolio manager Mona Patni – is so important.
Some key takeaways from our Q1 2024 analysis:
There’s a lot to unpack here, but the headline is clear: just business is better business.
Be well,
Martin
“While we don’t run the company worrying about the stock price in the short run, in the long run we consider our stock price a measure of our progress over time. This progress is a function of continual investments in our people, systems and products, in good and bad times, to build our capabilities. These important investments will also drive our company’s future prospects and position it to grow and prosper for decades.”
Microsoft continues to expand aggressively into AI, investing 1.5 billion into an AI holding company in the United Arab Emirates. The Motley Fool takes a closer look at this move.
The Wall Street Journal explores how corporate diversity goals are disappearing from company annual reports thanks to increased pushback on DEI. Despite this, the one CEO who hasn’t been scared off is Jamie Dimon, who continues to defend DEI when so many of his contemporaries have gone silent. Axios explores why.
CNBC runs down what salary a family of four needs to live comfortably in every state.
Volkswagen workers in Chattanooga passed a historic vote to join the United Auto Workers on Friday, making the auto factory the first in the South to vote to unionize since the 1940s. The Washington Post has the story.
Delta Airlines is giving a 5% pay raise to all employees and is increasing starting salaries for several positions in order to improve hiring and retention during the upcoming summer travel season.
The Washington Post reports that President Biden has officially signed the “TikTok ban” legislation, giving the company 9 months to sell the app or face a national ban.
This chart comes from our Q1 Investment Analysis, and shows a quick-view of the stakeholders in our JUST ETF that showed high outperformance. Click here to explore the full analysis.
Monday is the 54th annual Earth Day, so in honor of that I thought we’d highlight a few companies that are showing extraordinary leadership on environmental matters.
First, though, a bit of context. Environmental protection in the U.S. has for the most part been a unifying issue over the years, even politically. It may surprise some that it was Ronald Reagan’s EPA Administrator William Ruckleshaus who sat on the U.N.’s Brundtland Commission that coined the term ‘sustainable development’ (he also served on Clinton’s Council for Sustainable Development), and George H. W. Bush who signed the first Rio Earth Summit declaration that established the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 1992. Protecting our air, soil, and water; our fragile ecosystems; our climate, wildlife, fisheries and oceans; these are ties that bind.
Today, we see this reflected in our polling. Almost 9 in 10 say that large companies have a responsibility to reduce their environmental impact by using sustainable materials and renewable energy. 73% favor increased disclosure from corporate America on environmental impact data. The environment is an essential corporate stakeholder, in other words.
American business leadership on environmental matters comes in many different forms. On greenhouse gases, for example, it’s interesting – and perhaps intuitive – that on an absolute basis the companies that have cut direct emissions the most in recent years are from the most emissions-intensive industries: American Electric Power, Chevron Corporation, Phillips 66. From HPE’s pioneering low-carbon tech infrastructure and Microsoft’s Climate Research Initiative, to Accenture’s nature-based carbon removal solutions, we see innovation everywhere. Explore more of it in our list of the Top 10 Companies for Environmental Performance in 2024.
Be well,
Martin
“Supply chains are extraordinarily complex. My view is you’re never done, you just keep working through it. You take the next supplier. You take the next question. You continue to push on all three dimensions. Do you have resilience for the part of your supply chain? Can you trust that supply chain? And do you have sustainability? And when you have that answer, you go to your next supplier, and you just keep asking those same questions. You keep pushing down the supply chain. Our belief though is that the harder you work it – you’re pushing a boulder up the hill, and then there’s a cascading effect through the supply chain and through the customer base as well. The boulder all of a sudden starts rolling down the hill. I don’t think we’re there yet, but I think that time is in our future.”
We release our Top 10 Companies for Environmental Performance in 2024.
JUST data partner Karma Wallet acquires DoneGood, an e-commerce marketplace where every purchase you make does good for people and the planet, to expand their platform and consumer sustainable buying choices.
According to Fast Company, “Big Tech is on a generative AI hiring spree”. While the sector is experiencing tremendous growth, there are problems on the horizon. One of them? “ChatGPT requires 15 times more energy than a traditional web search.” That quote comes from Fortune’s interview with Ami Badani, CMO of chip design firm Arm Holdings, on the energy consumption AI requires, and how it must be addressed for the technology to grow, otherwise it will eat up a quarter of the electricity in the U.S. by 20230.
The Brookings Institute chronicles the Hollywood writer’s strike and the ways its union pushed back against the use of generative AI, and what lessons can be learned for other industries that will soon be threatened by it.
ESG Today looks at the new EU rules that require all new buildings to be zero emissions by 2023.
With EV purchases slowing down, Tesla will cut 10% of its workforce–nearly 14,000 employees–in an effort to deal with thinning demand. More via The Washington Post.
CNBC releases an informative map showing the median annual income in every U.S. state in 2024, and Business Insider runs down the best paying retail jobs.
This chart comes from the data in our recently released JUST Jobs Scorecard. While America’s largest companies have more work to do to improve transparency around some key job quality data points, overall performance on the 2024 JUST Jobs Scorecard speaks to noticeable improvement since the 2023 pilot version of this tool. More than one-fourth of companies (256 companies, or 27.3% of all scored companies) have moved from the Beginner category (taking early steps towards transparency, overall scores between 0 and 0.99) into the Explorer category (making progress with limited disclosure and practice, an overall score between 1 and 1.99). Explore these trends, as well as your own company’s in-depth performance, here.
Fortune published their 2024 100 Best Places to Work list recently. It’s highly regarded by major employers and obviously reflects a theme we know to be a top priority for the public, so we thought it’d be fun to compare and contrast against our own JUST Jobs Scorecard, which we released last week.
Although the methodologies and purpose of the two products are very different – JUST’s scorecard is an interactive toolkit designed to help companies track and improve performance and transparency, not a list per se – the results are interesting.
In total, JUST covers 43 of the companies on the Fortune BPW list (the remainder are private or outside our Russell 1000 universe). Of these, 22 are topic or industry leaders in at least one of the six topic areas on the JUST Jobs Scorecard. And yet, only one company earned top marks for its industry on the Wages & Compensation topic, a key priority for the American public. Top companies in the Employee Wellness category in the scorecard tend to be more represented in the Fortune list compared to leaders on other topics. Half of the Top 10 on the Fortune list are represented among the companies that earned the 100 highest overall performance scores in the JUST Scorecard.
This list also marks the last time Alan Murray – their much-admired CEO who is stepping down at the end of the month – will be at the helm. Always a good friend to JUST, Alan’s thoughtful, fearless and often provocative leadership on values-led business and stakeholder capitalism is but one facet of his lengthy career. The success Fortune enjoyed under his tenure is a testament to his business acumen, too. We wish him all the best! His successor, Anastasia Nyrkovskaya, is the first woman to lead the iconic 95-year-old publication.
Be well,
Martin
“I am intimately familiar with what we offer, what’s available to employees. The extra dimension that the JUST Jobs Scorecard gave, in addition to comparability across other companies, was really looking at those programs through an external lens, because you didn’t score things based on what I told you, you scored things based on what you were able to cull out of public information. One use case for the JUST Jobs Scorecard is identifying areas of opportunity where we are doing something but not talking about it outside of our organization.”
JUST Advisor Ursula Burns joins Board Member Dan Hesse’s podcast to discuss her career, her time as the first black woman CEO of a Fortune 500 company, and life lessons–most importantly, “where you are is not who you are.” Listen here.
Fortune reveals that startling stat that nearly nearly 3 out of 4 insurers, representing $13 trillion in assets, say they’re turning to AI to help reduce operating costs.
Must Reads
Fortune releases its 2024 “Best Places to Work” list, and highlights how the nature of the list has changed thanks to changing expectations from Gen Z workers. In their words, “Gen Z doesn’t live to work. They work to live.”
MIT releases a fascinating study showing that the majority of work today occurs in jobs and categories that were all created post-1940, and explores how professions are really created and lost over time.
The New York Times explores new data that shows that, despite the promises made by big Banks, voluntary commitment to reduce climate emissions have been ineffective so far. More inside.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Norfolk Southern has agreed to pay $600 million to settle lawsuits in connection with a toxic train derailment in Ohio early last year.
The chart comes from our deep-dive into the insights from our JUST Jobs Scorecard, particularly around stock performance. We examined the market performance of the highest-scoring companies within the top quintile, and discovered that, compared to the benchmark, we found that Scorecard leaders demonstrated substantially superior performance across nearly every Scorecard category, with the difference especially striking for companies that excelled in the Benefits and Wages & Compensation categories. Explore all the insights here.
