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Move past the ESG culture wars and make better choices for your business.Embracing ESG—environmental, social, and governance goals—isn't just the right thing to do. It's good business. Companies that don't address their material long-term risks may save a few dollars today, but they're putting themselves, their stakeholders, and their investors in jeopardy.ESG: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review will help you move past the noise and political debates to execute an ESG strategy that best fits your business. You'll discover how to link ESG targets to financial performance, when and how to respond to social issues, and where governance needs to adapt to meet a changing world.Business is changing. Will you adapt or be left behind?Get up to speed and deepen your understanding of the topics that are shaping your company's future with the Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review series. Featuring HBR's smartest thinking on fast-moving issues—blockchain, cybersecurity, AI, and more—each book provides the foundational introduction and practical case studies your organization needs to compete today and collects the best research, interviews, and analysis to get it ready for tomorrow.You can't afford to ignore how these issues will transform the landscape of business and society. The Insights You Need series will help you grasp these critical ideas—and prepare you and your company for the future.

Enel has transformed from the Italian state-owned energy monopoly into a global leader in renewable energy and shared value creation. Through its open innovation model, the company has catapulted to the cutting edge of electric mobility and distributed power generation, partnering with the likes of Google and Tesla. Under the leadership of Mr. Francesco Starace, the company has gone through a significant change in organizational culture and structure, committing to 100% renewables while placing an emphasis on growth in middle-income countries and capturing new revenue sources from energy management services. At the same time, Starace has had to balance stockholder pressure for short-term earnings with a legacy of coal and gas fired power plants against its futuristic vision.

Becton, Dickinson and Company (BD) was a medical technology firm headquartered in Franklin Lakes, New Jersey, with 43,000 employees and 2016 revenues of $12.5 billion. For several years, the company had pursued development of products that created shared value, defined as those that both generated profits and created positive social impact. One of the primary ways the company advanced such products was through establishing and maintaining public-private partnerships (PPPs) with governmental or non-governmental organizations. In June 2017, Gary Cohen, an Executive Vice President of BD, and Renuka Gadde, Vice President of BD's Global Health function, were deeply engaged in a six-year PPP to bring a new low-cost labor and delivery tool called the Odon Device to market. This device had the potential to avert hundreds of thousands of maternal and newborn deaths, primarily in low-resource settings. Although they had faced many challenges in bringing together multiple organizations to develop and launch the device, Cohen and Gadde were convinced that BD's ability to collaborate with governments and international agencies to address urgent global health needs was a source of competitive advantage for the company. Through these collaborations, BD had strengthened important external relationships and developed a distinctive corporate strategy for its expansion in emerging markets. Cohen, Gadde, and the BD Global Health team were also working to construct a framework for measuring both the social and financial impact of the company's shared value initiatives, starting with the BD Odon Device. Cohen believed that creating shared value was'fundamentally a better way to do business,'but he wanted hard data to demonstrate the full economic and social benefit of BD's shared value initiatives. The competition for internal capital and the challenges of taking on new types of products meant that any shared value initiative required a rigorous business case and clear indicators

Late in 2013, Novartis CEO Joseph Jimenez was considering how and whether to deepen the company's investment in Arogya Parivar, its profitable program that sold Novartis medicines in rural India, while expanding access to medicine and health information to millions of Indian villagers.

Leading fertilizer producer Yara International demonstrates the concept of creating shared value through the Southern Agricultural Corridor of Tanzania (SAGCOT) initiative, which brought together multiple organizations to enhance agricultural development in rural regions.

This case explores the origins and current practices of DBL, a San Francisco-based venture capital fund and one of the first impact investment funds to achieve significant financial returns to scale. This case allows for a competitive analysis of DBL's investment strategy as it seeks to deploy $400m, as well as the opportunity to evaluate a specific investment in a solar power company targeting low-income consumers in Tanzania.

This case considers Nestl's creating shared value (CSV) strategy, which focused on the three categories of nutrition, water, and rural development. In the packaged food and beverage industry, pressure had mounted since the 1990s to improve supply chain sustainability and provide healthier, more natural foods, leading to consolidation and causing sales to decline in the 2010s. With 150 years'experience in the industry, Nestl had transformed into a nutrition, health, and wellness company and made its CSV strategy explicit in the early 21st century. By 2014, Nestl CEO Paul Bulcke considered how best to fully embed the company's CSV strategy and to communicate it to shareholders and external stakeholders.

Dow had adopted the'Breakthroughs to World Challenges'(BWC) program as part of its ten-year 2015 Sustainability Goals. BWC was an internal award recognizing products that effectively addressed one of five world challenges: energy and climate change, sustainable water supply, decent affordable housing, personal health, and food supply. By late summer 2014, two products had been designated as BWCs and two others were set to be announced in the fall. Dow senior executives believed that Dow was creating shared value through its BWC products. As management began drafting the company's sustainability plan for 2015 and beyond, CEO Andrew Liveris confronted the question of whether to maintain, modify or terminate the BWC program.

This case provides a sample of Walmart's social engagement activities and asks students to categorize each as philanthropy, corporate social responsibility, or creating shared value.

Discovery Ltd. is a South-African based insurance company. Started in the early 1990s, Discovery used behavioral economics and data collection to innovate in the health care insurance industry. Its founder Adrian Gore believed that the company's products needed to not only make money but have a positive impact on society. Using its Vitality Wellness program as its strategic lynchpin, Discovery expanded into other insurance areas and financial services products and also entered new markets abroad. In late 2014, Gore and his team had to decide how to further develop the company and prioritize among many growth opportunities.