From Watts Up With That?

Essay by Eric Worrall

Get woke go broke?

Can Business Alliances Move the Needle on Climate Change?

Featuring Peter Tufano. 
By Rachel Layne on February 6, 2026.

Who will champion environmental, social, and governance issues at a time when such causes are under fire? Peter Tufano says that business alliances could play an important role. 

One of the first tenets of systems change is that ‘It takes a village.’ I have a particular interest in this topic because a lot of my career has been about collaboration in service of positive systems change through business. I cofounded the Innovation Lab at Harvard and joined with seven other deans to found Business Schools for Climate Leadership. These days, I lead a consortium of 150 schools and regulatory bodies to advance climate finance. 

Our conclusion was that there was an ownership type, among public firms, that seemed to have less appetite for what we call ESG: Family firms, or firms with vestigial family ownership. The way that a family becomes an owner in a publicly traded firm is by selling stakes to non-family members. Public firms with remaining family ownership show far lower adoption of ‘ESG’ practices than firms with institutional, employee, managerial, or government ownership.

Given that families usually claim that they have longer-term horizons and greater social sensibilities, we tried to understand this finding in more detail. While perhaps family owners might tend to treat firms as piggy banks, it’s not just about ownership, but also about control. Where families are in the second or third generation, the firms are much more prone to adopt ESG practices, and when they are in charge, even more so.”

…Read more: https://www.library.hbs.edu/working-knowledge/can-business-alliances-move-needle-on-climate-change

It’s kind of sad really. While mum and dad are busting their guts trying to build a future, woke teachers to whom they entrust their kids’ education are filling the kids heads with woke nonsense.

So, when the kids take over the firm, they don’t understand how damaging focusing on anything other than running the business is. They start living the ESG visions their teachers instilled in them.

I was going to say “and then the business fails”, but the case for this isn’t as clear – apparently the claim the third generation loses the business is a bit of a myth. Or maybe it isn’t, the sources I looked up are contradictory. Maybe by the third generation the business is robust enough to withstand a little ESG nonsense from woke third generation owners, if the founder and his or her successor picked the right senior managers.