Sustainability
Tenured Harvard Business School professor, now at Oxford University.
Charmian (Char) Love is Co-Founder of B Lab UK. She has an MBA from the Harvard Business School and is a very popular teacher in the MBA programme at the Said Business School at the University of Oxford. Love also has entrepreneurial experience as a co-founder of Volans with John Elkington and the late Pamela Hartigan. Love recently stepped down from her B Lab UK Chair role to become an Activist in Residence there.
I’ve never heard of such a role. Sounds almost like an oxymoron. I learned about what it means for her in a conversation we had after she returned from COP 26 in Glasgow. Love explained this role to me and shared her views of the good, the bad, the painful, and the hopeful of this event.
Eccles: Char, you have one of the weirdest titles I’ve ever come across. I know you’re connected to people at Extinction Rebellion (XR), and other climate movements, but what is an Activist in Residence?
Love: Thanks, Bob. The Activist in Residence role (AIR) is inspired by a question I was asked at a big Unilever event a couple of years ago. “In the field of sustainability when and how should entrepreneurs also be activists?” I thought that was pretty interesting and the idea stuck with me.
Robert G. Eccles of Saïd Business School, University of Oxford is the author of a number of books on integrated reporting, sustainability and the role of business in society. His focus is on sustainability from both a company and investor perspective. Professor Eccles is also involved in a variety of initiatives to embed environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues in real world decision making. One of these is the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB), of which he was the founding chairman. In 2018, Professor Eccles was selected by Barron’s as one of the top 20 influencers on ESG investing.
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