Companies are usually urged to improve on every ESG dimension at once. That’s an impossible standard, since ESG competition crosses industry lines in a way ordinary competition doesn’t. A bank competes with other banks for ESG-minded customers, but it’s competing with employers in every sector for ESG-minded talent. Hernandez-Lagos and Minor propose a different approach, Green Ocean Strategy: find the ESG space where rivals are absent but your firm can genuinely excel, commit to it, and communicate the results credibly to the stakeholders who actually care about that thing, instead of trying to cover everything.
* Pablo Hernandez‐Lagos and Dylan Minor. “Want to Excel in ESG? Craft a “Green Ocean” Strategy.” Harvard Business Review, June 13, 2022.
