What the TV Series Industry Gets Wrong About ESG
- Carol Lever
- Mar 12
- 3 min read
It is B Corp Month, the moment every March when the global community of over 10,000 certified B Corps comes together to celebrate what it means to use business as a force for good. This year's theme is simple and powerful: Behind this Symbol is a Powerful Signal. B Corps are in lots of ways the very essence of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) companies.
Also, this month was the end of the latest series of the TV show Industry and my favourite season so far has to be Season 3, when Lumi, a green tech energy company, collapses after a disastrous IPO, leaving investors and customers scrambling to recoup their money. It is so damaging it shakes the very foundations of the bank Pierpoint & Co, triggering a parliamentary select committee hearing. With Pierpoint & Co, who had invested heavily in ESG companies, declaring ESG businesses as "BS." One partner asks: shouldn't we be wary of increasingly gearing our balance sheet towards a fad?
It's a compelling scene and life imitated art when Goldman Sachs, one of the most powerful investment banks on the planet, announced it is dropping diversity, equity and inclusion criteria from its board candidate selection process. The decision followed pressure from a conservative activist shareholder group and sits within a broader US retreat from DEI commitments driven by the Trump administration's executive orders. The fictional traders at Pierpoint & Co would recognise their logic.
However, the mistake the bank of Pierpoint & Co make is the same one Goldman Sachs could be making. The only reason a non-ESG business looks more profitable is because the real margins and profits come from extraction, with costs pushed onto the planet, onto communities and onto future generations.
Paying fair wages costs money. Restoring ecosystems costs money. Building resilient supply chains costs money. Investing in communities costs money. All of it is money that extraction models pay directly to shareholders, leaving the real bill unpaid. Compared to that, yes, ESG businesses look less profitable. But what we're finding is that extraction economics don't actually create wealth. They borrow it. And one of the creditors is now calling in the debt.
We are learning, expensively and belatedly, that you cannot run a twentieth-century growth model on a twenty-first century planet. The political debate about why our weather is changing continues but the physical consequences are already here. Extreme weather pushes food prices up. Floods strain infrastructure. The old assumptions of stable seasons, predictable systems and infinite resources no longer hold. The planet will almost certainly survive what we are doing to it. The question is whether we will.
What ESG is actually building, when done properly, is the reporting frameworks, certification processes and stakeholder language of resilience. The kind that allows organisations, and by extension the societies they operate within, to function when conditions become volatile. Given the extreme weather changes we are already seeing, that is not idealism. It is the only rational long-term goal available.
The Resilience Asset Most ESG Frameworks Have Missed
Yet there is a human dimension to resilience that most ESG frameworks haven't fully reckoned with.
When systems become volatile, experience becomes a form of risk management. People who have lived through economic cycles, restructures, technological shifts and institutional crises bring something that cannot be onboarded quickly or trained in a day: pattern memory. Steadiness. The ability to interpret complexity without panic. To know the difference between a crisis and a disruption. They help organisations stay grounded when the conditions around them are anything but.
Those people are, disproportionately, older workers. And most organisations are treating their greatest resilience asset as a liability.
B Corp Month this year asks us to think about what the signal behind the symbol really means. For the movement to be taken seriously, by investors, by regulators, by the communities it serves, the signal has to include everyone.
I'd like to hear from you.
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