{"id":46290,"date":"2023-11-17T14:58:34","date_gmt":"2023-11-17T19:58:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nationalcenter.org\/?p=46290"},"modified":"2023-11-17T14:58:34","modified_gmt":"2023-11-17T19:58:34","slug":"scott-shepard-can-corporations-really-trust-the-conference-board","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nationalcenter.org\/ncppr\/2023\/11\/17\/scott-shepard-can-corporations-really-trust-the-conference-board\/","title":{"rendered":"Scott Shepard: Can Corporations Really Trust the Conference Board?"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a commentary<\/a> published by RealClearMarkets, Free Enterprise Project<\/a> Director Scott Shepard<\/a> targets the supposedly “independent, nonpartisan” Conference Board, which claims its advice can be trusted while making no efforts to dialogue with more than one side of the policy aisle.<\/p>\n

As Scott so aptly concludes:<\/p>\n

The forces that have pushed corporate America hard to the left all\u00a0pretend\u00a0to be following the science, the evidence or stakeholder demands in non-partisan ways \u2013 while in fact they\u2019re paying outside groups to feed them information predesigned and partisanly designed to point them in the direction that they\u2019ve already chosen.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read Scott’s commentary below.<\/p>\n

\n

For some inexplicable reason I have a clear, if fleeting, memory from early youth of hearing either MacNeil or Lehrer drone, in one of their ponderous voice-of-God tones, \u201cand the Conference Board anticipates \u2026.\u201d At the time I think I figured it was a government agency, to the extent I thought about it at all, and that impression stuck with me for many years.<\/p>\n

\"Scott<\/a>

Scott Shepard<\/p><\/div>\n

As it turns out, of course, the Conference Board is not a government entity. Rather, it is a non-profit that offers advice to its business-leader members. And it\u00a0claims<\/a>\u00a0to provides these services in an objective way. \u201cWe believe in innovative approaches that make you think \u2013 and act \u2013 differently. And everything we do reflects the input of our Members and their real-world challenges. We do this by delivering business insights. Because we are independent, nonpartisan, and nonprofit,\u00a0our insights are trusted<\/em>.\u201d\u00a0<\/em>(The italics are those of the Conference Board.)<\/p>\n

So the Conference Board claims that it can be trusted by its members to be nonpartisan and, presumably, objective, so that its members (sorry, \u201cMembers\u201d) can rely on Conference Board pronouncements while upholding fiduciary duty. That is a falsifiable claim, and one that has, since I began to watch developments at the Board a few years ago, seemed increasingly false. For while the Board portrays itself as a \u201cthink tank that delivers\u00a0Trusted Insights for What\u2019s Ahead\u2122\u00a0<\/em>to help our Members improve performance and better serve society,\u201d (again, the Board\u2019s italics), it turns out that its vision of what\u2019s best for society is, wearyingly, the same as that of the ESG warriors and the Biden Administration and the World Economic Forum \u2013 and that the Board\u2019s employees actively avoid knowing anything that might get in the way of its assertions that what the Conference Board wants for society is what society wants and what\u2019s possible, likely, and right.<\/p>\n

That doesn\u2019t sound as though the Conference Board is a very trustworthy source of nonpartisan information.<\/p>\n

Obviously, I should have some evidence in support of this claim. And so I offer the following email, sent six weeks ago, to Paul Washington, the head of the Conference Board\u2019s ESG outfit. Note that this is the whole of the correspondence, because in those six weeks Washington made no effort to respond, and has not otherwise gotten in touch with me or with the National Center for Public Policy Research, my employer and the \u201cwe\u201d to whom I refer in the email. (Per that email, we are, among other things, what\u2019s broadly understood as \u201canti-ESG\u201d shareholder activists.)<\/p>\n

Now, I ask you, if you represented a nonpartisan organization that was genuinely interested in collecting information upon which to build trusted conclusions, instead of acting in partisanship to build a narrative in which trust cannot reside, is this how you would behave?<\/p>\n

(Note, I corrected two spelling errors I made in the email, using brackets. I should proofread emails carefully, of course, but I should also go to the gym four times a week.)<\/p>\n

*\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0*\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0*<\/p>\n

Paul,<\/em><\/p>\n

I hope this note finds you well. I take it from your final comment in yesterday’s webinar that you saw my note to the Q&A folder as well as to the group discussion correctly indicating that the panel’s discussion about “anti-esg” shareholder proponent and activist efforts should be judged with significant s[k]epticism because neither you nor the panel members nor anyone at the Conference Board had ever tried to have any conversations at all with anyone from the “anti-esg” activist community, far less to include any of us in any of your programming in any way. As it turned out that warning was justified, as your treatment of our efforts was both wrong and dismissive, concluding with a false suggestion that we’re not seeking to change corporate culture and governance for the better but merely to get a spot on CNBC.<\/em><\/p>\n

This treatment of our and our allies’ efforts severely undermines another of your claims near the end of the webcast, namely that the Conference Board has been the chief analyst (or something to that effect) of good corporate governance for 80 years. That can’t be true so long as you accept as valid and valuable one slate of corporate-governance initiatives (broadly, “esg” as you use the term), but another set (what you call “anti-esg”) — distinguishable only because the former is aligned with a highly partisan political vision, while the latter is heterodox — as irrelevant “gadflyism” (a term from a previous CB webcast on this subject) that need not be understood on its own terms but can be mocked and dismissed. So long as the Conference Board follows that path, it is merely a partisan actor, not an objective analyst upon which reliance consonant with fiduciary duty may be placed.<\/em><\/p>\n

We would like to help you solve this problem. We would love to discuss with you the real goals and efforts and achievements of our community, and to enjoy the same partnership and participate in CB events to the same extent as “pro-esg” proponents and activists. I think this would be a partnership that would be good for us and our allies, and that is vital to Conference Board claims to be other than a dismiss[i]ble partisan actor itself.<\/em><\/p>\n

I look forward to hearing from you at your convenience, but hope that, given the events that you have scheduled for the fall, dialogue will begin sooner rather than later.<\/em><\/p>\n

Very best,<\/em><\/p>\n

Scott<\/em><\/p>\n

The forces that have pushed corporate America hard to the left all\u00a0pretend<\/a>\u00a0to be following the science, the evidence or stakeholder demands in non-partisan ways \u2013 while in fact they\u2019re paying outside groups to feed them information predesigned and partisanly designed to point them in the direction that they\u2019ve already chosen. When does the whole system, and knowing participation in it, become outright fraud?<\/p>\n

Scott Shepard<\/a> is a fellow at the\u00a0National Center for Public Policy Research<\/em><\/a>\u00a0and Director of its\u00a0Free Enterprise Project<\/a>. This first appeared at RealClearMarkets<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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