As virtue signals go, environmental, social and governance (ESG) initiatives are a popular and noisy bandwagon that companies are jumping aboard to show how much their brands care about things that often have little or nothing to do with their bottom-line business success.

An increasing number of companies are even taking the window dressing of doing good to an absurd and sometimes reckless level by tying executive compensation to leadership’s performance on these feel-good metrics. More than 70 per cent of Fortune 500 companies now have baked – or are considering baking – some ESG elements into their executive-compensation formulas. READ MORE