Last month, Rick Alexander, founder of The Shareholder Commons (TSC), announced that he will step down as CEO and introduced Dan Osusky as the next CEO of the organization. You can learn more about Dan and his background here.

As Rick noted in his message, this next phase of TSC’s work calls for a leader with the vision, rigor, creativity, and a deep commitment to collaboration. In Dan’s message below, he shares more about his path to TSC, his hopes for the organization’s next chapter, and his vision for the work ahead.

A Paradigm Shift is a Collective Effort

Even when a company is motivated to address systemic social and environmental risks, it is constrained by the capital markets in which it operates. Companies have owners, and those owners expect their companies to act in their best interest, which has traditionally meant maximizing profit at the enterprise level.

But what if it were in the owner’s best interest to better address systemic risks, even if it meant forgoing value at the company level?

When I first heard Rick pose this provocative question several years ago, my reaction mirrored what I now hear from others: the logic is there. It clicks. But then the doubts creep in: if it makes so much sense, why is it not already happening? What barriers need to be overcome to make it possible?

These are exactly the types of challenging questions that inspired me to join The Shareholder Commons, first leading the development of our System-Level Investing Knowledge Lab, and now taking on the role of CEO.

Over the past several months, our Knowledge Lab Listening Tour – intended to socialize the idea and gather feedback – has allowed me to meet and engage with more than 200 practitioners, peer organizations, academics, and other stakeholders. These conversations have helped me better understand how TSC, and how I, personally, can contribute to this growing ecosystem. While this kind of learning is certainly a perpetual process, the experience so far has been both insightful and heartening.

Some of my biggest takeaways include:

• The Shareholder Commons has built a reputation on being bold, showing a willingness to grapple with the tough questions and tensions that arise when turning theory into action.
• Practitioners have a real desire to work through these tough questions together, in dialogue and a spirit of co-creation.
• The Shareholder Commons does not work in isolation. Leadership in this field takes many forms, from practitioners, peer organizations, and others, and the success of system-level investing, like any healthy system, will be driven by a multitude of operating models and perspectives rather than a single approach.

Consistent with these takeaways, TSC is proud of the independent, public-good nature of its work. Our goal is for everything TSC produces to be as accessible and valuable as possible to the wide range of practitioners interested in system-level investing. In this spirit, we seek collaboration grounded in a shared objective: helping move the market towards more advanced cutting-edge thinking on system-level investing. We intend to support, highlight, challenge, learn from, and complement the great work being done by others.

At the same time, we plan to remain bold and willing to ask the tough questions, and we invite others to co-create answers to those questions with us via the Knowledge Lab. There’s still time to provide your input into its initial direction, and as our Listening Tour comes to an end in June, we look forward to sharing next steps with everyone.

We also recognize that while practical tools and resources help advance the market, they are not sufficient. At the core of system-level investing is a paradigm shift, and paradigm shifts like this require a change in culture. Co-creation and dialogue are necessary to achieve our vision, not just in ensuring the quality of any deliverables, but as goods themselves. At the human level, this work is partially about hearts and minds, and partly about ‘building the muscle’ to put this way of thinking into practice over the long term.

As I take on the challenge of filling Rick’s shoes, I figured I’d close by expanding his Casablanca reference in the last newsletter. “Welcome to the fight. This time I know we’ll win.”

I look forward to working with you all to help change the way our financial system operates. Right is on our side, as is the logic: what is best for owners and beneficiaries is also better for the world. There are substantial challenges to overcome, but the only way we’ll be able to overcome them is together. If I haven’t yet had a chance to meet you, I’d love to find a time to connect.

Best,

Dan Osusky