Reflections on a Quarter Century with Trillium Asset Management Corporation
My life is tied closely to the history of Trillium Asset Management Corporation (“Trillium”).
I was there at the birth. The column I now write made its debut on the front page of the first issue of this newsletter in 1983.
I served on the board of directors for eight years.
Founder Joan Bavaria lived in an apartment in my Mill Valley home for 10 years.
My stepson, Blaine Townsend, who lives with me along with his wife and three children in this same house, now manages the San Francisco office of Trillium.
When I look at the business landscape today, I am astounded at the changes which have occurred over the past 25 years:
- In 1983, there were only four mutual funds which specifically applied social considerations to investment decisions. Today, there are more than 60.
- In 1983, 136 major corporations had African-Americans on their board of directors. Today, blacks serve on the boards of more than 260 companies.
- The number of resolutions on social issues presented to companies in proxy statements has tripled since 1983 — and they gain much wider shareholders support than they did 25 years ago.
- In 1983, we didn’t have any organizations bringing people together around social responsibility in business. Today, we have a myriad of them, including the Social Investment Forum, Business for Social Responsibility and the Social Venture Network.
- And who would have thought in 1983 that members of the Rockefeller family would band together to challenge the head-in-sand policies and practices of Exxon Mobil, the original source of their fortune?
What’s indisputable is that Trillium has been the catalyst for many of these changes. Two organizations, the Social Investment Forum and Ceres (Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies), were hatched at Trillium. I can recall Joan coordinating the principles of Ceres on the kitchen table in her apartment in my home. Pioneers such as Amy Domini and Steve Lydenberg were once employed here.
In my first column, I noted the sparse information available about corporate social responsibility in mainstream business publications like Fortune, Barron’s and Forbes. That was one of my preoccupations as a journalist. I wrote and published a newsletter, Business & Society, for six years (1968-1974), my first book, Everybody’s Business, published in 1980, profiled 318 companies and was billed as “the irreverent guide to corporate America,” and as Franklin was launched, I was working on my next book, The 100 Best Companies to Work for in America, published in 1984. But I did point out in that first column that new information sources were beginning to appear — and indeed, Franklin Research & Development, was one of them. The founding of Kinder Lydenberg Domini (now KLD Research & Analytics) was still a few years off.
Trillium, from the start, did its own research to determine the social profiles of publicly-traded companies. In fact, those people who subscribed to this newsletter, then called Insight, received a steady stream of information about corporate responsibility and irresponsibility. This newsletter turned out to be a prime source of information for financial advisors setting themselves up as managers of socially responsibility portfolios. I remember that at board meetings the question occasionally came up: Why are we publishing this information to help our competitors?
Incidentally, that first issue of Insight had a box entitled “What Would We Buy?” And the recommendations were: Quaker Oats, Wheelebrator Frye, Betz Laboratories, Evans & Sutherland, Herman Miller, Johnson & Johnson and Digital Equipment. Such are the ravages of capitalism that only two of these companies (Herman Miller and Johnson & Johnson) still function today as independent entities.
Prior to launching Franklin Research & Development, Joan had, thoughtfully, invited everyone in the country who had a connection to corporate social responsibility to attend a symposium on social investing. I mingled at a condo in Lewis Wharf with these participants, among whom were the late Robert Schwartz, who managed social responsibility accounts at Shearson/American Express, Stuart Baldwin from the Council on Economic Priorities, Randy Barber from a pension advisory service for labor unions, Steve Moody from U.S. Trust, Wayne Silby from the Calvert Group, Tim Smith from the Interfaith Center for Corporate Responsibility and Jamie Heard from the Investor Responsibility Research Center.
I recall getting on a plane to return to San Francisco, thinking: “These are certainly do-gooders. But what do they know about running a business?”
It was one of the more colossal misjudgments of my life.
