My dad is a mechanical engineer who often gave me bedtime math problems instead of bedtime stories. I loved math from a young age and won competitions in 4th and 11th grade, taking pride in beating all the boys in my classes. (Now I’m proud that my 8-year-old daughter loves math😍) In 2011, I ...more

My dad is a mechanical engineer who often gave me bedtime math problems instead of bedtime stories. I loved math from a young age and won competitions in 4th and 11th grade, taking pride in beating all the boys in my classes. (Now I’m proud that my 8-year-old daughter loves math😍) In 2011, I had the honor of establishing an energy and sustainability department for public REIT First Potomac Realty Trust (NYSE: FPO), whose VP of Construction had been hearing from trusted colleagues that there was real business opportunity in this trendy new focus area. I dove into utility bills and we focused on measuring and reducing energy spend by improving design and procurement practices, completing lighting retrofits, and implementing demand response, real-time electricity monitoring, and operational improvements. In a billion-dollar portfolio, we found enough savings to pay for 14 of me. In 2015, I became sustainability director for a private real estate investment manager with 50 times the AUM of FPO. I quickly learned that prestigious global ESG frameworks reward companies for perfunctorily checking hundreds of boxes confirming low-impact details of corporate policies and practices more than they reward them for focusing on the ESG activities that create significant value or substantively mitigate risk. By pursuing point-earning actions, we raised my firm's PRI grade from a B to an A+ and increased its GRESB peer rankings as much as 43%, claiming the top spot in one category. This exercise developed my expertise in ESG scoring systems but didn’t improve the energy, risk management, or wellness performance of my new portfolio. With 0 and 2% of PRI and GRESB points awarded based on energy and emissions performance improvement, which takes significant organizational effort but also reduces opex and risk, improving actual ESG performance was the least efficient way to boost ESG scores. I later crunched the numbers and saw that GRESB collected information on over 750 micro-topics. Responsible investing frameworks were diverting firms’ ESG resources from the most value-creating activities. This realization led me to my current path of helping investors and companies cut through paper-pushing to maximize tangible ESG valueless