Power PlayerShould clean energy companies be held to a higher standard?Monday, March 28, 2016 – 2:55am
NRG Volunteer team celebrate “over the hump” (more than 50 percent of panels installed) on rooftop of Project Medishare maternal health clinic in Marmont on Haiti’s Central Plateau. Rarely did the two meet different confabs, different institutional investors, different trade associations but having already been a CEO of an independent power producer for more than a decade, I obviously knew many more conventional CEOs, much better and for much longer than I had known Lyndon and Ed, yet I faced no ice-bucket challenge from any of them, only from these two solar disrupters from the Bay Area.
It caused me to reflect on the following question: If you lead a company, such as Solar City or Sunrun, that you have imbued with a broader sense of purpose than just making money saving the Earth, for example are you genetically hardwired to be the kind of CEO that embraces and drives the company’s corporate philanthropy efforts?
Indeed, taking it a step further, it might be asked: If you are to wrap your for-profit company in the halo of a higher calling, are you morally obligated to do more in your community and for your chosen causes than, say, a conventional power company CEO who unapologetically pours carbon into the atmosphere?
If you lead a company that you have imbued with a broader sense of purpose than just making money, are you genetically hardwired to be the kind of CEO that embraces and drives the company’s corporate philanthropy efforts?
This is not just a philosophical question. This is because the directors and institutional investors to whom the CEO answers are usually indifferent to the company’s charitable endeavors (except the Audit Committee, which commonly reviews the company’s annual charitable giving to check up on the CEO and make sure that company funds aren’t being channeled principally to the benefit of the private schools attended by the CEO’s children which, depressingly, is actually necessary because that is too often the sum total of the CEO’s involvement in philanthropy).
With respect to the idea that charitable giving can be driven from below the C-suite, all companies have employees absolutely dedicated to doing good deeds but rarely, if ever, are those employees empowered to allocate corporate funds to giving.
