Barbara G. Novick

"Also, we worked with MSCI to create a new series of ESG indices and that series has very tight tracking error to the… "mother index". And what's different is we're weighting companies that have better ESG characteristics."<br />

"We have indices which are optimized for ESG. If clients pick those indices, that's great. In some portfolios it's just a plain portfolio and the clients haven't expressed any interest in anything special. But we can still go to those companies and talk about these long term issues and try and move them to be better on those. So there's different ways of sort of implementing sustainable investing depending on what the mandate is."

"Last year we said, I think we had a somewhat bright line on diversity. We said, if you don't have two women, we're pretty likely to vote against you on the board. And I don't remember exactly how we phrased it, but certainly that's how it came across. We got a lot of feedback. Well, what about African Americans and what about Latinos and what about Asians and what about all these other categories? Are you going to create a quota system and fill in each of these buckets? And I thought about it and I said, the way we wrote it, it's not really what we meant. What we really meant is we're looking for diversity of thought. And if someone came in and we said, well, we're going to use this as a flag because it's visible, easy to measure, easy to look, it tells us, is this a company we want to look at more? If we then got there and they said, well, here's our five African Americans and we have no women okay, I think we have to look at this more broadly. But is it a good flag? It's a good flag."