YouSaid · the spoken record

Martin Whittaker

lines on the record: 67
first: 2019-06-24
most recent: 2019-06-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I wish I knew that there are so many paths out there to success. I have four kids, obviously I'm trying to give them the lessons I wished I had learned when I was young. And I say to them, you know, look, there are many, many paths out there. Whatever you do, just throw everything you've got at it and love it. That's the key to happiness and success.”
2019-06-24 · Capital Allocators · Martin Whittaker – JUST Capital (First Meeting, EP.02) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say grit and hard work the idea of just really working hard at what you do to try and be successful and I would say also confidence I got a lot of confidence with my dad in particular would be very comfortable in any crowd in any situation and I've tried to get that from him.”
2019-06-24 · Capital Allocators · Martin Whittaker – JUST Capital (First Meeting, EP.02) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I learned to stop and smell the roses a little bit. My father passed away about 18 months ago and I realized when you run hard all the time at some point you got to stop. My wife said that to me actually in January I asked her, hey, what should my New Year's resolution be? She's like, you know what? You got to stop and smell the roses. So that's what I'm doing.”
2019-06-24 · Capital Allocators · Martin Whittaker – JUST Capital (First Meeting, EP.02) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh boy, I work in New York City. I would say this is a small pet peeve. You know, you struggle your way through crowds. People don't give you an inch on the sidewalks across Grand Central every day. People are just heads down, going for it. I guess my pet peeve is holding the door open for someone and someone walking through it without saying thank you. Common courtesy. We need a little more of that.”
2019-06-24 · Capital Allocators · Martin Whittaker – JUST Capital (First Meeting, EP.02) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm a big soccer player. I love playing, I love watching. I have four kids. I've forced them all to play. And I'm the kind of guy who will stop and watch a soccer game at any point in time, anywhere on any TV or live action, whatever I'm doing. And my team is Manchester United for the record.”
2019-06-24 · Capital Allocators · Martin Whittaker – JUST Capital (First Meeting, EP.02) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the biggest frustration in terms of running a nonprofit is just predictability of funding. So that's par for the course for anybody listening who is supporting a nonprofit. I would encourage you to give on a multi-year basis. I think the biggest frustration in terms of the mission is one of mindset. People just have a knee-jerk response about, well, this is the way the markets work and this is the way they've always worked. Why should that change? Everything's fine. What are you talking about? Wealth inequality. What are you talking about? Everything's fine. Like that we can start to shift behavior. We can start to influence companies and data and all the good things we're doing. But it needs a change of system and it is only going to come with a shift in mindset.”
2019-06-24 · Capital Allocators · Martin Whittaker – JUST Capital (First Meeting, EP.02) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we're tracking companies all the time on their performance. That's what we do for a living. So the metrics that we've developed every year, we release the new rankings, but on an ongoing basis, we're gathering data on how companies are tracking to all these things. So we had a tech company recently do its first living wage audit. It had never done that before. Did that on account of our involvement with them? So we started to see progress take lots of different form. You see companies disclosing data, giving us data. We have tens of thousands of individual company data points now, which are now public, which we're not before. We see investment dollars flowing in more just direction. So there's lots of markers of progress and adoption. But hey, you know, we're early on a journey. We're trying to move markets, and that doesn't happen in a couple of years. That's going to take more than just capital, and it's going to take decades.”
2019-06-24 · Capital Allocators · Martin Whittaker – JUST Capital (First Meeting, EP.02) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Displaying the seal as a just company and your consumer making decisions around justness. Because I think that's ultimately what's going to be driving the kind of overall change that you have to have for the mission to be fulfilled.”
2019-06-24 · Capital Allocators · Martin Whittaker – JUST Capital (First Meeting, EP.02) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we want to broaden, obviously we want to expand. We want to broaden the number of companies that we track. We want to broaden in terms of where we go for our polling. We love to do survey work internationally. We're always on the hunt for new and better data. That is, I would say, the intellectual and technological frontier of impact investing. It's all well and good for it to have a policy on gender pay equity, but how are you actually doing? You wouldn't invest in a company that had a policy to be profitable. You'd want to know what they're actually doing. So I don't see this as being any different. So getting the data and then getting data that you can rely on, that I think is where as a CEO of just and I think about our mission, if we can get the best data, good things happen. And the last place where we're going is we want to raise our profile. I want to be walking through Times Square and see a company.”
2019-06-24 · Capital Allocators · Martin Whittaker – JUST Capital (First Meeting, EP.02) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. I mean, when we talk to the public, these same sentiments and the same model can just as much apply to a private company as it can to a public company. So we're most focused on the public markets because we can get data on those companies and we can rank the companies. But the model itself, absolutely, we want to drive that. I mean, look, we're a nonprofit, so we're open for business. You know, we want private equity investors, private companies, business owners to come to us and say, hey, look, I really like that framing. How can we adopt that? How can I as a CEO of a private company or as a GP in a private equity firm benchmark my companies against the largest publicly traded corporations in the country? I want to know that my company is a just company. I want to know that my company”
2019-06-24 · Capital Allocators · Martin Whittaker – JUST Capital (First Meeting, EP.02) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're feeling our way. You know, we don't want anything to compromise our independence and the unbiased quality of either rankings or the polling. So if what we're doing creates a problem in terms of our ability to deliver the market with a high quality independent signal on justness, that's a problem we won't do it. So that's really the North Star.”
2019-06-24 · Capital Allocators · Martin Whittaker – JUST Capital (First Meeting, EP.02) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, to what extent do we lean into advocacy? You know, a lot of people are very focused on individual issues that we track. I'm thinking of like things like paid family leave. A lot of activism around that. A lot of people involved in policy who know far more about that issue than we do, but who will use our data and see a need to try and get companies because they see the scale effect. If we can get the top 10 retailers to invest in workers more and improve training and lift wages as we're starting to see actually, that affects millions of people and tens of millions of families. So they see the scale effect. So the tension there is to what extent are we leaning into the advocacy and in order to sort of support that process of change? And to what extent do we say no, we're maintaining complete independence and we'll let the market do what it will.”
2019-06-24 · Capital Allocators · Martin Whittaker – JUST Capital (First Meeting, EP.02) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We don't really care about how we treat our workers. It's obvious now you say it, but we're sort of getting into the heart of what drives success for companies. And I think many of the companies that we rank and many companies that we don't rank who are knocking on our door and who are working with organizations like ours to be better, to be just more thoughtful about how they manage different stakeholders, they're doing it because they believe it's in their best interest and that that isn't also aligned with the best interests of other stakeholders. And it's a win-win, not the zero-sum game of I'm an investor, I win, you're a worker, you lose. Every dollar coming back to me is a dollar out of your pocket. That's the social norm that we've got to try and break.”
2019-06-24 · Capital Allocators · Martin Whittaker – JUST Capital (First Meeting, EP.02) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Competitiveness and performance improvement. And so help us help you do that. We don't take money from companies for that. We don't take money from companies for the ranking because we want to preserve our independence. But we absolutely want companies to be looking at this and saying, okay, this is in our self-interest to be better. And honestly, Ted, we haven't talked to any company that says, well, we don't really care what the public thinks.”
2019-06-24 · Capital Allocators · Martin Whittaker – JUST Capital (First Meeting, EP.02) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you were pushing on one of the core tensions of what we do, which is, sure, we want to be very unbiased in our polling and bring this new sort of model of the public to bear, rank companies, tell their story honestly, let the data do the talking. And we want to try and encourage a race to the top. So that's why we build the investment products. That's why we want capital influenced by our data and our rankings, because that will incentivize companies. We want to get our rankings and our data out in the hands of consumers. We know that new workers entering the marketplace, they want to work for just company. They are less willing to trade their values at the door every morning. They want a sense of purpose in their lives. So you want to win the war for talent. You've got to be a just company. We certainly want to go to the companies and are going to the companies to say, hey, look, this is good for business. There's a strong story here for companies.”
2019-06-24 · Capital Allocators · Martin Whittaker – JUST Capital (First Meeting, EP.02) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Way so let me push on that a little bit because it makes perfect sense, right? In the sense that we have this idea, we want to know what the American people think. But there's this also broader mission of making companies more just. Have you run into situations where somebody has a hypothesis of this is what makes a just company function? Well, it's a certain type of leader. Oh, but that type of leader might not be great for jobs. And so there's a thesis that the polling is what matters. But as you said, in causation, maybe that's not really what matters in sort of improving the long-term sustainability of companies and having them be more just.”
2019-06-24 · Capital Allocators · Martin Whittaker – JUST Capital (First Meeting, EP.02) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we want the chips to fall where they may in terms of, okay, the polling, the process. We are very cognizant of the need to be asking the right questions. So I want to make sure that, you know, our polling team, they are very, very focused and very professional and very expert at making sure that we're not leading the witness in any kind of way.”
2019-06-24 · Capital Allocators · Martin Whittaker – JUST Capital (First Meeting, EP.02) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now you're getting to the heart of causation and correlation. And we're very obviously aware of that and we're really trying to drill down into what's a persona of a just company? What are the connecting factors here that you could say, yeah, you know what? That company has these attributes and it's going to be more just and it's going to do better financially anyway. When you break that down, some of the things you start to look at are leadership, the integrity of a company's leaders. How is that being transmitted throughout an organization? We talk about culture, management quality. Those are the kind of hallmarks of a well run company, a company that does look after all of its stakeholders well. And so I think that's what we start to see come through. But again, we want to be very intellectually honest about this.”
2019-06-24 · Capital Allocators · Martin Whittaker – JUST Capital (First Meeting, EP.02) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And similarly, have you looked at models that may have sort of a spurious correlation with what you're doing? So the one that comes to mind as you're talking about this is, well, high profit margin businesses have the ability to pay their workers more and treat people better. So are there any consistent sort of correlations with other factors that don't lay into the polling that would indicate that it's easier for a company to be just if certain factors are in place?”
2019-06-24 · Capital Allocators · Martin Whittaker – JUST Capital (First Meeting, EP.02) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How healthy is social media? How do people think about the job destruction factor as well as job creation? Is technology serving society? Are we creating an economy that is giving more people the chance to pull themselves up and build a more prosperous future? Is tech doing that? I think we may start to see a bit of a rebalance. We're in the middle of our 2019 polling right now. It'll be interesting to see how some of the travails that tech has been through in the last six months play out.”
2019-06-24 · Capital Allocators · Martin Whittaker – JUST Capital (First Meeting, EP.02) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, if you looked at our absolute ranking, you tend to get software companies, tech companies rising towards the top, although I will say the just 100, which is the top 100 companies, has every sector represented and is actually very diverse in terms of its sector representation. The tech companies, they typically have created a ton of jobs. They've done well financially. They are able to pay people well, which is obviously highly rated in the model, highly weighted.”
2019-06-24 · Capital Allocators · Martin Whittaker – JUST Capital (First Meeting, EP.02) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We just try to steer as close as we can to our North Star, which is just making sure that we're accurately capturing how people think about and define a just company without thinking about it through any kind of economic lens or presupposing whether they're right people are right or wrong. We have dissected the returns. We looked at our own portfolio, our own index. The index has outperformed its benchmark since inception by a couple hundred basis points, but we've been able to dissect that alpha signal. And actually, you see a lot of that coming from the S, the social elements, which stands to reason. Every CEO I know says our greatest asset walks out of the door every night, right? So how you treat your people, yet we often think about employees as a cost, not as an investment. So I think the S of the ESG and the human element, let's call it, that we're picking up is probably one of the most undiscovered sources.”
2019-06-24 · Capital Allocators · Martin Whittaker – JUST Capital (First Meeting, EP.02) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And a lot of the investing impact when people think about it really does, you have the governance piece, but a lot of it focuses on the environmental part. And I understand the sort of people in the country want certain things, but sometimes the people in the country don't fully understand the economic impact of, say, other more important factors. Have you thought about that mix in the sort of economic impact of what just companies do versus sort of what the people say a just company is?”
2019-06-24 · Capital Allocators · Martin Whittaker – JUST Capital (First Meeting, EP.02) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We want to try and meet companies where they are. We're not naming and shaming Once we earn their trust. This is why the transparency matters. We want to build trust with the companies that we're really just trying to tell their story accurately and honestly. And increasingly they're buying that whether they're ranked high or low.”
2019-06-24 · Capital Allocators · Martin Whittaker – JUST Capital (First Meeting, EP.02) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's been really interesting, you know, even companies that are lower down in the ranking, we never call them bad. So we're all about trying to incentivize and encourage and influence companies to be better. So we want to showcase the best companies. We award them a seal. We want the seal to be displayed so that they can market their justness. So we're always trying to encourage companies to do better, be better. And the rewards for doing that will come to you. So the companies who are lower ranked, typically they're on a journey anyway. They're trying to figure it out. How can we be better on some of these things? Sometimes our data can help them be better. Sometimes they want to emulate best practice. Occasionally it's the first time they've been benchmarked on some of these things. So we've had, again, I gave you sort of the impressive corporate engagement numbers that we're posting now. That's across the board. That's not just among leading companies. That's across the board. And I think”
2019-06-24 · Capital Allocators · Martin Whittaker – JUST Capital (First Meeting, EP.02) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a question, a legit question. What are markets best serving when you look at wealth inequality, income inequality in this country, social challenges that we face? We have to get markets involved in the solution. Philanthropy and government is just not going to do it. So I think it goes beyond ESG and the impact bucket of a portfolio. This is really about core investing in core Processing of how capitalism needs to evolve over the next fifty years.”
2019-06-24 · Capital Allocators · Martin Whittaker – JUST Capital (First Meeting, EP.02) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I see how active family offices are on trying to align the valleys of perhaps next gen family members with the way the portfolios run, large asset managers who just believe this is a very, very strong opportunity in the market right now because a lot of money is seeking a way in, a credible way in, to impact. So I think that that's the state of the SG market and we want to help investors by providing them with data and providing them with products. But I'd also say, quite honestly, this transcends the SD impact. We're talking now about it's a legitimate debate in this country right now about the future of capitalism. Reimagining capitalism It's almost fifty years from the date of Milton Friedman's seminal New York Times piece. That has defined a generation of thinking. Is that thinking fit for the next generation”
2019-06-24 · Capital Allocators · Martin Whittaker – JUST Capital (First Meeting, EP.02) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Resources for the organization. We have some great partners. Obviously, we partnered with Goldman Sachs. Asset management, they've been a wonderful partner on the launch of the ETF. We want to do more with them. You know, we want to get the word out. And thanks to you, Ted, with this podcast. Hopefully that will contribute. We appreciate that. But we're trying to get as many eyeballs on what we're doing on the mission as possible. And it's like any business, you just grind it out day after day and then your moment in the sunlit uplands comes later. I see how active as an investor New York State Common is on climate change.”
2019-06-24 · Capital Allocators · Martin Whittaker – JUST Capital (First Meeting, EP.02) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, we want to have a family of just products. We want to have fixed income. We want to have, I could see us having different active strategies, sectoral strategies, because we obviously the rankings can be quite easily sliced and diced in lots of different ways. So you should see this as a signal that would apply to anywhere where you're looking at a company issued security.”
2019-06-24 · Capital Allocators · Martin Whittaker – JUST Capital (First Meeting, EP.02) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's early right now, I would say a handful, maybe half a dozen or so. We're in discussions with probably twice that number. And it varies, as I said, from we want to develop a brand new product and we want to embed the just signal in that to, hey, we're already running this whole strategy or we're simply data hungry and we think you've got the best data on some of the most important new drivers of corporate performance. So we want to license your data.”
2019-06-24 · Capital Allocators · Martin Whittaker – JUST Capital (First Meeting, EP.02) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We just have to be selective. We have to make sure we're working with people who we believe are doing this for the right reasons and is supportive of the mission.”
2019-06-24 · Capital Allocators · Martin Whittaker – JUST Capital (First Meeting, EP.02) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we think that's great, so we want them to use it. We want them and other active or passive managers to start using our signal. And as I said, provided it's consistent with our mission, channeling capital to more just companies and therefore encouraging more just corporate behavior, then we're right behind that. We want more of it.”
2019-06-24 · Capital Allocators · Martin Whittaker – JUST Capital (First Meeting, EP.02) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's obviously something we encourage. We have a lot of folks since the press and the attention we've received since the ETF launch and our overall marketing efforts as our profile builds. We have a lot of investors who say, hmm, that's an interesting signal. I'd like to use it. How they use it, we want to make sure that it's being applied in a way that's consistent with our mission. What we also want to encourage adoption of our rankings, and we know that investors will use it in different ways depending on their strategies. So a good example is a startup manager, a new manager called Grey Arc that is interested in synactive management strategy. They want our signal. They feel like our signal can be accretive to their own investment decision-making process, their own thinking.”
2019-06-24 · Capital Allocators · Martin Whittaker – JUST Capital (First Meeting, EP.02) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, it produces greenhouse gas emissions, contributes to environmental impacts, but on balance across all those issues, this is where it stacks up. So it's really a very detailed set of due diligence, which quite honestly is as rigorous as any due diligence that I as an investor in my previous life have been through. And I would say appropriately so.”
2019-06-24 · Capital Allocators · Martin Whittaker – JUST Capital (First Meeting, EP.02) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“the investors practically speaking connect with Goldman Sachs because it's their ETF but obviously inevitably they want to know what's under the hood so typically we sit down with them and just walk them through the methodology exactly the same questions you've been asking me where do you get the polling how do you do that Does that really make sense? How do you get the data? How do you think about Exxon or Chevron's an oil company? How can an oil company be in your index? Well, because when you pull the public.”
2019-06-24 · Capital Allocators · Martin Whittaker – JUST Capital (First Meeting, EP.02) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of just companies. We slice and dice it lots of ways. Tends to be very strong. You know, we see the top quintile, bottom quintile in our model, according to Justin, not financial performance, just ranking. There's a material spread. So we think there's a strong investment thesis, but that's not why we're doing this. It's not why we started this.”
2019-06-24 · Capital Allocators · Martin Whittaker – JUST Capital (First Meeting, EP.02) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we started out not to build an investment product, just to be clear. We started out with a mission to build a more just marketplace. It's like turning a light on in a dark room. If we provide the market with information on what companies are doing on things that matter to their workers, their customers, the people who live and work in their communities, those are just better companies. And this is a really interesting, neat, unique way to get a handle on that. And so investors, active, passive the world over are looking for an edge. And we think this is sort of like the proverbial dollar bill on Wall Street on Wall Street on the sidewalk. It can't be real because somebody would have picked it up if it was. Going to the public to say, hey, what do you think is actually kind of a neat way to think about it? Look, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. The performance of the index has been good.”
2019-06-24 · Capital Allocators · Martin Whittaker – JUST Capital (First Meeting, EP.02) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“from the beginning to the creation of the ETF, you're doing this polling to see what matters. You're then doing all this research to see how companies stack up. But all along the way in that process, you started with the hypothesis that this was better for performance. We're going to follow the money. At what point in time did you say, well, maybe we should see if these companies actually do better in corporate performance”
2019-06-24 · Capital Allocators · Martin Whittaker – JUST Capital (First Meeting, EP.02) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you're thinking about where do I get data on companies? How do I know what companies are really doing on these issues that I'm interested in or I'm tracking or that I think are financially relevant? We want you to come to just capital. You can use our data as a feed. You can invest in our ETF hopefully one day we'll have a family of products. But that's the idea is to try and make it easy for investors who want exposure to these trends or who just believe this is just a great investment approach to put a dollar down and support us that way.”
2019-06-24 · Capital Allocators · Martin Whittaker – JUST Capital (First Meeting, EP.02) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so we publish all of that. But we believe that there's a very strong signal here that's actually very interesting, undiscovered, drives alpha, helps investors think about risk in a new way, keeps people up to speed with what's going on today socially, politically, and thinks about that as an investment lens. So the model can be used in lots of different ways. So if you're an ESG investor or an impact investor,”
2019-06-24 · Capital Allocators · Martin Whittaker – JUST Capital (First Meeting, EP.02) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's completely user friendly and flexible and can be customized. We then launched a couple years ago, we took the top 50% of companies in every sector and we create an index. And we launched the index for FTSE Russell, and then Goldman Sachs Asset Management licensed that index late 2017. And in June 2018, we launched the Just ETF, which is an exchange traded fund on the New York Stock Exchange, JUST is the ticker. So that's one way that we have created a product that an investor could say, yeah, I like that approach, actually. The wisdom of the crowd, I believe that there's something there. And we do a lot of work to try and understand that just alpha. So what is the investment case? What is the business case for being a just company?”
2019-06-24 · Capital Allocators · Martin Whittaker – JUST Capital (First Meeting, EP.02) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we reach out to the companies and we say, hey, we're going to be tracking you on these things. Here's just capital. Let me introduce you. This is what we do. And here's the data we have on you. And we give the companies a chance to comment and to give us data and to question data. And so the companies start to get bought in. And, you know, the last 18 months, we've had a tripling of the number of companies that are in engagement with us now 360, 370 of the almost 900 companies we rank. So I think the company is sort of like this idea that we're actually out there to try to reflect their performance accurately. So then we take that and we rank the company's head to head, one to a thousand. We rank them by industry. We've built the model in a way and our website in a way that you could rank any company on any issue and compare them head to head.”
2019-06-24 · Capital Allocators · Martin Whittaker – JUST Capital (First Meeting, EP.02) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It depends on the issue. You know, you partner with academic institutions on our living wage work, for example. We partner with MIT, our human rights work. We're working with lots of groups focused on business and human rights in the supply chain. So we partner with experts. We're always on the hunt for data. And over five years now, we've been doing this. We've gathered a huge amount of data and we're constantly looking to work through that in terms of its quality and its accuracy. We're also very transparent. The other thing you've got to know about us is the methodology, the data sources, all of that we make public. We then go to the companies and we've built an online portal.”
2019-06-24 · Capital Allocators · Martin Whittaker – JUST Capital (First Meeting, EP.02) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so let me connect those dots a little bit. So, from our model from the polling, we get the components that are weighted and they roll up to these seven drivers. Now our team then analyzes the Russell 1000 companies. So we take those companies, we gather data, the best quality data that we can get our hands on on all of those things.”
2019-06-24 · Capital Allocators · Martin Whittaker – JUST Capital (First Meeting, EP.02) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To start working towards what you do with this. And the first observation I had is as you walk through those seven criteria in the investment world, and people think about impact investing and these types of things, you hear the acronym ESG, environmental, social, and governance. And the E wasn't that high on your list, and the G was at the very bottom. As you've looked at the results of your poll and thought about what's actually happening in the impact investing universe, what do you see happening that you'd like to inform people either shouldn't be or should be weighted differently?”
2019-06-24 · Capital Allocators · Martin Whittaker – JUST Capital (First Meeting, EP.02) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've built our team, we try to stack it with data scientists and decision modelers so that we're really as accurately as we can presenting this very, very strong public polling opinion on what a just company is.”
2019-06-24 · Capital Allocators · Martin Whittaker – JUST Capital (First Meeting, EP.02) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Components of the model, so pays a fair wage, provides good benefits, invests in local communities, provides good jobs and so on and so forth. Those things come direct from the public. And then we do a final phase, which is a quantitative polling where people are forced to make a choice between two types of companies. If you rotate the things that vary between those companies, at the end of that, and you do that thousands and thousands of times, you get the weighting. And so if you were to take one of our polls, you'd be confronted with two companies. We don't name companies. So whenever polling on actual companies, these are all company A company B because we don't want to get any brand confusion with naming actual companies. Company A, company B, and we'll have four attributes and they'll vary. And so this approach is well used in consumer choice and decision modeling.”
2019-06-24 · Capital Allocators · Martin Whittaker – JUST Capital (First Meeting, EP.02) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we start out with focus groups. So we bring seven, eight, nine people together, blank sheet of paper. What does a just company look like to you? So people talk about that. Then the moderators obviously trained at these things. We start to introduce ideas now from previous years. What do you think about this? What do you think about that? Without kind of putting our finger on the scale, that from the focus groups, and we've done dozens of these now all around the country. And from that, you get a sense of the issues. We then can group them together in different groups which we then put to the test through qualitative polling. We'll conduct qualitative polling where we're testing the use of different words and language to people understand what we're talking about. Are people confused? Are they conflating two things which are separate in our model? So the qualitative helps us actually name the specific”
2019-06-24 · Capital Allocators · Martin Whittaker – JUST Capital (First Meeting, EP.02) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we went to great lengths to make sure we weren't leaving out people who weren't online. You know, we do telephone direct interviews. We wanted to make sure we were reaching people in all parts of the country from all economic brackets. So that was the second objective is to make sure that we couldn't be accused of bias in any way in the results. And then the third objective was really to try and capture with as much accuracy as possible how people really felt about these things. We feel as though we're kind of journalists in a way. We want to be as true to form as we can to make sure that we're capturing people's real views today, 2019 on what is a just company look like.”
2019-06-24 · Capital Allocators · Martin Whittaker – JUST Capital (First Meeting, EP.02) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we wanted absolute technical rigor. We wanted this thing to be academic quality, peer review quality, stand up to scrutiny by the American Association of Public Opinion Research. We wanted this to be pristine. So we ran a process and we ended up partnering with the National Opinion Research Center, the University of Chicago. They've been our partners for the last four years. They're awesome. They do incredibly high quality work. They have the Amerispek panel, which is fully representative of American society. So that's the second piece. We wanted to make sure the polling wasn't biased in any way.”
2019-06-24 · Capital Allocators · Martin Whittaker – JUST Capital (First Meeting, EP.02) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source