Edward "Trace", Welch

Internship Description

Trace Welch, ’17BUS, worked as a thought leadership fellow at the Coalition for Inclusive Capitalism, a nonprofit that brings together asset owners, managers, and creators of top global companies to make capitalism more equitable, sustainable, and inclusive through practices that extend the opportunities and benefits of our economic system to everyone. Trace worked on the thought leadership team to develop content and supported the EBUS - Columbia Business Schoolnkment Project, a pilot program that develops a framework for companies and investors to measure and report the impact and value created for all stakeholders.

I was a part of the Thought Leadership team at the Coalition for Inclusive Capitalism.  The Coalition was started by Lady Lynn de Forrester Rothschild in 2014 in response to a growing distrust between society and the business and investment communities. The conference was headlined by Bill Clinton and was such a success that the conference became a regular, annual event and a nonprofit was born. The conference brings together CEOs and top academics and government officials to speak about inclusivity and its executional challenges in an anonymous, peer-to-peer setting.  Based on these conferences the Coalition addresses the best way to push the movement forward. After the 2016 conference, they asked companies to make public commitments. EY committed to developing a framework to properly value investments companies make in nonfinancial investments like workforce development and culture. This turned into the “EBUS - Columbia Business Schoolnkment Project for Inclusive Capitalism” that I worked on. It gathered, with personal buy-in at the CEO required, nearly 30 companies representing $20T from asset owners (Norway Sovereign wealth fund, CalPERs, etc), asset managers (JPM, BlackRock, Vanguard, etc), and companies like Unilever, JNJ, and DuPont.  These companies across the investment value chain will work to develop, test, and refine this framework, with the hopes of allowing companies to fully realize the value they create for all stakeholders and orient capital markets towards a focus on inclusive capitalism. 

I read a number of academic studies to support the work we did, wrote op-eds to argue that market forces are driving a shift that is not being picked up in current cash flow models, and leaned heavily on the social enterprise courses I’ve taken. The Coalition is working with some of the leading investors in the world, and it was important that I both understood their perspectives as well as the perspectives of the companies that they would be investing in. 

The goal of the EBUS - Columbia Business Schoolnkment Project was quite literally to change the way the capital markets function, so there were plenty of challenges. I would categorize two types of challenges. First, the challenges I witnessed and second the challenges I actually faced. The chief challenge I witnessed was simply the friction present when it comes to working with large organizations. As a five person team, the Coalition for Inclusive Capitalism moved very fast. We could shift focus ten times during a day and work on many different projects, while from some of our biggest partners we might be chasing for a week to get an email draft. But regardless of the pace that things seemed to move, once we got in front of the CEOs of these organizations, it was imperative that we be ready to move, weeks of work and waiting were often greenlit or died in a 15 minute conversation with the CEO. I wouldn’t say this is a revolutionary insight, but it was interesting to get a semi-front-row seat to the juxtaposition of organizational level speed vs CEO level speed. Often times the bottleneck for action was a lack of ability to act or ownership of a project. I saw it as a good reminder for future managerial experience how important it is to make sure the right problems elevate and employees are empowered to act on all others. As far as challenges I faced, the biggest one was simply limited time, as my project was only six weeks, though I suspect I would’ve felt like that regardless of the length of the project. Secondly, it was trying to figure out where to focus given such a broad topic. There was a delicate balance when trying to make sure I covered topics with the amount of research they deserved vs. making sure I had enough breadth and diversity among areas we thought about. I would say I actually went into the internship pretty bearish on the ability of any nonprofit or even large institutional investors to really move the needle on “inclusive capitalism” or responsible investing. Because of the convening power of Lady Lynn Rothschild, I think the Coalition is actually capable of doing so because she has attracted the world leaders across the investment value chain. But more importantly perhaps, I was struck by what seemed like genuine belief in and desire to drive this sort of change among the industry players. I had assumed there was a bit of desire to “make the world a better place” when you heard industry chatter, but that it was primarily driven by window-dressing and a default setting of inaction. Rather, it seemed to me that there was desire to undertake this project and support more broadly the inclusive capitalism initiative both because it made business sense, and as a reaction to the shifting market landscape as purpose and profits become more interconnected. CEOs in the project all communicated that the pillars of inclusive capitalism were the best drivers of long-term value creation, but we simply needed a better way to measure and articulate them to be properly valued by the market.