The Person once again first
A slim book adds another factor to the ESG criteria – a focus on humans – to give them the full importance they should have
Is an ESG world really more sustainable? Massimo Lapucci and Stefano Lucchini try to answer this somewhat surprising question in a short but comprehensive book that has just been published. The meaning of “Ritrovare l’umano” (Rediscovering the human) is immediately apparent from its subtitle: “Because there is no sustainability without Health, Human and Happiness”. And this comes from an observation: the famous criteria for verifying and measuring environmental, social and governance impacts are certainly necessary to define and improve companies and investments in terms of sustainability, but in recent years their importance has sometimes been exaggerated, altered by communication needs or eroded to the point of becoming a bureaucratic requirement or a mere budget quantification. Conditions found in most approaches that companies at all levels have to the topic.
In order to adapt the acronym ESG and its approach to the speed of current changes, Lapucci and Lucchini argue for the addition of an “H” as the real leap that needs to be made to transform ESG into an adequate tool for progress focussed on “quality of the future”. The H – as the book’s subtitle states – of Health, but also of Human, of Heart and Happiness. An approach that is not only lexical but also substantial, and that can be traced back to four aims: make ESG more visible to people and communities, create a model that makes ESG natural and necessary before it is useful, share ESG more widely and, finally, free it from the elitist connotations that have characterised it to date.
Lapucci and Lucchini arrive at these conclusions by tracing the historical evolution of the industrial revolutions, through to the most topical issues of work, AI and ethical finance, drawing up a truly pragmatic manifesto on the ESG of the future and accompanying the reader in the rediscovery of that impulse, already expressed in the Age of Enlightenment, which looks to place the dignity of the Person (not by chance written with a capital P) at the centre of the pursuit of an increasingly indispensable collective well-being.
Ritrovare l’umano
Massimo Lapucci, Stefano Lucchini
Baldini+Castoldi, 2024
A slim book adds another factor to the ESG criteria – a focus on humans – to give them the full importance they should have
Is an ESG world really more sustainable? Massimo Lapucci and Stefano Lucchini try to answer this somewhat surprising question in a short but comprehensive book that has just been published. The meaning of “Ritrovare l’umano” (Rediscovering the human) is immediately apparent from its subtitle: “Because there is no sustainability without Health, Human and Happiness”. And this comes from an observation: the famous criteria for verifying and measuring environmental, social and governance impacts are certainly necessary to define and improve companies and investments in terms of sustainability, but in recent years their importance has sometimes been exaggerated, altered by communication needs or eroded to the point of becoming a bureaucratic requirement or a mere budget quantification. Conditions found in most approaches that companies at all levels have to the topic.
In order to adapt the acronym ESG and its approach to the speed of current changes, Lapucci and Lucchini argue for the addition of an “H” as the real leap that needs to be made to transform ESG into an adequate tool for progress focussed on “quality of the future”. The H – as the book’s subtitle states – of Health, but also of Human, of Heart and Happiness. An approach that is not only lexical but also substantial, and that can be traced back to four aims: make ESG more visible to people and communities, create a model that makes ESG natural and necessary before it is useful, share ESG more widely and, finally, free it from the elitist connotations that have characterised it to date.
Lapucci and Lucchini arrive at these conclusions by tracing the historical evolution of the industrial revolutions, through to the most topical issues of work, AI and ethical finance, drawing up a truly pragmatic manifesto on the ESG of the future and accompanying the reader in the rediscovery of that impulse, already expressed in the Age of Enlightenment, which looks to place the dignity of the Person (not by chance written with a capital P) at the centre of the pursuit of an increasingly indispensable collective well-being.
Ritrovare l’umano
Massimo Lapucci, Stefano Lucchini
Baldini+Castoldi, 2024