Alex Edmans is Professor of Finance at London Business School. He is an expert in purposeful business/sustainable finance/responsible investing; diversity, equity and inclusion; practical investment strategies; the psychology of finance/behavioural economics; the use and misuse of data; and time management.
Alex has a unique combination of deep academic rigour and practical business experience. He is particularly noted for his ability to present complex concepts in non-technical language and an engaging, dynamic manner. Alex Edmans has spoken at the World Economic Forum in Davos, testified in the UK Parliament, and given the TED talk What to Trust in a Post-Truth World and the TEDx talks The Pie Growing Mindset and The Social Responsibility of Business, with a combined 2.8 million views. He previously served as Mercers’ School Memorial Professor of Business at Gresham College, giving a four-year programme of lectures to the public.
Alex Edmans is a leading figure in the reform of business to serve wider society. He serves as Non-Executive Director of The Investor Forum, on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on the Future of Responsible Investing, and on Royal London Asset Management’s Responsible Investment Advisory Committee. The UK government appointed him (jointly with PwC) to study the alleged misuse of share buybacks and the link between executive pay and investment.
Alex has written for the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Harvard Business Review and World Economic Forum and been interviewed by Bloomberg, BBC, CNBC, CNN, ESPN, Fox, ITV, NPR, Reuters, Sky News, and Sky Sports. His book, “Grow the Pie: How Great Companies Deliver Both Purpose and Profit”, was a Financial Times Book of the Year and has been translated into nine languages. He is a co-author of the classic textbook “Principles of Corporate Finance” (with Brealey, Myers, and Allen). His latest book, “May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases – and What We Can Do About It” will be published by Penguin Random House in 2024.
Alex Edmans was named Professor of the Year by Poets & Quants in 2021. He has won 25 teaching awards at Wharton and LBS, featured in Thinkers50 Radar, and elected a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.
Purpose is the corporate buzzword of today, with politicians, the public, and even shareholders calling on businesses to serve wider society. But purpose is also controversial, because companies have a responsibility to deliver returns to investors. Is there a trade-off between purpose and profit, or is it possible for companies to achieve both? This talk will critically examine the case for purposeful business, using rigorous evidence and real-life examples to show what works – and, importantly, what doesn’t. It will discuss practical ways for businesses of all sizes to put purpose into practice – to ensure it guides a company’s day-to-day decisions, is embedded throughout the organisation, and enhances rather than jeopardises long-run shareholder returns.
Interest in sustainable investing is at an all-time high, with savers flocking to ESG funds under the promise of both higher returns and positive social impact. At the same time, there’s a growing chorus of criticism with concerns that funds are “greenwashing” and making false promises. This talk will use rigorous evidence and real-life examples to explain what sustainable investing can realistically achieve, and the best way to do so. It will discuss how to implement sustainable investing in practice – how to handle controversial sectors such as energy and defence, how to overcome the challenges with unreliable data and inconsistent ESG ratings, and how to distinguish companies that are truly purposeful from those that are greenwashing.
ESG is at a peak. Companies are prioritising ESG issues, sometimes even more than mainstream business topics. Investors are selecting companies based on ESG rather than financial criteria, and engaging with companies to improve their ESG. But is ESG an unnecessary distraction that’s at the expense of financial performance? Isn’t it enough for a company to focus exclusively on profit, as long as it takes a long-term approach to profit? This talk will critically examine the case both for and against ESG, and set out of a vision for the future of ESG – how companies and investors can reap its benefits while avoiding the controversies and politics.
Textbook finance theory assumes that investors are rational and markets are efficient. However, real-world investors are human and thus prone to biases. This talk will highlight the main biases that distort our trading decisions, and how to address them to make better investments, at both an individual and a team level. It will also illustrate how the biases of other investors cause markets to be inefficient – stock and bond prices can be overvalued or undervalued – and explain tried-and-tested investment strategies that take advantage of these mistakes.
One of the most dangerous phrases is “evidence shows that …”, because you can almost always find evidence to support any viewpoint. Experts are similarly untrusted, because they may have motives other than the truth. These problems are particularly severe in the digital age where people are bombarded with data and supposed expert opinions. This talk will explain the common mistakes people make in interpreting data, and the biases that cause us to make them. It will provide a practical guide for how to discern whether a particular study or expert opinion is trustworthy – even if we’re pressed for time and don’t have specialist knowledge in the field – and how to create a culture that actively promotes a diversity of thinking.
Classic time management frameworks advise us to focus on the important rather than the urgent. However, these frameworks seem not to be applicable to the 21st century, where technology means that we are constantly bombarded with deadlines, and it is not realistic to simply ignore the urgent. This talk will explain how to focus on important long-term goals but at the same time meet urgent short-term deadlines, how to use email as an effective communication tool without being overwhelmed with it, and how to instil superior time management practices within the teams that we lead. It will be based on insights from behavioural economics which demonstrate the most effective ways to develop new habits.
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