Rick Alexander

Rick Alexander, Co-Founder and CEO of The Shareholder Commons, joins Earth Live to discuss a powerful but often overlooked lever for change: the shareholder governance system.

Alexander explains how the current system of corporate governance incentivizes companies to externalize costs onto society and the environment, and why individual company-by-company engagement, while valuable, cannot solve systemic problems like climate change and biodiversity loss. He makes the case for a new approach that shifts the focus from individual company performance to the health of the systems that all companies depend on.

The conversation explores how institutional investors, pension funds, and asset managers can use their collective power to reshape corporate behavior, and what it would take to build a governance system that serves the common good rather than short-term shareholder returns.