Sir Ronald Cohen
Impact: Reshaping Capitalism to Drive Real Change
Summary
Sir Ronald Cohen discusses his book, Impact (2020), and how we can reshape our economic system from a polluter and driver of inequality into a powerful force for good, distributing opportunity more fairly, and bringing solutions to our great social and environmental challenges.
Sir Ronald Cohen
Sir Ronald Cohen is chairman of the Global Steering Group for Impact Investment and The Portland Trust. He is a cofounder director of Social Finance UK, USA, and Israel, and cofounder chair of Bridges Fund Management and Big Society Capital. For nearly two decades, Sir Ronald’s pioneering initiatives in driving impact investment have catalyzed several global efforts, each focused on driving private capital to serve social and environmental good. These efforts are leading the global impact investment movement toward an Impact Revolution. He is a graduate of Oxford University and has an MBA from Harvard Business School to which he was awarded a Henry Fellowship. In 2007, Sir Ronald published The Second Bounce of the Ball: Turning Risk into Opportunity. Sir Ronald lives in Tel Aviv, London, and New York with his wife of more than thirty years, Sharon Harel-Cohen, who is a film producer. They have two children, Tamara and Jonny.
Carly Maisel
Carly Maisel is the global CEO of Kirsh Philanthropies.
Impact for me is the effect we have on the lives of other people and on the environment of our planet. And impact investment is having the intention when we invest to achieve a social or an environmental good, as well as to make a profit.
So I think each of us has a role to play in the impact revolution, whether it’s as a consumer buying the product that each of us has to buy, whether it is as an employee of a company making a choice of where we want to work, whether it is as a pension saver, there’s 38 trillion of investment in pension funds today. If we’re working for companies, know what our pension funds are doing with our money. They’re polluting, and they are creating social issues without realising it.
I think we have to reskill. Reskilling is going to be part of our society. Technological change comes so quickly now. We can no longer live with the notion that we can take on a profession and just stick with it all the way through without any risk. Obviously, there’s some professions where you can do that, but most professions, you can’t. Even accounting, you’re going to have to shift from measuring profit to measuring impact. Leaving people with their traditional skills is basically to condemn them to permanent unemployment.