In the corporate world, big change starts at the top—which means companies will have to shake up their leadership to fulfill their environmental agendas.

My newsfeed—and probably your newsfeed too—is chockablock with stories about professional workers returning to their offices this summer. What the pandemic’s grand, unwitting experiment has shown is that the structure of work isn’t just habit, it’s culture.

Work culture varies not just industry to industry, but also company to company, and sometimes even worker to worker. Citigroup Inc. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc., for instance, have their global headquarters a few blocks from each other in Manhattan but are miles apart on their workplace policies—hybrid and report-to-your desk, respectively. Meanwhile, younger professionals are anxious about missing out on skills-development and relationship-building, while working parents—having experienced flexibility of time and location—may be less eager to re-engage with their pre-pandemic commutes and intricate schedules.

Just as the work-from-home shock of Covid-19 is forcing companies to reckon with company culture, so too are they increasingly reckoning with how they’ll address climate change. The pandemic could have set climate back on the agenda, but instead, 2020 set records for clean energy deployment, electric vehicle sales, corporate net-zero commitments, and sustainable finance. The global climate is certainly not antifragile, but apparently the business world’s commitments to improve it were.

That said, I think companies are in many ways quite far from being able to engage with the impact their businesses have on the climate—and the impact the climate has on their businesses. Earlier this year, my colleague Tim Quinson highlighted research from Tensie Whelan, a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, on how few corporate board members have a background in environmental, social, and/or governance subjects. I read Whelan’s paper again this week specifically for environmental expertise, and the data are pretty grim.

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