Glossary*

Activist Investor

An activist investor is an individual or institution who purchases a stake in a company to significantly change how it is managed to unlock hidden value to make a profit eventually.

Advisory

Advisory services provide information and advice to mitigate risks using data modeling and experience. Advisory services also help clients create and execute growth opportunities by accessing capital and financing options to reach strategic goals.

Agile Corporate Performance Management

Agile performance management is a business approach to improve employee performance and development by aligning business and employee goals. Agile performance management relies on real-time measurement and feedback.

AI Data Privacy

AI data privacy is a set of practices that address the ethical collection, storage, and use of personal data by artificial intelligence systems. As artificial intelligence systems extract insights from large amounts of personal data, it must protect individual data rights by maintaining confidentiality.

AI-Driven Risk Management

AI-driven risk management is a critical component of the responsible use of artificial intelligence systems. AI-driven risk management drives responsible uses and practices by encouraging organizations to think more critically about relevant contexts and potential negative and positive impacts. Understanding context and exploring potential impacts lowers organizational risks.

Alternative Strategic Investments

Alternative strategic investments are active strategies that supplement traditional investments by providing investments with different risks and returns. They include private capital, real estate, and infrastructure investment. 

Artificial Intelligence Venture Capital

Artificial intelligence venture capital is an investment sector where VC firms invest in AI and software companies.

Asset Performance Management (APM)

Modern Asset Performance Management, or APM, enables innovative digital asset management to increase reliability, maintenance execution, and business performance. APM includes predictive analysis, condition monitoring, and reliability-centered maintenance.

Chief Sustainability Officer

The chief sustainability officer is an executive position that manages a corporation’s environmental and social programs. The rise of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investor activism increased the need for companies to address sustainability and social issues.

Circular Economy

The circular economy is a modern approach that transforms cycles of production and consumption. It emphasizes reusing, repairing, refurbishing, and recycling materials and products for as long as possible to extend their lifecycle. This approach focuses on minimizing waste. The circular economy is different from the traditional linear economic model with its take-make-consume-dispose pattern. The linear approach depends heavily on the availability of cheap, easily accessible materials and energy, often leading to significant waste and environmental impact.

Consulting

Consulting is the practice of providing expert advice to help clients overcome obstacles that are blocking a company’s strategic or operational goals.

Corporate Communications

Corporate communications convey goals and ideals to an organization’s internal and external audiences. Corporate communications must share information that engages audiences to manage brand perception or support internal priorities. An effective communications strategy can help organizations build loyalty by capturing and deepening internal and external narratives.

Corporate Communications Strategy

A corporate communications strategy is structured guidance allowing an organization to effectively communicate with its internal and external audiences. Part of the plan includes information to share, target audiences, frequency of updates, and what channels to use. Having a corporate communications strategy in place shapes how a company will handle communications during times of crisis, change, and launching new initiatives.

Corporate Social Responsibility

Corporate social responsibility focuses on a business’s need to appeal to modern consumers by addressing societal concerns in corporate practices and products. 

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Customer lifetime value, or CLV, is a marketing metric that predicts customer revenue throughout the business relationship. Costs to gain and retain customers are subtracted from the anticipated revenue.

DEIB (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging)

Diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEIB, help build a culture of belonging in an organization. People reach their potential when they feel valued and accepted by being given fair access to company resources. An organization encouraging a diverse work culture will create better outcomes and increase employee satisfaction.

Design Thinking

Design thinking is a process that helps enterprises shift focus to creating products or services that focus on the human point of view and solving problems for the people served by the enterprises. Design thinking helps an organization understand the unmet needs of its intended audience, which reduces risks, generates innovative solutions fast and utilizes the creative talents of an organization’s team members.

Employee Value Proposition (EVP)

An employee value proposition or EVP is a set of benefits an employer provides in return for employees’ skills and experiences. Some common elements of EVPs include compensation, development, culture, and work-life balance. EVPs help find and retain the right employees.

Environmental Venture Capital

Environmental venture capital seeks to increase profits by improving the environment and addressing climate change through innovative technologies that address sustainability. 

ESG

ESG stands for Environmental, Social, and Governance. Investors increasingly analyze ESG factors to identify risks and growth opportunities. 

ESG Goals

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals are non-financial metrics that allow organizations to assess their societal and environmental impacts. ESG goals help organizations manage governance standards, social responsibility, and environmental influence. ESG goals can also positively impact an organization’s bottom line by attracting new customers who want to support responsible consumption, reducing waste, and improving supply chains.

ESG Investing Principles

ESG investing principles include the practices and strategies investors use to take a more holistic view of a company’s practices and products to mitigate risk and find growth opportunities.

ESG Responsibility

ESG responsibility is a company’s duty to use practices that reduce environmental damage and help alleviate social harm.

ESG Shareholder Activism

ESG shareholder activism encompasses activities that shareholders undertake to move a company to protect the environment and society. It can include board elections, proxy contests, and resolutions, among the numerous ways shareholders can urge a company to address ESG issues.

Ethical Leadership

Ethical leadership helps leaders make decisions by considering the needs of a wide array of interests, including their employees, customers, and communities, in addition to the organization’s growth and revenue. Ethical leaders create an organizational culture that values trust, accountability, and transparency.

Group Real Estate Investing

Group real estate investing is a set of investment principles companies use to focus their efforts and capital on real estate ventures.

High-Commitment, High-Performance Management

High-commitment, high-performance management aligns business goals and employee concerns by focusing on fair real-time performance reviews and quick constructive feedback.

Human Capital Consulting

Human capital consulting focuses on human resources planning, professional development, and performance management to maximize the profitability of a company’s workforce through training and development.

Impact Entrepreneurship

Impact entrepreneurship means building a business that seeks to create positive change to help economic systems work toward long-term stability.

Impact Investing

Impact investing provides capital to businesses to generate environmental and social benefits. Impact investing also targets companies with accurate and transparent accounting methods and has policies that address workplace diversity.

Impact Venture Capital

Impact venture capital investments focus on companies that generate social and environmental good while maintaining profitability.

Industrial Clusters

Industrial clusters are geographic areas with multiple companies that take advantage of their proximity to share the benefits of environmental resources and spread climate-related risks.

Integrated Risk Management

Integrated risk management aligns a company’s practices and processes to create a risk-aware workforce and enable technologies to improve decision-making by taking a holistic view of an organization’s management of its unique risks.   

Latticework of Mental Models

The Latticework Mental Model is when individuals use mental models from various disciplines to make better decisions. It encompasses an integrative, multidisciplinary way of thinking. In this model, data is not isolated; it is added to a framework that connects ideas from various fields and disciplines to form an understanding of problems and complex systems.

Modern Real Estate Investing

Modern real estate investing opened up commercial real estate investments to smaller investors by using crowd-funding to finance high-cost real estate development.

Net Zero

Net zero means reducing emissions and removing greenhouse gases to reach a level that prevents climate change from worsening.

Net Zero Food Plan

A net zero food plan is a plan to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions from the food system to zero. The worldwide food system is responsible for nearly a third of global greenhouse gas emissions. Creating a worldwide net zero food system would make a considerable impact on the achievement of climate change targets.

Net Zero Investors

Net zero investors are investors who commit to transitioning their portfolios to net-zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2050. The net-zero commitments are part of the plan to reach the Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting global temperature increases to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels by 2100.

Not-for-Profit Venture Capital

Not-for-profit venture capital funds are a combination of social impact and market approaches that rely on donations to create self-sustaining funds invested in companies working to solve societal issues.

Operational Efficiency

Operational efficiency measures an organization’s ability to reduce waste in resources like people, equipment, time, and inventory to serve the business efficiently, making the company leaner, agile, and more profitable.

Pay Equity

Pay equity means employees who perform similar jobs should receive similar pay, regardless of their gender, race, ethnicity, or other status. It’s also known as equal pay for work of equal value. 

Pay Inequality

Pay inequality, also known as pay disparity, occurs when employees with similar work experience and backgrounds are paid differently for reasons that aren’t justified by job-related factors.

Portfolio Diversification

Portfolio diversification aims to reduce risk by spreading investments across various industries, instruments, or other categories. It also reduces the volatility of your investments over time.

Predictive Maintenance

Predictive maintenance uses data analytics to identify anomalies that can predict equipment defects to enable fast repairs before failures start. It builds on condition-based monitoring to optimize the performance and lifespan of equipment.

Private and Public Organizations

Economies contain both public and private sectors that are combined to reach a total gross domestic product.

Private Capital Investments

Private capital investments use raised capital to invest in privately controlled companies.

Private Equity Real Estate Strategies

Private equity real estate strategies include core, core-plus, value-added, or opportunistic investment models to allocate funds according to the desired risk and return levels.

Private Sector Business

Private sector businesses are part of the economy run by private citizens or for-profit companies without state control.

Public Sector Organization

Public sector organizations are part of the economy that includes all organizations owned and operated by the government, including infrastructure, the armed services, law enforcement agencies, and infrastructure.

Real Estate Investment Financing

Real estate investment financing is a method for securing funds from an outside entity for a real estate venture.

Real Estate Debt Investing

Real estate debt investment provides borrowers with short-term private funding for real estate projects.

Real Estate Development Financing

Real estate development financing provides borrowers capital to finish or expand real estate development ventures.

Risk Management

Risk management identifies and assesses threats to a company’s assets or earning potential, including legal liability, management errors, natural disasters, market drops, and disruptive new technologies.

Sales Enablement

Sales enablement is the process of equipping sales teams with everything they need to engage potential customers. Sales enablement provides the tools to sell more effectively and productively.

Social Innovation

Social innovation is the process of creating solutions to social and environmental issues to improve the well-being of society while still contributing to economic growth.

Social Venture Fund

Social venture funds provide loans to businesses and non-profits addressing environmental or societal issues.

Strategic Advisory

Strategic advisories use their experience and knowledge to provide organizations with expert guidance to help achieve their goals.

Strategic Business Consultants

Strategic business consultants provide their industry knowledge to objectively assess high-level business issues and offer solutions to help a company reach its goal.

Supply Chain Risk Management (SCRM)

Supply chain risk management or SCRM involves identifying, assessing, and mitigating supply chain risks to optimize operations and prevent disruptions. It includes managing wide-ranging risks, from logistics to compliance.

Sustainable Banking

Sustainable banking challenges traditional banking practices to factor in social and environmental impacts when establishing financial policies and projects.

Third-Party Risk Management (TPRM)

Third-party risk management or TPRM identifies, assesses, manages, and monitors risks from third-party organizations in a business relationship with an organization. Third-party risks could negatively impact the organization’s data, finances, operations, or reputation.

Venture Philanthropy 

Venture philanthropy redirects venture capital to support philanthropic goals.

Women’s Economic Empowerment

Women’s economic empowerment is a process that aims to create more equitable economic systems where women have equal access to resources, assets, and income. This process also involves women exercising agency and power to challenge inequalities.

Zero-Based Budgeting (ZBB)

Zero-based budgeting, or ZBB, is a method that requires justification of every expense for each new period. No balances are carried over from prior periods. ZBB is an effective tool for finding and eliminating unnecessary costs.

*The terms and definitions set forth in this section are for informational purposes only. They do not serve as a legal standard for such definitions and may not be relied upon for business decisions or other representations.