On the morning of September 11, 2001, standing in a conference room in France full of institutional investors from around the world — representing pension, sovereign-wealth, and corporate funds — I spoke about the emergence of an important, but not yet fully recognised, new trend: investing with a conscience. The audience scoffed, to put it mildly. Investing was all about returns.

That afternoon, airplanes struck the World Trade Center, and everything changed. In the days that followed, as the full magnitude of the horror set in, the same people who were sceptical came back to talk to me about investing with a sense of direction and purpose, and in ways that would contribute to something bigger than the bottom line. The investment community had begun to transform its thinking.