Founder's Note
Supporting the individuals building institutional resilience amidst structural change
The institutional investment ecosystem is made up of organizations with widely varying time horizons, institutional constraints, and incentives. At the same time, those institutions are populated by individuals who must regularly decide how to interpret and apply the institutional mandates and roles they’re tasked with carrying out when faced with new information, new counterparts, or new opportunities.
In an age of major global economic, political, and social upheaval, with wars, geopolitics, artificial intelligence-driven economic growth as well as job losses, energy volatility, nature loss, climate change, rising economic inequality, inflation, and an affordability crisis all combining to generate uncertainty about the future of our society, economy, and planet, the individuals within institutions are confronted near-daily with challenging questions about how to act and what to prioritize. Questions such as:
Is our asset allocation sufficiently diversified to mitigate the risks and capture the opportunities driven by global demographic trends, economic growth, and shifting supply chains?
Is our mandate from our board flexible enough to allow our asset class teams to make tactical thematic allocations to a rising theme, or do we need to engage them to discuss further?
Do we have access to the data we need to inform our decision-making process on an emerging risk topic? If not, who can provide us that data, and will it fit into our existing investment workflows?
Do our existing managers have the offerings we need to access our identified priority growth areas, or do we need to run a search? If we’re seeking a more niche exposure, does the investment product we’re looking for exist on the market today? If not, how can we source an effective solution?
And, perhaps most crucially for many institutional professionals “If I bring any of these challenging questions up to my superiors, am I putting my career and professional standing at risk?
Business as usual versus structural vectors
Oakledge’s approach to serving our clients is oriented toward helping the individuals within institutions to navigate structural change and transitions in the global economy. We take this human first approach because we ourselves have had to grapple with visceral, career-defining choices and moments where we’ve chosen to spend our political capital within our organizations in service of the long-term health of the institution, despite the inconvenience it may cause our superiors in the moment.
For better or worse, we are in a moment where it appears that what was previously accepted as “business as usual” is simply not going to be possible, as there are simply too many destabilizing structural vectors at play politically, economically, socially, and environmentally, as noted earlier. These vectors will force challenging questions to arise for institutions, their leaders, and their staff, and the actions institutions take in response may themselves raise further questions among stakeholders.
What our approach means in practice
Oakledge supports robust data- and insight-informed decision making by the individuals within institutions, as we believe that helping individuals in positions of authority to see the world around them and potential future pathways more clearly will lead their institutions – and our society as a whole – towards a more resilient and flourishing future.
As practitioners who have sat in various seats within different actors in the institutional ecosystem, we recognize that, for many clients, our unconflicted and system-aware perspective is our most valuable offering, allowing us to reflect back to an actor occupying one part a view into what the whole might look like, and where their institution sits within it. We sell no products and take no success or placement fees; our only stake is in helping our clients to see the board clearly enough to navigate the moments when prudence and pressure pull in opposite directions.
Seeking to sit in our clients’ seats, to see the world through their eyes, is to bring empathy into the realm of effectiveness. Our clients will not be effective if we cannot provide solutions that speak to their actual circumstances, and when those clients are deciding how to best allocate millions and billions of dollars, their effectiveness has global implications.
When decisions are made more clearly, capital can move with more wisdom – that is the difference Oakledge seeks to make in the world.