Joseph (Jay) Bragdon is a money manager for high net worth families and a pioneer in the field of corporate stewardship. He co-authored the first empirical study on the linkages between stewardship and profitability in 1972. Titled “Is Pollution Profitable?” it was published in the insurance industry journal Risk Management (Volume 19, Number 4). He also co-chaired the first national symposium on “Corporate Responsibility in Investments” at the Harvard Business School.
In the early 1990s his research approach was transformed from the linear thinking processes of traditional corporate analysis to the non-linear (holistic) processes of systems thinking. To assess the viability of this new approach, he created in 1996 a learning lab of corporate LAS exemplars, which later became the Global LAMP Index®. Through an iterative series of tests and refinements, the lab was completed in 2004.
Profit For Life (2006) presented LAS as a strategically superior model of corporate management – one that is fast overtaking the traditional industrial capitalist model. This remains the central focus of Jay’s work.
Jay is a research member of the Society for Organizational Learning and a board member of the Sustainability Institute – both centers of applied systems thinking.
