Optimism, in the boardroom, can be a dangerous thing. Not because it is wrong to hope — but because hope, unchecked by structural reality, has a way of becoming a substitute for strategy. And nowhere has that substitution been more visible, or more costly, than in the decade-long experiment with shareholder-driven corporate social responsibility. There was a moment — roughly between 2012 and 2019 — when a genuinely exciting idea took root. The idea was this: governments are b