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E19 - Alison Taylor, Clinical Associate Professor at NYU Stern
71 Plays1 month ago
Can companies save the world? In this episode, Alison Taylor, author of Higher Ground and Clinical Associate Professor at NYU Stern School of Business, shares thought-provoking views. She brings two decades of experience consulting with multinational companies on sustainability, culture, stakeholder engagement, and political risk. Together, we explore how corporate responsibility has evolved, why reputational risk is not the same as trust, and what needs to change in how we hold businesses accountable. Alison challenges the myth that companies can solve every global issue. Instead, she urges us to go back to basics and ensure that "do no harm" principles actually translate into reality. Clean up your own house. Be honest and transparent about trade-offs. We also talk about the global disconnect between ESG promises and everyday realities, especially in emerging markets, and the importance of centering voices from those markets in decision-making. This is a conversation for anyone who has ever felt disillusioned by corporate sustainability and still wants to believe change is possible.
Please review the episode, share your feedback, and subscribe to the podcast!
You can also:
- Visit our website: womenchangingfinance.org
- Read Alison's full bio
- Follow Alison on LinkedIn
To go further, here are some of the references mentioned during the episode:
- Higher Ground (book by Alison Taylor): https://www.alisontaylor.co/higher-ground
- NYU Stern School of Business: https://www.stern.nyu.edu
- Ethical Systems: https://www.ethicalsystems.org
- Transparency International: https://www.transparency.org
- CDP (Carbon Disclosure Project): https://www.cdp.net
- Edelman Trust Barometer: https://www.edelman.com/trust-barometer
- Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment: https://ccsi.columbia.edu
- Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL): https://www.cisl.cam.ac.uk
- We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, by Musa al-Gharbi: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691232607/we-have-never-been-woke?srsltid=AfmBOopG6upUXUne1RaD75_oh9ESQ1rasEqDWDR_0xLQswWTzFF9GkAF
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Transcript
Introduction to Women Changing Finance
00:00:05
Speaker
Hi, welcome to the podcast Women Changing Finance, where you will discover amazing women from all around the world who are making finance become a force for good.
00:00:21
Speaker
Welcome to the podcast Women Changing Finance.
Meet Alison Taylor: Sustainability and Responsibility Advocate
00:00:24
Speaker
I'm Krisztina Tora and I'm welcoming today Alison Taylor, a Clinical Associate Professor at NYU Stern School of Business and former Executive Director at Ethical Systems.
00:00:34
Speaker
She is also the author of a book called Higher Ground and a practitioner who has spent the past two decades consulting with multinational companies on many issues relating to sustainability and corporate responsibilities.
00:00:46
Speaker
Alison, have for a long time been inspired by your work and your very bold voice on corporate responsibility. It's an inspiration and it's a real pleasure to have you on the show today. So welcome.
00:00:57
Speaker
Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. It's wonderful to be here. Thank you. So my first question is actually quite simple. I would love to get your views on exactly that question, corporate responsibility.
Has Corporate Responsibility Improved?
00:01:10
Speaker
Have businesses become more responsible and more sustainable? Where are we? What's the state of play? Can you describe evolutions or trends that you're seeing? Gosh, what a big question to start with. I mean, I think one way I would put this situation that we're in is that I think globally, we're having an extremely high stakes conversation about the role of business in society, about the enormous externalities, both positive and negative, that business generates.
00:01:41
Speaker
about the relative role of government, business, and civil society, and then about the mechanisms that we can use to drive more corporate accountability. So i think it would be hard to unpack this very simple question about whether things are getting better or worse.
00:01:59
Speaker
I think one, you know, we can say that a few things have happened over the past several decades. I think one is that we have globally become far more aware of the negative externalities generated by business.
Social Media's Impact on Business Accountability
00:02:13
Speaker
I think the rise of social media drives new forms of accountability and new forms of disclosure. So the rise of social media, the fact that anybody can capture anything on a smartphone, really the reality that you can no longer control the narrative as a corporation, no longer control your reputation, forces a much more dynamic and interactive relationship with a far wider group of stakeholders.
00:02:38
Speaker
We've seen shifts in messaging, I think, to really account for these ah far greater environmental and social pressures awareness. And then last but not least, I think we're seeing profound value-driven generational shifts in what we're expecting from work, what we're expecting from corporations, how we feel about the political process.
00:03:01
Speaker
So I think we're seeing huge kind of systemic recalibrations. If we want to narrow down on the corporate responsibility topic, I think we've we're leaving an era where there were very aggressive claims being made about the win-win nature of driving environmental and social responsibility.
Beyond Shareholder Value: New Focus on ESG
00:03:24
Speaker
There has been somewhat of a deuct denial of trade-offs of saying that if you're environmentally and socially responsible, you're always make more money, you'll always drive more shareholder value, ESG drives alpha, that kind of thing.
00:03:35
Speaker
I think we're now emerging from that era of over-promising and unconvincing claims. If you're in the US, as I am we see a lot of throwing the baby out of the bathwater, a lot of dialing back and abandoning everything. But I don't really believe that going back to Milton Friedman and a exclusive focus on shareholder value is an option.
00:03:54
Speaker
So the question is, what are we going to do differently? How are we going to reshape the narrative? How are we going to, and this then touches on your work, how are we going to become more realistic about the relationship between societal institutions and how we can think more so in a more smart and sophisticated way about how we design those incentives to get the kind of results we want?
Morals, Values, and Business Role in Society
00:04:16
Speaker
And the final thing I'll say is I think this is a conversation ultimately about morals and values. I think it is a normative conversation about the kind of world that we wish to live in And I think one of the problems we've had is the rather simplistic idea that the market's just going to solve all this on its own.
00:04:32
Speaker
Yes. Can I just jump on this question of morals and values? Someone recently in a conference said, what we really need to do is to get together and have a consensus on what is the role of business?
00:04:46
Speaker
What is the purpose of business? Because so much comes from that philosophical definition of the purpose of business. Can you say more on your thinking about that?
00:04:56
Speaker
I mean, I think in one sense, this is a really excellent point. Like if we think about globally, how different attitudes are and corporate governance notions are and regulations are about this role of business in society.
00:05:12
Speaker
In America, we tend to act as if shareholders own the company, as if driving shareholder value is the sole purpose of the corporation. But you go to a lot of Europe, and I've been spending a lot of time in Scandinavia, as an example.
00:05:26
Speaker
In Scandinavia, you will have much more of a consensus that there is a social contract, that there is a role for business to play in supporting the public interest, that corporations that undermine the public interest ought to be under a lot of pressure.
00:05:41
Speaker
You go to Asia, you have this notion that the government can design and roll out regulation that will incentivize business to drive certain things. So we have, I think it is correct that the role of business in society and what we expect and how we regulate and drive that accountability is the ultimate question.
00:06:00
Speaker
I think we may be being overly optimistic to say that we can come together and and reach a consensus on this conversation. Because I think this inconsistency and managing this inconsistency of values, of notions, I mean, we're in an era where capitalism is being contested, democracy is being contested, where values are really, really high stakes, where we're really polarized. So I doubt that we will see an emerging consensus anytime soon, i but I would fully agree that this is the ultimate question.
Ethical Practices vs. Grand Claims
00:06:29
Speaker
Perfect. perfect So let's talk a little bit about your book. and It's called Higher Ground. And my first question is that i saw that in an interview where you were discussing the book, you said companies can't save the world. It's time. Stop trying.
00:06:44
Speaker
Tell us why. and also tell us about your book, why you decided to write it and what kinds of recommendations it contains. Sure. So i suppose ah one of the core, there are a few core central arguments in my book.
00:06:59
Speaker
ah One of them is that before a corporation should goes out promising to save the world, they should do their best to make their own business better first, do no harm, clean up their mess, treat their workers with dignity and respect.
00:07:12
Speaker
So what I think we've seen is something different, which is that corporations have maybe not been accountable ah to their negative externalities, have not done their best to make their business better, but have gone out there making implausible net zero claims, implausible claims to care for their stakeholders, implausible claims about balancing and addressing diverse stakeholder interests.
00:07:37
Speaker
We've seen too many public-facing PR-driven commitments and not enough focus on strict materiality and the problems business can actually solve. We've seen a lot of rhetoric around how business should think more systemically.
00:07:51
Speaker
And that seems to translate into we're going to over-promise on all the kind of systemic challenges we can take on and solve. Whereas my perspective would be thinking systemically means let's get clear about what a corporation is and how it's governed.
Genuine Action over Superficial Efforts
00:08:07
Speaker
Let's get clear that a corporate executive is not a government official.
00:08:11
Speaker
Stakeholders are not an electorate. Let's get clear that many corporations are simultaneously promising to solve climate change. And then they have their government relations teams lobbying to make sure nothing is done about climate change.
00:08:25
Speaker
Let's address that inconsistency. Let's stop pushing corporations into over-promising on 40 things. Let's have some plausible commitments they can actually fulfill. And let's get out of this kind of corporate responsibility theater.
00:08:39
Speaker
And one thing I would say that may be controversial and people that are listening may disagree with is that I think the sustainability community, I wouldn't say it holds core responsibility for the situation that we were in but I think has unfortunately shaped a narrative where um corporate responsibility is seen as theater, is seen as PR claims, is seen as messaging at the expense of action. and that's the era I think we need to get beyond.
00:09:06
Speaker
okay So that's a very, very excellent point to get started on this discussion. So tell us more, like, what are the recommendations exactly that you're making for the businesses, but also for the sustainability community?
00:09:21
Speaker
And maybe can you give examples of, well, perhaps
Steps for Running Ethical Businesses
00:09:24
Speaker
things that you have seen gone wrong and have improved or good practices that you think can be implemented in other places? Yeah.
00:09:33
Speaker
So the goal of the book is to say, is to try and answer a very simple, arguably simplistic question, which is to say, if you were trying to run a good, ethical, responsible business in the 2020s, how would you do that? And what would that look like?
00:09:48
Speaker
My perspective is there is an overwhelming amount of bad advice on this topic out there. So I try to provide good advice in this context where so many people think that business leaders are greedy and bad faith, whereas I have so many conversations with leaders that I think would like to do the right thing and don't know how.
00:10:06
Speaker
I make many recommendations for how to do this throughout the book. One of them I've mentioned already, you know, I think you need to first of all focus on making your business better. Just to pick up on some of the points I was making earlier, an example would be Unilever, which is a company I advise and I'm paid to advise. So full disclosure there.
00:10:24
Speaker
But we can think about Unilever as a poster child for sustainability, is famous for its sustainability commitments and for shaping the field for a long time. If you look at Unilever's materiality map a few years ago, you will see most of the sustainable development goals on this.
00:10:39
Speaker
You will see enormous big picture commitments. You will see a laundry list of commitments and goals. You will see a suggestion that a soap and mayonnaise company can really take on and solve a lot of wider systemic challenges.
00:10:54
Speaker
More recently, I think Unilever has taken a change of direction, which is not due to me at all. And they've said we will focus on four issues, nature, livelihoods, climate, plastics.
00:11:06
Speaker
They have acknowledged their failures. They have recalibrated their goals. They've acknowledged their failures, particularly on plastics. They have aligned their policy commitments around these four goals.
00:11:17
Speaker
This is, to me, a much more realistic and restrained vision for the future of corporate responsibility than their former vision. i think the wider question we need to ask ourselves as the sustainability community is that why we can only ever think of a couple of poster children, why we can only ever think of a few companies that we think are doing well,
00:11:37
Speaker
The vast majority of companies get critiqued. So we are not providing an achievable vision, i think, for corporate leaders, even those that want to act in good faith. And that's not to deny the level of cynicism and manipulation going on around this topic.
00:11:53
Speaker
It is just to say that even if you were trying to give good practical advice, there is a lot of bad impractical advice to wade through in the first place. Any bad advice that you would advise against?
00:12:04
Speaker
but Balance the interests of your stakeholders. This is about managing trade-offs. At some point, you're going to have to make choices. You're going to have to manage these trade-offs. You can't do everything. Stop promising to address issues where you have no leverage and no legitimacy.
00:12:19
Speaker
So what happened to stakeholder capitalism in your view? I think it's too generic. I think it used reputational risk as the gauge of success. Reputational risk is not a linear accountability mechanism. It's a funhouse mirror.
00:12:37
Speaker
If you look at activist campaigns and who activists target when they're trying to drive change, they don't just target ExxonMobil and Chevron. They target Unilever and Starbucks because if you can get a company like Starbucks to move on labor rights, That will put pressure on the rest of the sector.
00:12:55
Speaker
There is a misunderstanding, I think, about who gets reputational pressure and on what basis and how that tracks with performance. More broadly, I think we're assuming that the average consumer, and bear in mind that you and I are have some expertise here, I find myself in the supermarket wondering what kind of coffee and vegetables to buy and trying to pass all these claims and labels.
00:13:17
Speaker
I don't know how the average busy person who is worried about inflation is supposed to unpack this and somehow call corporations accountable. So I think there's a lot of mist busting to do. And I think one of the things that we can all do collectively in the sustainability community is to try and provide a more practical path that doesn't suggest unless you're perfectly sustainable in all dimensions right now, you have nothing to say and nothing to offer.
00:13:40
Speaker
That's great. That's very pragmatic. So you talk also a lot about transparency in your work. Can you reflect on well, where we're at with the idea of transparency driving
Transparency and True Accountability
00:13:52
Speaker
sustainability? t We have a lot of standards out there where there is a lot of backlash against ESG.
00:13:58
Speaker
What are your views and how do you see but the potential of transparency? So I like transparency. I work for Transparency International, but I do think it's another angle on the question of how maybe the sustainability discourse does not fully reflect reality. So we almost hyphenate transparency and accountability. If you look at the founding documents of CDP in 2000, they basically say, we've got all these investors backing this, we're going to drive climate disclosure, we've got however many trillion dollars behind this, we'll get the information and then we'll solve climate change.
00:14:36
Speaker
I think it's illustrative that it's 25 years later and we're still arguing about what disclosure is even required and whether scope three is appropriate. So we did not meet that goal of we'll get the information, then we'll act, and then we'll solve the problem.
00:14:50
Speaker
We're still arguing about what needs to be disclosed. And then we still are telling a story that if people get the information, investors get the information, stakeholders get the information, they'll behave in this very predictable,
00:15:03
Speaker
way. They'll assess the information completely. They'll be fair. It will be perfect. And then we'll somehow use this information to drive accountability. I mean, this is just not happening.
00:15:14
Speaker
What instead is happening is we have an enormous industry of accountants and consultants and auditors and investors that have created this kind of ESG machine.
00:15:26
Speaker
And we ended up with a lot of companies shifting from treating this whole topic as empty PR to treating this whole topic as the tick box compliance. And so I'm certainly not saying these disclosures are bad or unnecessary. do not know why they suck up 90% of the discourse and effort.
00:15:44
Speaker
There are other conversations that we need to be having. One of them is the conversation and the the thinking that you're driving on kind of financing mechanisms and the role of government and the role of business and the role of investors and thinking at a much more systemic level about what we can expect from these actors and how they can work together.
00:16:04
Speaker
So in short, I don't think requiring a lot of ESG metrics, even if you were to regulate it, is going to get us out of the mess that we're currently in. Thanks for this. And maybe just to to kind of ask you back, let's say one of the things that some of our colleagues are working on is impact valuation. So bringing in and valuing in the financial balance sheets,
00:16:28
Speaker
the negative externalities. So that's for us, that's impact transparency and that's a goal that we want to pursue. What's your take on that? Wouldn't that be helpful as an incentive for companies to really take the negative externalities that they're creating into account and manage them?
00:16:47
Speaker
I think it's extremely valuable work. I mean, that is the underlying issue, which is the externalities are not properly valued in the balance sheet. We can think of ESG as a highly imperfect response to the rise of intangible factors in driving corporate value.
00:17:04
Speaker
we know that traditional financial reporting and accounting mechanisms do not capture these issues. So impact valuation seems to me a really important thread of the conversation.
00:17:15
Speaker
What I worry about is some of these things aren't easy to quantify. Causation isn't easy to quantify. If we take, let's say we take a really basic example, what is the impact of a pharmaceutical company on driving more positive health outcomes in a particular community?
00:17:33
Speaker
What's the contribution of that organization? What's the contribution of wider public policy? What's the contribution of factors beyond the company's control? This gets pretty esoteric and complicated pretty quickly.
00:17:45
Speaker
So my only caution would be, could sound like another great reason to waste another decade arguing about metrics and measurement rather than actually getting on with acting.
Immediate Action vs. Perfect Metrics
00:17:55
Speaker
Like I think in most corporations, those corporations are well aware of the scale of their negative externalities. that what That's what they go to so much effort to message and hide around.
00:18:07
Speaker
And they do not need to wait for perfect impact valuation to start acting on these topics. Yes, I mean, action, this is the driver, right? But within that realm, i think one of your you know starting comments was also about trust and how polarized the system has gotten and how it's really important to rebuild trust.
00:18:28
Speaker
You've been one of the few actually writing about the Edelman Trust Barometer. So I want to hear about that. But I also want to hear more importantly about about this idea of how do we rebuild trust between the different parts of the system within companies, the stakeholders of the companies, and like everyone in the system so that it can work better. Because It's great if if the action happens, but how do we enable that action or to scale that action?
Building Trust Through Reciprocity
00:18:59
Speaker
Right. So I want to go back to the point I was making a little bit earlier, which is around reputational risk. So the Edelman Trust Barometer, in my opinion, is guilty of conflating reputational risk management and genuine trust.
00:19:14
Speaker
So if you look at the origin of reputational risk, which was coined in the 1990s, it was described, reputational risk was described at the value at risk from stakeholder perceptions.
00:19:28
Speaker
So this implies that you manage stakeholder perceptions via PR and you generate more value. It's a fundamentally defensive and message-driven approach And then with social media and polarization and misinformation going the way it's going, we can also see that companies can be piled on even though they're not the worst actors and vice versa.
00:19:52
Speaker
So this is not a linear accountability mechanism and it's not fundamentally about reciprocity. So reputation risk management is defensive and it's about messaging.
00:20:03
Speaker
People disagree, academics disagree on definitions of trust. We could have a two hour conversation on this topic, but trust generally includes reciprocity. I treat you a certain way. I can expect you to treat me a certain way in return.
00:20:17
Speaker
There is a sense, therefore, that if you're a corporation or a manager within a corporation and you're going to ask a stakeholder a question of what that stakeholder thinks about your business, thinks about your initiatives, you're asking them to do stakeholder engagement and reputational risk management, you have no intention of listening to that stakeholder or doing anything different, that stakeholder will be more annoyed than if you didn't ask them in the first place.
00:20:43
Speaker
So let's stop branding reputational risk PR efforts as genuine trust building. Let's understand that trust is about dignity and respect and reciprocity. They are not the same thing.
00:20:56
Speaker
In some cases, they are diametrically opposed. And let's stop spending all our money on defensive messaging and trying to shape the stakeholder narrative rather than thinking if we just treat people with dignity and respect, maybe they'll trust us more. At risk of being simplistic, I kind of think we've lost our way on this question.
00:21:15
Speaker
Yes, no, and that that's a actually, you know, you're boiling it down really to make it very
Organizational Culture and New Value Shifts
00:21:21
Speaker
clear. And how does that, this trust rebuilding infuse culture? So youd you'd also talk a lot in your work about culture, organization of culture, and how that is helpful for, well, supporting and advancing corporate responsibility.
00:21:40
Speaker
Yeah, so let's go back to the the transparency conversation. And let's go back to what I was just saying about reputational risk management. So back in the 20th century, it was much easier to control the narrative.
00:21:54
Speaker
The corporation and and a lot of our metaphors for corporations are about a black box, a singular actor, a profit maximizing entity. And so we could personify the corporation. We could build defense mechanisms around it. We could control the narrative. With the rise of transparency, generational value shifts, even the rise of things like remote work, the rise of a notion you're responsible for your whole value chain and not just your entity, for sure kind of social media dynamics, strategic leaking, all these kinds of questions, organizational life has become more intangible and more transparent.
00:22:32
Speaker
It's hard to create that defensive mechanism around the corporation. This puts culture front and center. This means that employees might be undercutting your message. You can be going out there saying, look at all the wonderful things I'm doing.
00:22:46
Speaker
You'll have Gen Z employees leaking internally about your silly emails and decisions and what you're really saying. So you have to move through the world, assuming that anything that goes on in your organization, anything you say or do internally could become public knowledge.
00:23:02
Speaker
Think about when Elon Musk acquired Twitter. We got a blow by blow account from employees of everything that was going on. So to me, this puts culture and intangible value ah the center of value creation And it prioritizes culture because you can't treat this as a sort of hierarchical top-down effort anymore where we just issue orders, we control the narrative, we make decisions at the top.
00:23:27
Speaker
What you've got to do is bring along a diffuse group of people who do not necessarily want to listen to you and win them over. So I think this transforms leadership. I think it transforms culture.
00:23:38
Speaker
i think it transforms the metaphors that we should use about the corporations. Yes, that's great. And have you seen any, he actually any examples of organizations that have really thought about this well and kind of really implemented some practical tools or initiatives within their organization?
00:23:59
Speaker
I mean, I know that a firm like Google measures its culture and an employee ah sentiment on an incredibly regular basis. I also love, this is mentioned in my book, but there is an initiative from Allstate Insurance to try and say, we have employees from across the political spectrum.
Allstate's Model for Respectful Dialogue
00:24:19
Speaker
We have employees with different values and worldviews.
00:24:23
Speaker
we need to be able to have respectful negotiation and dialogue. So this is not about the corporation saying it represents its stakeholders. This is about saying we have people with divided views inside this corporation.
00:24:35
Speaker
We need to incentivize cooperation, negotiation, respect, working together. And so a really impressive effort, I think, to kind of depolarize the conversation and to drive more respectful and considered debate and really the ability to work across values divides.
00:24:53
Speaker
I think that is exactly the sort of thing we need right now. No, that's a ah really great example. Thank you. On a slightly different, mid-connected topic, I also really wanted to ask you, as an expert in ethics, AI is coming, AI is here, it's already completely here.
AI and Power Imbalances
00:25:10
Speaker
How do we make sure that it's used for the betterment of society and not the opposite? I mean, I'm pretty scared about this. i think things are going to get worse before they get better. I see an enormous herd mentality.
00:25:25
Speaker
And just as an aside for all the conversation that we have about set sustainability practitioners needing to prove the business case, no one seems concerned about the business case for AI at all. It's just we all need to invest in this right away of or we're going to get left behind.
00:25:39
Speaker
You do not see the kind of skepticism and consideration you see about sustainability as you see about AI. and i find that extremely revealing. Anyway, I think, I hope that ultimately we will end up with refocusing on our humanity and on meaning when all information can be protested, when everything humans have come up with has been put into these machines. The question is what's left? What value can we provide? What is special about us that machines cannot bring? So I really hope that over the long term, this drives more focus on meaning and more focus on humanity. But I suspect we're in for an extremely rough ride before we get there.
00:26:18
Speaker
I feel very, very, very concerned about the concentration of power and greed that I'm seeing in this whole area. Would you have any practical steps for people to take or is it even too late?
00:26:30
Speaker
I did some training on AI and ethics and managing your own critical thinking for Santander a little while ago. i have noticed it's extremely hard for my undergraduate students to concentrate if I have a no no screens policy.
00:26:44
Speaker
I think we need to drive critical thinking. I think we need to give a lot of thought to how we're using these tools in the classroom. I mean, banning them, I don't think is the answer. But I really worry about the kind of concentration, the cognition, the ability to focus, the ability to deal with boredom.
00:27:01
Speaker
My undergrad students and my MBA students are utterly brilliant, don't get me wrong. But I have really started to see a lot of pressure on concentration levels in the classroom over the past few years. So i think we need to pause and be much more reflective about how these tools are affecting young people in particular.
00:27:19
Speaker
Yes, thank you. Actually, that's a great bridge to my next question. So you're a professor on these topics. What does a typical day look like? What kinds of conversations you are having with these young people who are coming into the world, who are coming into the work world?
00:27:34
Speaker
I mean, I think it's quite different between the execs and the MBAs and the undergrads. So let's focus on the undergrads. I think Gen Z is a very interesting generation, rather nihilistic, highly skeptical, highly, highly attuned to authenticity or lack ah of authenticity, which is something we've been talking about this whole conversation.
00:27:55
Speaker
Very difficult to impress. I think rather cynical about where the world is going, but wants a way forward, wants a way to make a difference in the world, wants to have an impact far, far more informed and sophisticated about big picture questions than I was when I was that age.
Teaching Critical Thinking for Better Responsibility
00:28:14
Speaker
extremely impressive and smart people. So the question is, what can we provide for them? What paths can we provide? How can we help them think about their careers and their impact in a way that's realistic and pragmatic and achievable?
00:28:30
Speaker
So I'm very, very careful in the classroom not to cheerlead, not to say it's all wonderful, not to say it's easy to go out there and have an impact and have a career aligned with your values, but also to say these topics, these disciplines, these worlds are just getting shaped.
00:28:46
Speaker
We've seen a few early unsophisticated efforts so far. Let's be critical. Let's understand where the critiques come from. And I say to these students, you could spend your whole career making these ideas better and driving these ideas. Like nothing is settled law.
00:29:02
Speaker
i am not here to tell you these are the dominant frameworks and you've got to use them. Let's really debate these big picture topics just as we've been doing in this conversation.
00:29:13
Speaker
And then i will arm you with the tools and the critical thinking to go out there and make this better. That's brilliant. And yeah, I hope, you know, they take your advice. This podcast is also ah an opportunity to celebrate achievements.
00:29:26
Speaker
So I want to ask you what achievements are you most proud of, or maybe any achievements that you want to aim for in the future? Oh my gosh. I'm proud of How Well Higher Grounded. It won an award and it's a book about business ethics.
00:29:41
Speaker
The award it won was for the best leadership and strategy book of 2024. So I was very proud not to be in a sustainability or ethics silo. not to be seen as a kind of wonky specialist kind of jargon conversation. So that was very, very fulfilling for me.
00:29:59
Speaker
I found writing the book extremely difficult. I complained every day. The other thing that I'm proud of is the work I do in the classroom. I find this approachable. privilege and an honor. i get enormous energy from it. It is the most fulfilling thing I've ever done by far.
00:30:15
Speaker
So I'm proud that I managed to make a living this way after not being a career academic, after spending my life kind of as a consultant, that I am seen to have value to add to young people and and to have the qualifications and abilities and profile to teach young people is a wonderful thing for me at this stage in my career.
00:30:37
Speaker
and not something I would have expected.
Career Journey: Interdisciplinary Business Ethics
00:30:39
Speaker
That's brilliant. And actually tell us about your journey. We want to inspire others to show that any journey can lead to having an impact on the world.
00:30:49
Speaker
So how did you get here? What were milestones or turning points in your career? I mean, there were so many, but I started my career in kind of editorial jobs and political risk consulting.
00:31:01
Speaker
Then I spent 12 years in investigations, so really focused on corruption, money laundering, fraud. I worked in the Middle East and Africa. Then I worked in the Americas. So crisis management, general counsels, bankers, ethics and compliance officers, really high stakes ethical dilemmas.
00:31:22
Speaker
I think something I've done is change fields a lot. So then I moved into sustainability. I think having a background in a completely different area allowed me to think critically about sustainability, allowed me to think about the broader kind of governance and systemic questions.
00:31:37
Speaker
And then from there, I made my way into more organizational psychology and behavioral science and culture. I ran this think tank ethical systems and then I full-time joined the faculty. So I could give a lot more detail on all of this, but I suppose the thread is i have moved disciplines and moved topics.
00:31:56
Speaker
And I've found that joining the dots across disciplines about being able, being willing to take risks, make sideways moves has given me a ah new unique perspective. So i suppose don't be too risk averse.
00:32:11
Speaker
I suppose when you're thinking about your career, think two or three steps ahead of where you want to be when you're at the peak of your career, build your skillset and ambition around that.
00:32:23
Speaker
Don't be too worried to stay on a particular path and don't be afraid to take risks. Yes, risk-taking is ah is a feature. I wanted to ask you, so you were working and you were exposed to actually very different geographies. I mean, the same topics, but in very different geographies.
00:32:40
Speaker
You are today in in New York, but can you reflect on on the progress perhaps of or the evolutions of the topic of corporate responsibility and sustainability in the world?
00:32:52
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's extremely Western-centric at the moment. When I think, and when we just, let's make a super basic point. Why do we have American and European companies lecturing companies in Brazil and India about waste management and conservation and and water use.
Western Bias in ESG Metrics
00:33:12
Speaker
They say we are in the countries that have been most wasteful about resource use and now we are seeking to impose the consequences of our own mistakes on developing nations.
00:33:24
Speaker
More broadly, many ESG metrics and measurement efforts do not resonate in developing countries, strike people in developing countries as, i wouldn't say irrelevant, but as sort of elitist concerns when they have more urgent and worrying things to worry about. They don't pay attention to the political or governance context.
00:33:45
Speaker
They act as if you can cherry pick metrics in a vacuum in this perfect political environment. And they suggest that what we need is for implicitly, of course, what we need is for big multinational corporations like Walmart to impose ESG standards on small suppliers in developing countries.
00:34:04
Speaker
That is not working. So to me, we are, you know, this is maybe the biggest tell that we are just at the first stage of this entire conversation. We need to bring voices in from what is usually called the global south into this conversation.
00:34:19
Speaker
We need to understand that the flow of knowledge and expertise is in many cases going the wrong way. and we need to have a conversation about fairness. The other thing that is going on, of course, is that people, corporations and governments in the US and Europe, it's as if we spent the entire evening drinking cocktails and now other countries have turned up and we'd like to split the bill.
00:34:41
Speaker
We'd like to hold them equally responsible for the consequences of our own decisions. So to me, this is an entire conversation that needs massively reframing. And I believe you are part of that conversation is about really thinking about public private finance, about thinking about incentives, about thinking about the problems that core investors in the markets aren't going to solve about thinking about how systemically we can challenge everything that is left when the market can't fix the issue on its own through a few ESG metrics.
00:35:13
Speaker
Yes, I couldn't agree more. It has to be a more global conversation yeah and with different voices, different stakeholders. Otherwise, it it won't work.
00:35:23
Speaker
Or actually, it will be creating worse problems than we even have now. it's the problem of exclusion of developing country voices. But there's also, I think, we think about a topic like climate change.
00:35:36
Speaker
The sustainability community would tend to prioritize the farmer in the cocoa supply chain being affected by biodiversity and child labor. That's a real thing. I'm not saying for the moment that's not real.
00:35:49
Speaker
But we would, if it is a Pennsylvania co-worker losing their job and concerned about how they're going to feed their family, we're like, oh, you're an idiot climate denier. So I think think fairly about impact. We don't think about the political dimension of these topics in a very sophisticated way.
00:36:07
Speaker
That's correct. But as you say, it's the beginning of the conversation. Definitely. I want to ask you a question that I'm asking all my guests. How does it feel to be a woman doing this job?
00:36:18
Speaker
Oh, I worry a little that this is seen as a woman's job.
Gender and Sustainability Roles
00:36:22
Speaker
i go to a lot of sustainability gatherings where it's vast majority women.
00:36:28
Speaker
It's sort of like ah HR and communications. It's the way you get into the C-suite and This should not be a gendered role focused on a specific sort of social identity.
00:36:41
Speaker
We could maybe make the argument women are better at thinking about stakeholders and thinking more systemically, but I would be very reluctant to make those arguments. I think... i thank Women need to be part of all sorts of conversations. When I talk to my young female undergraduates, I say to them, maybe you should go and work for Goldman Sachs, like your male colleagues, and get some power and then try and change the system. Maybe it's not the case.
00:37:06
Speaker
You need to go and be an underpaid ESG analyst. So we need to be careful about pigeonholing ourselves. We need to be part of the wider conversation. i don't like the idea that you know women can work in sustainability and HR and corporate affairs.
00:37:21
Speaker
And the CFO's job, the head of legal's job, those aren't open to women. So I think the important thing is you have the facility and confidence with these topics.
00:37:31
Speaker
I think it's extremely important that everybody understands sustainability, broad concepts and drivers and can associate those with wider business decisions. I worry a little bit about championing women too much in this space because I think it maybe speaks volumes about how society works.
00:37:50
Speaker
regards the credibility and status of these kinds of roles. Yes. Thank you for this reflection. Quite different question about the challenging nature of our work.
00:38:01
Speaker
It's complex, multifaceted. What helps you be your best self? Oh gosh. I think you've got to take a lot of breaks. I like to hike. I like to go in the woods with no mobile phone reception. i think to Time away from your desk and away from social media to think, to be bored, to process, to come up with ideas.
00:38:24
Speaker
Really, really important. I very frequently feel overwhelmed by the scale of problems in the world and a little hopeless. And I think this year in particular has been very, very tough given where I live.
00:38:36
Speaker
But also I think you've got to focus on what you can influence and what you can control. So i get an enormous amount of joy and fulfillment from influencing students, from helping students, from trying to kind of provide ideas and concepts they can apply by helping them with their careers. So I can't say that sometimes I don't get super overwhelmed with whether all my efforts are worth it and have paid out off and what I've spent my career doing. But then I see such a thirst for meaning and such a thirst for good ideas and so many like-minded people that you've got to kind of, I think, balance the hope and despair.
00:39:14
Speaker
That's great. Actually, my last three questions are a little bit related.
Optimism and Inspiration from Youth and Nature
00:39:19
Speaker
What keeps you optimistic? I think it's working with young people. i think it is. i do believe that once the students in my MBA and undergraduate classrooms are running the corporations of the future, things will be better.
00:39:33
Speaker
It will be sad if we have to wait for these generational shifts to play out because we're in a very critical period. But that is the thing that gives me the most optimism. Who or what inspires you most?
00:39:44
Speaker
I mean, nature inspires me most and my family and loved ones inspire me most and the help and support. i've I've had a difficult time for various reasons over the past few years um on a personal level.
00:39:57
Speaker
And I've had amazing support from family and friends and community. That's beautiful. And are you reading anything that you would recommend? Oh, this is an amazing book.
00:40:07
Speaker
This is a book called We Have Never Been Woke. It is by, he's a sociologist, really. He argues that Progressive elites, like both of us, often use the language of social justice, not in a cynical way. They believe it to protect their own interests.
00:40:26
Speaker
And a lot of progressive messaging is counterproductive. It talks about symbolic capitalists. These are people that make money from knowledge and ideas. as an interest group and as a cohort and takes a very critical lens to the messaging. It's not a book about sustainability, but it is a book that made me greatly reflect on my role in the world, the ideas I'm putting out and who is really included in this conversation. I would highly advise anyone to read it.
00:40:54
Speaker
Very challenging set of ideas. That's really brilliant. Definitely adding it to my list. Thank you so much. So we are nearing the end. So do you have any final thoughts or advice to fellow changemakers or perhaps any specific ask of the listeners?
00:41:10
Speaker
No, I think what I would like to say is that the kind of work and thinking that you personally are doing is exactly what is needed. So I would encourage more people to listen to you.
00:41:22
Speaker
To follow your work, I also very much like Lisa Sachs at Columbia is thinking very systemically about the same questions. The Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership as well.
00:41:33
Speaker
Lots of very realistic and thoughtful reports coming out of there right now. So I start to see a new cohort, I guess, of voices shaping a new narrative for the future of what this looks like. And I would encourage everybody to join that conversation.
00:41:49
Speaker
Brilliant. Thank you so much, Alison, for this conversation. and It was amazing. Thank you for your time today. Thank you so much for having me and your amazing questions. Really, really appreciate it. It was a workout.
00:42:00
Speaker
Thank you.
00:42:06
Speaker
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00:42:17
Speaker
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00:42:29
Speaker
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