The Search for the Soul of Business

uh i had a conversation with uh soren sku who is the ceo of molar mayor's the big shipping company that runs ships all over the world carrying containers and he has recently made a huge investment with orsted the danish power firm to build wind farms way up in the north that will be used to manufacture hydrogen fuel so it's really a kind of a revolutionary at scale investment i had the opportunity to talk to him and i said why are you doing this he said i'm doing it because i have to because the people who ship their goods on my ships are calling me up and saying hey i just made this commitment to get all the carbon out of my transportation lines 10 years from now and you're going to have to go with me on that ride or i won't be able to keep my commitment so the pressure is getting pushed down the supply chain you have walmart working with its suppliers saying what's your carbon footprint and how do we reduce your carbon footprint that has an enormously powerful effect i'm here today with a good old friend alan murray and be able to look at his new book tomorrow's capitalists my search for the soul of business i think this is a very very prescient book it's as we're kind of moving from the ideology of me to we we're seeing that the quality the brand the reputation not only of executives but of their companies and the motivation of their customers is depending on a different kind of imagination about our social responsibility ellen thanks for being here yes it's great to be with you it's an honor yeah it's my honor so tell me you start you write this very creative book i see all kinds of beautiful endorsements of it on the back cover i'll leave that for your readers to be surprised by but it's a whole spectrum of people what what's the origin where did it come from well well rob you know because you've known me for a long time i've been a journalist my entire life even now as ceo of fortune media i still think of myself as a journalist and and i never i always thought of my role in the world as explaining what's going on not trying to change things not trying to drive an agenda but i think over the course of the last decade i had lots of opportunities to talk to ceos people running large companies and and really after the great recession i heard more and more of these ceos just talking in a different way about their responsibilities about how they ran their companies and what their goals were and i heard more and more about social goals not just financial goals i started to hear people talk about moral leadership about responsibility to society it was a it was a big change in the language around running a large company and and i started to ask them why what what's driving and i think initially the main answer was my employees my employees want this increasingly it became customers customers want this now more recently you've even seen it from investors but i just got into it because i heard it i was in a unique position to hear what was going on and it seemed to me that it was a very big and important change yeah the music changed and now the dance steps do too yes where you're looking at this i mean it seems like the specter of climate change is on the horizon and everybody is being evaluated in the context of doing harm or getting ahead of the curve in that realm internal issues related to race and gender and so forth we might call social sustainability seems to be another dimension those are two big ones and the other one that i hear a lot about here at inet is the concern about investment and growth as distinct from stock buybacks which are used to i say reward the people who've already been there right and that seems to be another frontier of exploration but which one's triggered your imagination where did you find uh the most interesting dilemmas yeah i think they all kind of happened simultaneously i really do see this very much as growing out of the great recession when they're as you know because you were very much at the center of this there was kind of a rethinking of the market economy so we thought as as john kennedy put in a rising tide lifts all boats but he said well wait a minute that rising tide isn't lifting all boats the way we thought it would and the market isn't correcting the way we thought it would and there there are problems happening and that of course is very much a part of your journey i think for ceos it was the same kind of awakening you may remember that bill gates gave a speech at davos in 2008 where he talked about the need for creative capitalism that's right and michael porter at the harvard business school started talking about shared value capitalism and john mackey at whole foods talked about conscious capitalism all of a sudden everybody was putting a modifier in front of capitalism there was an increasing sense that this system that they all believed in these business leaders all believed in it but it wasn't working as well as they thought it could or should and that was pretty much a crescendo through the uh through the decade of the teens and i think has really come to a head in the last two years yeah it does seem that people were almost wearing an armor the market decides they almost worshipped the market as opposed to saying if i have desires but i don't have any wealth the market can't hear me or yeah if i have desires that are driven by the fear for myself or my children or what's happening then i'm sending signals to the market which if you change the architecture i might not be afraid and i might want something different and part of that market fundamentalism the the part of it that was most apparent to corporations was what milton friedman said back in 1970 which is the social responsibility of business is to make a profit you know you obey the laws you you know you don't commit fraud but basically your responsibility is to make a profit and i think a lot of business leaders who had been a part of that movement began to say well wait a minute that's not sufficient because first of all if we don't do a better job taking care of our employees they're going to leave us if we don't do a better job tending to their communities their communities are going to blow up and if we don't do a better job paying attention to the planet we're all going to be on fire so i i think that sense part of it by the way is the failure of government some of these things were things that business leaders used to say that's not my problem that's the government government's problem and i think over the last few years they've said the government isn't going to deal with that and it's existential in the long run for us so we have to step up we have to do more when you say government does that but then you unleash things with super pacs and what have you where the survivability of politicians or the enforcement of regulations or whether you prosecute antitrust depends upon your fundraising what the sec says they can patrol there were studies scholarly studies i've seen that said companies that made lots of big donations didn't get prosecuted like smaller groups they wanted to make an example of what was honest and fair in the market but they didn't want to take on the donors which refracted the entire yeah i think that's an interesting question is how responsible our companies and their lobbying actions of the past for the dysfunction of government i i don't attempt to answer that question in the book i think there are many things that have led to the dysfunction of government but i do think you have a new generation of ceos who say if we don't step up we may lose our license to operate when you and i were working in washington in the 1970s and the 1980s business kind of defined the right wing of the spectrum the american enterprise institute you know free market economics i think what happened what has happened over time and some of this is due to fundamental changes in the structure of business which we should talk about but what's happened over time is that on issues of of social justice and the cl and certainly on issues of climate businesses move very much to the center and now also finds itself without a political party to identify with because on the on the right you have uh you know you have this kind of populist trumpian anti-globalization uh sentiment that's very foreign to business and on the left you have a bernie sanders you know an aval democratic socialist taking the momentum and i think a lot of business leaders are saying we we don't play in this political system but we have to figure out a way to address these very real problems if we're going to continue to exist well the word sustainability if you have a company that has really developed something great then you could imagine making profit for as far as the eye could see but if you're going to go to war if you're going to have internal turmoil revolutions strikes all kinds of things then your good idea isn't going to be realized financially as much as it could in a more stable environment so attacking in a different direction creating a contribution to social stability a restoration of trust and expertise or confidence in leadership can actually boost long-term profitability i i think it's become essential and and you know the other thing that's happened rob and i know you you uh uh look at this at the institute the other thing that's happened is that the the source of valuing companies has changed i mean if you look at the fortune 500 of 19 of the 1970s and you look at their balance sheets and say where is the value coming from more than 80 percent of the value of the fortune 500 was physical stuff it was plant equipment inventory on the shelves oil in the ground all stuff that had to be supported by financial capital and so returns to financial capital became really important because that was how you built value you also needed hands and legs to get it well but they and they were a little less aware of that but if you look at the balance sheet of those of the fortune 500 today more than 85 percent of the value is intangibles yes it's intellectual property uh trademark copyright software all things that are tied to people and so companies have been forced to become much more people-centric to care about their employees their customers the communities they live in and the planet because that's where their value comes from and if they if they aren't attentive to that they may lose their best employees or they may lose their customers one of the areas that people talk about now is what is economic justice and in the traditional i'm talking now about economic theory you earn in the market your marginal product so if you're paid more than that you're subsidized if you paid less than that you're exploited and if you make your marginal product then everything's in balance that's economic justice there's a problem with that when your marginal product is so low that you can't sustain a life or a family or anything people sort of which might call blaming the victims are sowing the seeds of social discord but the other complaint that i often hear from people who have a little bit broader mindset like you're describing of new executives is your marginal product comes from the educational trajectory you've been on and the quality of health care you've had so a healthy well-educated person has benefited from what you might call social platforms and if you turn the arrows around society is responsible for that marginal product not being in a sustainable place or is to be congratulated for doing that we have to create the collective platforms so that people can have a sustainable life while not being subsidized i think that's absolutely right and and what's changed in the corporate world is a lot of big businesses are starting to take some responsibility for that you know when you and i were in washington in the 80s and 90s training for instance trade adjustment assistance that was all seen as a government problem a government responsibility if people lost their jobs or didn't have the skills they needed to get the jobs that were being created it was the government's job to help them and give them uh training and what i what i've been hearing over the last decade is more and more companies that say well you know we're the job creators and at the end of the day in the long term we're the ones who need skilled workers to succeed and so you hear a lot of big companies doing coming up with very creative programs uh to skill under skilled workers not just their own workers but there's a whole coalition of large companies in chicago for instance which has created apprenticeship programs in order to try and take people who weren't part of their labor pipeline in the past and to bring them into the companies and give them the skills they need to succeed i don't think it's happening on the scale that it needs to happen but it is a change that companies are saying this is not their responsibility the government's responsibility this is ours and we have to take it on and a lot of people whether it's in china or in the united states that i talk to among leaders will say to me the failure associated with you know globalization always has this free trade everybody can be better off and nobody worse off there's an asterisk there provided you do the transformational assistance for the losers then everybody can be better off but if you don't do that then the despondency the diseases of despair the trumpian enthusiasm trump used to come to michigan and say the system is rigged we got a band together to transform this society the big three auto makers he went to the economic club of detroit and said the big three automakers should be ashamed of how they treated the people in this region that was music to the ears of these people yeah until he was elected no that's right we always the economists always said as you said that that global trade would be good for everyone as long as you dealt with the redistribution and training problem and clearly in retrospect we didn't do enough i once went to a thing at the swedish consulate in new york a little presentation the now new york times reporter peter goodman i think it was 2019 january he wrote this piece called we love the robots in the new york times and what he was saying was in sweden people understood that automation machine learning robots created a new set of possibilities but they did so knowing they'd get retraining pension health care children's education that none of those things were at risk so they played as a team what goodman's presentation was about was that in the world of donald trump in 2019 americans don't have that faith that they're going to be yeah they don't have it uh and and there's a lot of cynicism and the cynicism is understandable and there are a lot of examples of corporate greed and corruption that feed that cynicism but i'll give you just one example uh um a t when randall stevenson was ceo this would have been maybe three four years ago he quickly realized that the fundamental work of that giant telecommunications network which was switching was going to move to software the whole thing the vast majority of their workers were going to you know were going to be gone because switches wouldn't be necessary it would be software-based switching and so what what he did was to say okay he made a deal with georgia tech and basically said we'll provide anyone at this company who wants it the education they need to make this transition transition we will pay for it it's online courses it's up to you you can either take advantage of this education opportunity and come with us for the ride or not but if you don't you have to recognize that at the end of the day you may be without a job here and it was a very far-sighted uh plan that's that's a corporate example of what you're talking about it's not the society taking care of them it's the company saying we understand that you have to be supported through this uh transition that at the end of the day can create more wealth but we have to make sure you can participate in that i've got a number of friends that work in the corporate sector related to renewable resources energy transformation which seems to be an enormous agenda for planet earth right now and one of them said to me he was in west virginia the previous week and when he started talking about the need to stop burning coal and whatever the people said so you're going to take care of us just like you took care of detroit and cleveland in the old days right my friend came back to me and he said this is really important rum because if you can mobilize that fear you create resistance to change that we must make to meet all the ipcc criteria and so forth we have to establish a credibility with the population that they can not only benefit from climate change in that dimension of sustainability but they can be assisted as citizens for cooperating with the transition a lot of people who have long commutes in suburban real estate are afraid of the collapse of real estate prices if they can't drive cars to work anymore and there's all kinds of rise yeah the rising gasoline prices uh in order to either through taxes or other means to support the transition and so what you see is a world that's yearning for the kind of leadership that you're digging out finding in various places of corporate leadership yeah and making a positive example of that what your book does is is yeah and look i i'm this isn't yet a majority of corporate leaders uh and it's probably not enough to replace it's definitely not enough to replace action by government but it's worth it's notable it's worth paying attention to i mean you talk about climate just think just look at the number of large companies over the last two years that have made commitments to reaching net zero by 2050 or sooner i mean it has increased by several hundred percent and now our polling shows that a majority of fortune 500 ceos either have made a commitment or are planning to make a commitment now some people say well it's easy for a ceo to make a commitment about doing something in 2050 because they'll be long gone by the time that comes but you're also seeing a new seriousness about putting uh intermediate benchmarks in place and really really taking action and it's starting to get pushed down the supply chain i'll give you one example i had a conversation with uh soren sku who is the ceo of molar mayor's the big shipping company that runs ships all over the world carrying containers and he has recently made a huge investment with orsted the danish power firm to build wind farms uh way up in the north that will be used to manufacture hydrogen fuel so it's really a kind of a revolutionary at at-scale investment i had the opportunity to talk to him and i said why are you doing this he said i'm doing it because i have to because the people who ship their goods on my ships are calling me up and saying hey i just made this commitment to get all the carbon out of my transportation lines 10 years from now and you're going to have to go with me on that ride or i won't be able to keep my commitment so the pressure is getting pushed down the supply chain you have walmart working with its suppliers saying what's your carbon footprint and how do we reduce your carbon footprint that has an enormously powerful effect so you're really starting to see momentum build through these corporate actions well it's fascinating to me to see uh what i would say those pressures and those responses at a time when people are in such despair because usually when you complain about things you're deepening the void yeah and the question is you won't regain trust you won't regain coherence so in society unless we fill the void yeah and when you start to see these beacons which you're amplifying awareness of in writing this book i think that's a healing gesture i think you're contributing perhaps not only to the awareness but perhaps calming us all down a little bit at a time when we're pretty i hope so and also holding up examples of what the best companies are doing so that more and more companies do that uh you know trust in business trust in institutions overall as you know has been declining for decades but trust in business right now is higher than trusting government trust in media trust in trust and geos yeah so uh and i think that's partly a result of the pandemic a lot of businesses really stepped up for their employees during this unusual period so whether companies can do enough to maintain that trust is one of the big questions that lies in front of us when you got into this book i know you you like you say fortune you're flowing through and you're talking to people and also this change in tone starts to gather momentum was there one episode or one threshold moment where you said i gotta write this book was there something that was just i i'll tell you one of where it really hit home for for me i mean you remember what happened before the last recession there was a bubble of we've been talking about the environment there was a bubble of corporate interest in taking action on climate ge did its eco-imagination duke power was there was something called u.s cap which is a coalition of companies that said we're going to take corporate action to address climate and you had two presidential candidates at the time both of whom favored putting a cap on carbon emissions john mccain on the republican side and barack obama on the democratic side so there was a once before a bubble of interest and then the recession hit and companies started looking at their bottom lines and seeing their finances deteriorated and you could almost feel that concern about the environment going away it's like we'll deal with this later we have to and so uh when when the pandemic hit and the economy turned downward and every company was looking at sharp deterioration of its p l i thought okay here we go again stakeholder capitalism is going on the back burner and everybody's going to forget it and what was remarkable was the exact opposite happened i kept finding myself in conversations with ceos who said oh no we can't back off now we have to double down because this is a stakeholder crisis our employees are the health of our employees is in danger the health of our customers is in danger we have to now more than ever we have to pay attention to a broader array of shareholders not just of stakeholders rather not just financial shareholders so i think it was at that moment i said wow what's going on here is not a fad it's something more permanent more enduring and it's worth digging into more deeply now these business leaders are acting like broad-minded government officials do you think there might be a more what might i call peaceful collaboration between public and private sector oh i i think the ceos that i talk to the ceos of the largest companies are dying for that kind of collaboration they want the government to be more involved in thoughtful climate regulation you know it would be a much because if you think about it the if the best companies are taking action and the worst companies aren't that creates a competitive imbalance a competitive imbalance and they'd rather have the government come in and set some rules on the road and you're starting to see some of that look at what the sec is proposing on climate disclosure um but but on other things as well on the training issue that's a perfect place for public private partnership the problem is they don't feel like they have anybody a very small group of legislators in washington that they can talk to you know you have you have a left that increasingly is turning away from capitalism in their view and you have a trumpian right that doesn't share their social values uh or their environmental values and so they don't have they're dying to work with someone in government but don't have anybody to work with you it kind of reminds me when i was a child in detroit my parents were my mother with the detroit symphony my dad was a physician involved in a lot of public things and people like george romney and bill milliken where what my parents i remember in my kitchen yeah she called them no blessed obliged republicans you know no question i mean you started out by talking about uh a showdown at gucci gulch when you were working for the senate budget committee and i was writing about the tax reform bill and what what you know about that period in washington was yes there were partisans you know ronald reagan and tip o'neill were as far apart as nancy pelosi and donald trump but you have this whole group of people in the middle which you were a part of trying to bring those partisan impulses together for creative solutions i think that's what's broken down and you know at the end of the day business leaders are pragmatic they're problem solvers that's what they get paid to do and politics in washington at least has become less and less about solving problems more and more about getting an edge in the next election they don't have anybody to talk to there's nobody trying to come up with i mean you saw a brief example of that with the infrastructure bill last year a small group of senators from both sides put that together but for the most part that's become way too rare you finish this book if you said i got to write one more chapter that i left out what's the next phase what's the what's the well you know how slow put on time you you know how slow uh book publishing is i had to submit my manuscript before the russian invasion of ukraine and where we saw a remarkable advance of companies into geopolitics i mean hundreds of companies of their own will withdrawing from russia i don't think we've ever seen anything like that before some people have compared it to what happened with uh south africa uh and the corporate revolt against the apartheid regime but that was a slow process that took 15 years and this happened in 15 days uh so i i would have liked to have included that in the book and then the other thing i feel uh i feel like there there are some important limits some important things that haven't happened yet that will need to happen if corporations are truly going to maintain and grow the trust that the public has put in them one we've already talked about is taxation i think too many companies still reflexively and the lobbying arms of of corporations still reflexively fight to take to do whatever they can to lower their tax bills without taking account of the fact that if they're going to be focused on their positive social impact taxation is one of the ways they do that and a zero tax rate is not a good thing

2022-06-02 14:24

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