Alison Taylor, Ethical Systems — Fraudish

This is a fangirl episode. I cannot tell you how excited I am to have Allison Taylor. And if it weren't for the amazing people of Great Women in Fraud, shout out to Mary Eastwood Jones, I would have never had the cajones to reach out to Allison Taylor. So take a listen because you are going to love this episode. Okay, you guys, this is like the biggest deal for me to have Allison Taylor. Thank you to Mary Eastwood Jones to prompt me to actually reach out to you because Alison Taylor, you're going to find out how much of a rock star that she is. And I have a total fangirl crush. And if you guys don't know her, you will know her so well by the end of this. So Alison, welcome. And we are going to start with a speed round to get things going. And a word is awesome. When you hear the word fraud, what do you think of?

Uh, scapegoats.

Oh, interesting. How about ethics?

Uh, defense mechanism.

Oh, I like that. Oh, that is really good. Oh, is there a TV or a movie detective that you wanna be like or that you are like?

Oh man. I mean, I like old, I don't, not TV. I really like P.D. James who is like an old British writer who writes these great detective novels. And then one of my favorite books ever is called Smilla's Sense of Snow. It's set in Greenland and it's this incredible kind of murder mystery and she's a really strange character. She's in her late 30s at the time. But I just really— I just really love the character of Smilla in this Scandinavian book. So those would be my answers.

I'll put that in the show notes. Okay. Now, this question, I don't know how it'll hit you, but who makes better embezzlers, men or women?

I mean, I'm gonna go ahead and say women because people tend to make assumptions about us. I think men have more hubris. I think to be a really great embesler, you need to be very cautious and very determined and very behind the scenes. And so, I don't know what the data says, but that would be my guess, that a woman would be more likely to get away with it and probably more careful.

Oh, I like it.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. Okay. So, I can't remember exactly how I came upon you, but I believe it was a podcast. And what I love about Alison, and I'll let you say this in a second, you started out as an investigator. So why don't you give your sort of career trajectory? Because it's fascinating.

Sure. I mean, I won't go on and on, but I— so I have a master's in kind of political science and international relations, and I was— first of all, I was interested in kind of market entry and how you— how do you do business successfully in Nigeria and India and stuff like that. And I got a job at a firm called Control Risks, which did political risk. And, and the honest truth, Kelly, is that I thought it was a political risk job. So I started working in investigations completely by accident, but then I got in there and started getting into the job. And another kind of uncomfortable reality about my personality is that I'm incredibly nosy. I'm incredibly curious. So once I started, and I obviously started as a researcher, I was pretty junior, like pulling documents and looking at press articles and talking to sources and all that kind of stuff. And I mean, it was just like a combination of me being able to sort of exercise my curiosity. And then I thought it was— I felt about it like it was like building a story. You look around and you get this disparate piece of information and you start to build pictures of kind of companies and people and put the pieces together. And I just was like, man, this is fun. I am gonna have a really good time here. So, so that's what happened. Got the job by accident and then it just really, really suited me. And then a few years late, there was someone in the team that was doing all this work in the Middle East and Africa and I was like, oh, That looks really fun. And he got to travel all the time and he was always going to kind of Nigeria and Dubai and Egypt. And he wasn't a great guy to work with, but I sat there being like, I really want your job. And anyway, a couple of years later he left and I got his job. And the team was really tiny at the time because people had the view that doing investigations in the Middle East and Africa was too hard. But I was lucky at that time. I'm sure you will remember in the wake of 9/11, there was this big kind of ramp up in anti-corruption and money laundering and no your customer and terrorist financing. So the Africa Middle East business really took off and I was kind of part of that ride. And then I moved to New York in 2011 and, and did the same job but for the Americas. So that was the US and then obviously kind of Central and Latin America and Canada. So yeah, I worked in investigations really for longer than I've done anything else is the actual truth. And then on my way out of that organization, I, I went back to school and studied organizational psychology, and that took me to work in sustainability and then to NYU you. But one of the things I think is, which I'm sure you will agree with as well, like once you're an investigator, you'll always think like an investigator. You'll always have a really nasty, suspicious mind. You'll always be thinking about verification and qualifying sources and information and all that kind of thing. So I very, very much bring that mindset of an investigator to everything I've done since. And so if we're talking about something like ESG or sustainability, I will come at it with that mindset. And one of the, the dirty secrets about ESG is that it's all based on self-disclosed information, which if you're an investigator, you're like, oh, got to verify some of that. So, so yeah, I don't think you ever lose that way of thinking once you've got it. I'm sure you would agree.

Yeah. My dad said I was Snoopy. I say, I like to say I was curious, but he said I was Snoopy. So yeah.

Yeah.

So in 2019, and I don't know if you were there, I went to the Ethical Systems. They had a day-long event. Jonathan Haidt put it together.

Yes.

Okay.

I was not there actually. I was at a different conference. I went to the one in '16, but I've heard everything about it and watched all the videos.

It was so awesome. Like life-changing. I went there, or I told a good friend about Tom Harden, who is Jim Rouse, and he showed up and, and Eugene Soltis sat at my table and I was like, okay, in 2021 I'm coming back to New York for it. And then COVID happened.

And right, 2023, I think we are gonna have another conference. So, but you are absolutely right. Great about— I mean, Eugene Salters is brilliant, but Tom Harden. I get to come and speak to the MBAs about insider trading, and it is the most effective, impactful thing, partly because he looks like he could be in the class. Like, they can all really identify with him and what happened to him. And it's so much more powerful to have him come talk to the students for an hour than it would be me being like, "Don't do insider trading." So we really need these voices, I think, to teach people what to do and what not to do. Yeah.

So Ethical Systems, like, it is an amazing organization. Like, you're all the people on it, this free amazing resource. And like, whenever I get a chance to tell people, like, do you know about Ethical Systems? If they say no, I like literally send it to them instantly because I'm like, I should get affiliate marketing. It's okay.

And then now we have to go to the next thing.

And I asked Allison if I could ask her before it started, like, Prof G, Scott Galloway, and the Pivot Podcast. And Alison is a fan.

I am a huge fan. I'm a huge fan of Scott, of Kara and Scott. Always like their take on the news. I like that. I like their chemistry. I think they have brilliant chemistry.

Yeah. Yeah. And now he's moving to London. Where are you originally from?

London?

I am.

Yeah, I am.

Okay. Okay. But you've been stateside for quite a while.

I have. I've been in the US for 11 years this time around, but actually I also lived in Chicago in the late 1990s for 3 years. So, and then I went back to London, but I'm clearly meant to be in America and it's my second time around. I now have citizenship and a lot of people, it's funny, I meet a lot of people via social media who don't realize I'm British and then I come on the phone with them and they're like, oh, I didn't realize you were British cuz you, you're so direct. And so I think I have the soul of a New Yorker and I found my spiritual home.

Oh my gosh. Oh, that is awesome. Okay, so 2023, I will be there for sure.

We'll listen.

And Tom Harden, I mean, I saw him present and we've become, I'm going to say, good friends. And people just look at him and they're like, no way. Like, yeah, I think every college student and master's student should listen to him.

I just, I can't say it enough.

He did everything right. He reached out to kind of his mentors and they're like, no, you're okay with it. And his story, I can't wait till it makes it to the big screen because I think it will, or at least it'll make it to streaming, don't you think?

I think it would be great. I, I love the— I'm sure you've read the article, I heard him talk about it— when he goes to someone's house in the Hamptons and he's wearing a wire and the guy like obviously suspects him and tells him to get changed, and he— I can't remember if he refuses or goes and does it in a private room. But yeah, I mean, it's kind of— he's such a soft-spoken, sweet guy, it's kind of amazing to think of being under that pressure for so long. But yeah, the, the students at Stern always absolutely love hearing from him and have a million questions. And what's great about him is you can ask him anything and he'll, he'll tell you the truth, which I find just amazing and admirable.

So he also goes to the— I'm sorry to say, the low-hanging fruit. Like, yes, okay, they're never going to get Stephen Cohen, Steve, right? But they're going to get the likes of Tom Hanks.

Which is why when you said word association with fraud, I said, okay, go.

Yeah, yeah. So let's talk about ESG because it's such a hot button for everyone, and I kind of think you have— I'm going to say the best takes on it. And I guess it comes from that nasty, suspicious mind. 100%. So the, the whole idea of ESG, is it like we have greenwashing and things like that?

Is—

do you have a word for it?

I don't have a word for it, but what I would, what I would say when people ask me to sort of talk about it, what I would say is like, there's been a responsible business movement for a really, really, really long time. And one of the really interesting things about the responsible business movement is that around the kind of 1980s or the '90s, it's split into two camps, one of which became what we know of as ethics and compliance, which is more your area. And then the other that became corporate social responsibility. So it's interesting to think about business ethics as developing along these kind of two parallel tracks. And so corporate social responsibility then became sustainability, which is not a word I love because I don't think anyone knows what it means, and people always assume it's just about the environment. And so ESG, I would describe as being what happens when financial services gets hold of sustainability and tries to make it, turn it into a question of numbers. So it's about the financialization of sustainability as an effort to turn something that was really a movement, a very long-running movement, into something that makes money or saves money and has metrics and can be measured and can be used by investors to create value. So that's what ESG is. And I think that that kind of weird history and the way it's been kind of taken on by financial services explains a lot about how it's working today and frankly, some of the things that aren't working.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I work for a big corporation and it had the whole sustainability, and there was a woman that was in charge of it, and you'd go on to like the layoff or Glassdoor and people would just slay her. Yes, they would absolutely slay her. And I found it to be interesting that they would—

my, my— I mean, my other, which I wouldn't use for the ESG but I would use for sustainability, my favorite definition of sustainability is that it is the paramilitary wing of the marketing department. So I think the big The problem is a lot of this is treated like a form of kind of stealth PR by companies. There are a lot of sustainability teams that spend all year just kind of producing these beautiful reports and don't have any power or authority to do anything. And that would— I mean, I'm, I know nothing about this woman, but I can understand that if she's not very effective and what she's providing is window dressing, then that will likely make her unpopular. Because as we know, young employees and young people in general care a lot about this this stuff, and they're not going to shut up about it. So it's becoming much more dangerous, I think, to treat sustainability as PR. And I think we're going to see a lot more changes coming here, which—

okay, so also, I will tell you, Alison, I've never prepared so much for a podcast.

I have—

I have binged so much of your stuff. And there's a couple things that I want to go— this is one of your things: point scoring over purity. I love that.

Yes, yes, yes, yes. Why do you love it?

Because I think it's so spot on. It's just so spot on. It's like, oh, look what I did, when the reasons behind it aren't pure at all.

Yeah, no, exactly, exactly. And it's all— but this— yes, it's, it's a lot of defensive signaling, and I'm okay, look over here, don't look over here, and The problem is, I think, that, that everybody becomes very cynical and upset about greenwashing and upset about all this stuff. And yet most people, most employees, most members of the public would like to buy from and work for companies that we can believe in. Or maybe we can say they're not perfect, but they're doing their best and everything is kind of set up to make that as difficult as possible. So I think we need to kind of pull back the curtains a little bit and have a bit more of an honest discussion about how hard some of this stuff really is to get right.

Yeah, which leads to the next one, which I heard with Jonathan Haidt on the podcast, is structural stupidity.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Jon has been worrying about and talking about and writing about the effect of social media on democracy for a long time. You've obviously read his recent article about how the last 10 years have been uniquely stupid. And I think we see it. You just have to go on Twitter for one second, and you'll see a lot of people yelling at each other and a lot of very unhelpful helpful conversation that isn't going to help us resolve our really many, many intractable problems. So I think he's on to something. I saw an amazing survey about a month or two ago, and it was a survey of PR professionals and marketing professionals, and about 90% of the people that responded to this survey said they thought polarization was a massive problem in America. Really massive problem for business, really massive problem for us all. And half of those people— so 45%, half of those 90% then said, if my branding isn't pissing someone off, what's the point in doing it? So I just thought that was crazy that like half those people had been simultaneously polarization's a giant problem, and then B, my job is all about pissing people off. So I think that kind of is very revealing about where we are and some of the difficulties companies are running into today.

So then I have to, I have to ask you Is this world we're living in depressing to you, or is it not depressing because you think that you and ethical systems and some of the great people out there can really improve?

I mean, some days, I'm not gonna lie to you, some days I feel really depressed. Some days I think things seem really, really overwhelming. I'm not happy about where we're going on climate change. I'm not happy about where we're going on women's rights and human rights. Some of our problems just seem really, really, really hard to to solve, and that can really get me down. Like, I'm not one of those people that's like, everything's great all the time, because it isn't. But I get a lot of energy and a lot of joy from teaching. I find that the students at NYU Stern, which is where I teach, they're incredibly smart, they're incredibly international, they're incredibly diverse, they're critical, they care, they want to be led in very, very different ways, they're going to lead in different ways. And so when I think, like, the oldest millennials are now 40, I I think in another 10 years, I think leadership and corporate responsibility is gonna look so different that, that gives me hope. I don't wanna sound like I'm kind of hoping that young people are gonna solve everything, cuz it also makes me really angry when people say that because it's our job to solve the problems that we created. But I do think we are seeing really huge changes in organizations and culture and leadership that are just getting going and are gonna be really transformational. So definitely depends what day you catch me. Sometimes I do feel really depressed, but some other times I have a lot of hope and a lot of excitement for the future. So it's a mixed bag.

I, I would agree. I would agree. Another thing that you talked about with John was slowing down.

Yeah.

How important it is to slow down and system 1 and system 2 with Kahneman. But I've found as I've gotten older, slowing down is so incredibly important.

Yes. And it's so important for ethics, right? I mean, so much, if you read these kind of interviews or these post-scandal accounts, and everyone's like, "How could this have happened?" And what usually you hear is people kind of saying, "We had to do it. We had to do it. It was so urgent. We needed to win. There were all these threats, and like, we just really didn't feel like we had any choice." And I think that kind of culture where you're under a lot of pressure, quarterly targets, sales targets, 'Do this or you're going to get fired.' That's such a petri dish for corruption and ethical issues. Being under time pressure, being under pressure to close the deal a long way from home is kind of how these things happen. And so, if we can slow down, if we can provide the space, if we can provide the voice, if we can stop and have a discussion, I do think we will end up with better and more ethical decisions.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean the whole sleep on it.

Yeah, absolutely. Exactly. And I'm a very fast, and I don't, this is not a good thing and it's not anything I would recommend to anyone. I'm very fast on email and on messages. I'm a fast responder. I tend to kind of just the way I operate. I'm really, really trying to slow down and be a bit more thoughtful before hitting send on stuff. It's a work in progress. But yeah, so I can talk about slowing down as being really important. I should, I should take my own medicine, probably.

Okay. You probably don't know this, but I have a thing with lawyers, like actually a thing against lawyers. Did you ever think of becoming a lawyer?

No, because I thought it was too boring. I mean, I really, I didn't know. I left undergrad, I didn't know what I wanted to do. Law school was kind of the obvious answer. I like arguing. I need my stepdad's a lawyer. Everyone told me I'd be a great lawyer, but at the end of the day, it just seemed I couldn't bear to do anything that boring.

Oh my God, I love that. I love that. Oh, that's so, so good. The other thing I really liked that I marked down on my little notes here— Leticia Bittar.

Oh yeah, wonderful.

That was a great, great interview, and I will put that in the show notes too. She— I think it was her section also— the no binary. It's not black and white.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. Nothing is. And I think, I think that our sort of— we're in a very black and white phase, right? This is in, in our society. You see it very kind of binary thinking, obviously about politics. We've become much more politically divided. We're much more likely to really dislike the other side, but I even saw it like after Russia invaded Ukraine and there was so much pressure on all these companies to kind of pull out. And we had a very binary view of like, you're in or out of Russia. And as you will know, that's not really how it works, but we have this spreadsheet from Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and we had all these, you've got to get out right now. Obviously behind the scenes, it's a bit more complicated than that. Do you keep paying your employees? Do you sell your operations? Do you evacuate? Do you whatever? There are all these really complicated questions. And I think a lot of the time we have this very black and white view. The good companies are out, the bad companies stayed in, and there's a lot of yelling. And I think it makes companies more defensive and more likely to kind of resort to PR in ways I don't think are very, very helpful for our discussion or really advancing companies to behave better. So yeah, I think the black and white binary nature of certainly American society at the moment is a real, real problem. And it makes it very hard to have a discussion, hard to provide nuance, hard to say that might be okay sometimes. No one really wants to hear that at the moment.

And it's just like going back to Tom Harden. He would've said, "I would've never done this." But when it's couched in a different way, much like the companies in Ukraine, in Russia, like, we could just pull out, but then what about all our employees? We're actually killing them. Hurt our employees. I mean, it's that slowing down.

Exactly. And I think it's really revealing that Nestlé had some of the worst pressure on social media over Russia. And they— there is a case, there is a human rights case to still provide paid baby food and pet food to Russians. And what I saw on Twitter was a lot of, no, chocolate with a side of blood, you've got to get out, you're really self-serving. And so I worry about this because I see a lot of companies pulling out of markets, like lots of companies pulled out of Myanmar. After the coup, and it's made female unemployment skyrocket. A lot of these businesses have been sold to people that are really unethical. I don't think this is good for human rights. So, the real world's very messy and complicated. Business ethics is messy and complicated. And certainly a binary black and white view, I think, will only get us so far. But people love to feel righteous. That's another one of Jon's books, The Righteous Mind. We love to feel righteous. I often give a talk to kind of big groups and I will start off and I'll put a kind of question in the chat and I'll say, how ethical are you on a scale of 1 to 5? And it doesn't matter if I'm teaching a class of 30 people at Stern or 500 people at a corporation, 85 to 90% will always say a 4 or a 5. So we always, we all think we're more ethical than average, just like we all think we're better than average drivers. But as you will know very well, the research shows that in fact, most of us can be encouraged encouraged to behave unethically in the right environment. So I think if we can start from a bit of a perspective of humility and learning and slowing down, we're much more likely to make better decisions rather than being like, I'm a good person, what do you mean?

And I'm a huge fan of Dan Ariely. He kind of got me into behavioral economics, behavioral science. And you do only have a few big cheaters, but you have tons of little cheaters, just tons of little cheaters.

Exactly. Most of us will cheat a little If we're given the opportunity, but not so much that we feel bad. And so this is, I think this is just such an amazing thing. Like once you see that you can completely move your thinking about ethics traditionally, of course, we've had this view of ethics and compliance of like, we have the policies and the procedures and the control processes and the speak-up line. And we, if we can just find and remove the bad people, we won't have a problem anymore. But if we acknowledge that everyone's potentially a bad person, then we can think more about how do we design the systems? Let's think about the bonus structure. Let's think about the promotion criteria. Let's think about, do we really have a no asshole rule or do we promote people that behave badly, but get great results? And if you pay attention to those things, I think you will have much better impact with your rules and processes and procedures. So if you design culture to make being good as easy as possible, you will have far fewer problems with these theoretical bad apples.

Yeah. And I listened to you on Christian Hunt. I've been on Christian's podcast, I think twice. And you put a good apple in with bad apples and they're eventually gonna go south or turn south.

That's it. Yeah. I can't remember if I said this on Christian's podcast, but the bad apple metaphor was originally supposed to be about the whole barrel rotting. And now we use it to be like, oh, there were just a few bad apples. No rot here. Nothing to see here, mate. So the meaning of the metaphor has changed, which I just find completely fascinating.

Yeah, that's also like putting the frog in water and slow— that's fake. It doesn't work.

Yes, that's right. The frogs do not in fact do that. It's just a nice idea.

Everyone uses that and I'm like, no. And I do a presentation on ethics and I say, is business ethics an oxymoron like jumbo shrimp or military intelligence? But that's what I like about Ethical Systems. You're using the academic with the real world.

Yeah, and that's the whole reason Ethical Systems was founded, because what John noticed when he, he really started focused on business ethics is that there's loads of great ideas from academics, and mainly the corporate world completely ignores them. There's a load of consultants saying, just do this and benchmark against that and do what the DOJ says. And so what we're trying to do is get those, the really good ideas that are workable and practical in front of people that are doing real jobs in real companies. So if people ask what I do, I mean, I think of myself as a translator between academics and the business world.

That's how I view my job, Well, and I also think this goes to podcasts. Like, I walk over 20,000 steps a day. I'm always listening to podcasts, and I have gotten a better education than I ever got when I attended college.

Oh yeah. Yeah. I mean, in college it was better when I studied organizational psychology, but I remember it was professors going, well, this is the way it is and read this book. And I always would sit in class being like, you sound very certain about the way it is, but the world's changing really fast. And is this really true? And so I think we need a lot more practical technical education in business law and anything else. I mean, I've really noticed that the student— what the students love most about my classes is that I've got all these stories and all this professional experience. So I think it's good to have a mix of people that have really got their hands dirty in the real world and people that, you know, are really brilliant academically if you're going to really educate the next generation of leaders. So I'm certainly the former, not the latter, but the students seem to really appreciate that got some kind of practical hands-on experience of this stuff.

So going back to your investigation days, do you have a favorite case, or as I call it, a favorite child that you can talk about?

Oh man. I mean, I did so many great cases. I did a lot of work on, in the South African defense industry about kind of corruption and offset. There was a lot of, a lot of corruption on both sides, a lot of corruption kind of going on. So it was a very sort of big political risk case. I did a project in the DRC, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in Kinshasa, for a mining company who thought that one of their competitors was bribing the Deputy Minister of Mines to cancel their license. That was a fun case. And I worked on— I don't know if you remember this, I think it was in 2006— there was a toxic waste spill in Abidjan in Côte d'Ivoire by Trafigura, And so I investigated what happened with that ship and then what happened on the ground and who was really responsible for that. So I guess I don't have a favorite case because I did so many amazing cases, but those would be— those would give you a flavor of some of the things that I worked on. Yeah.

So I, I know you're familiar with Margaret Heffernan, the whole whistleblower. What do you think about whistleblowers in your cases that you had? Did you have whistleblowers? Were they— I don't want to say rewarded, but not retaliated against?

Um, there were certainly whistleblowers in the South African defense industry. In the other two cases, not so much. I mean, Trafigura wasn't so much, um, whistleblowers, but what happened was Trafigura, who was the, the company that had spilled all this waste via a contractor, kind of denied, denied, denied, did a lot of kind of libel lawsuits, tried to stop the media covering the case. Case, tried to stop anyone talking about it in UK Parliament, like really kind of came down really heavily, used the UK law. And then what happened was that Julian Assange started WikiLeaks, and the one of the first big WikiLeaks was all these internal documents from Trafigura. So this was such an amazing— this was like in 2009— this was such an amazing thing to me because I'd spent the whole of 2007, 2008 investigating this case. We found huge amounts of circumstantial evidence. We couldn't prove kind of thing because we didn't have access to Trafigura's internal documents. And as you will know, like, Africa was very opaque at the time. It's still quite opaque, but lots of stuff you couldn't get online. You had to talk to people. We couldn't conclusively prove anything. And then WikiLeaks came out and all this internal information like hit the public domain. And that was before all the diplomatic cables, it was before the Panama Papers, it was before all this stuff. I looked at this and I was like, wow, Wow, social media and the weaponization of information is going to really change business ethics. And for sure I was right about that.

And I don't remember exactly when you posted this, but my daughter and I will go into a store, like a major store, and she'll go, Mackenzie was here. She literally is a 22-year-old. She will go, Mackenzie was here. You've been, I'm gonna say, vocal, and vocal in a very good way. I don't think Mackenzie's gonna hire you anytime soon.

I mean, and I I think that speaks very well of your daughter. I experienced the same thing. I teach 22-year-olds, I teach seniors a class called Professional Responsibility and Leadership. And yeah, I mean, that's exactly my experience as well. If I run something past them, like we read the Business Roundtable statement and I was like, what do you think of this? And they're like, this is PR, this is nonsense. And then we talked about Black Lives Matter and I was like, what did you think about what corporations did about that? And they were like, PR, this is nonsense, they don't mean it. Look at the senior leadership composition, look at the pay, look they're paying taxes, look at what they're doing, and they're so sophisticated. This is partly why I feel hopeful about the future, because I feel like they really are going to kind of outsmart us on— they understand social media, they understand signaling, they understand hypocrisy, they really want to call it out. And I am not sure that our current generation of corporate leaders are ready for them, quite frankly. And I find it both funny and exciting to think think what's gonna happen when people like your daughter really enter the workforce and, and start changing corporations.

I'll say, in my 20s, I wasn't aware. I just— you just got a job.

Yeah, I had the idea, yeah, you have to kind of turn up and do what you're told until you get senior enough to tell other people what to do, which is a depressing view of work. And I don't think 22-year-olds want that kind of work. They don't want that kind of boss. They don't want to be that kind boss. They just don't think about leadership in that way. And I think that's incredibly positive.

Yeah, yeah, me too. So as we're kind of coming to a close, because I know how busy you are, and Alison has a book coming out— it'll be like first quarter 2023, is that when you—

uh, no, I don't know. It's my first book. My first draft is going to be with the editor later this year. So it's really— and then I want to get a lot of people to critique it before it's published. I— and, and I have chapter on lots of different subjects, so I really have a lot of potential to annoy a lot of people. So I want to really make sure that it gets ripped apart before it goes out into the world. So I'm anticipating a long review process, but I'm hoping it does come out in 2023. I will obviously keep you posted.

So are you binging anything these days on like streaming or podcasts?

Give our audience Oh gosh, I mean, I love Pivot. We've already talked about that. I love a podcast that's really, really nerdy called Capital Isn't by the University of Chicago, and they debate kind of ideas in capitalism and changing capitalism. It's, it's pretty academic, but I, I really like the hosts. And I love a podcast called You're Wrong About. One of the hosts has left now, but if you look at the old episodes, and they take a lot of kind of old old scandals or kind of moral panics from like the '90s or the '60s, and they kind of revisit them. So there's a— there's one on Tonya Harding, and there's one on Yoko Ono, and there's one on lots on kind of O.J. There's a whole series on Princess Diana. And I like it because it's like young people talking about things that happened when I was young, and they've just got a funny take on it. I really, really like it. I would recommend that. And then, I mean, TV's got so amazing these days, it's hard to even think of all the things I watch. But I'm watching We Crashed right at the moment.

I was going to ask you, are you watching it as well?

I just think Anne Hathaway's performance is so brilliant. I just, I'm really enjoying it. I don't think much of Adam Neumann, obviously, but I'm really enjoying the way they're doing it.

Well, and Adam Neumann's making a comeback.

Yes, he is.

Yeah. So this leads me to, did you follow the Elizabeth Holmes Theranos case at all?

Absolutely. And I read the Wall Street Journal book about that case. Fascinated by the creepy boyfriend, I must say.

Jury is in deliberations right now for that. And the Prof G, Scott Galloway, had a point of view. Why did Adam Neumann get away with— I'm gonna say his— he calls it like his 10%, $2 billion. And Elizabeth Holmes, who really didn't actually profit, is going to go to prison. And he says it's cultural.

No, I was going to say it's sexism, but I don't know what's Galloway's explanation.

So he says it's cultural, that Mashi Son is originally from and that Elizabeth Holmes ripped off four old white guys.

That makes sense as well. That's a good alter— So that combination, that makes sense to me. I do think we all know these kind of glass cliff arguments. There's all this data showing women tend to get pulled in in turnarounds and then are more likely to kind of get fired when they can't do it. So I don't want to excuse Elizabeth Holmes. I think she's a relatively nasty piece of work. So maybe it's a good sign we have that kind of grand fraud coming from a woman. Maybe this is a sign of good gender balance. Dynamics. But I feel the way she's been kind of punished and hauled over the coals and the level of attention, I can't say for sure what it would have been like if she was a man, but I know it would have been different.

Yeah, very much so. Which leads me to my last point, and I don't know if you've listened to— do you listen to No Stupid Questions? It's a spin-off of Freakonomics.

No, but that sounds great.

Okay, so it is— this one is with— they're both with Angela Duckworth and Steven Dubner, but it's episode 97. I'll put it in the Show Notes, Are Women Really Less Happy Than Men? And I think you should listen to it.

I will. Yeah, I see this data saying that we— I think there might be different data depending on whether we're single or married, but I can't remember. Yeah, I will listen to the episode and then I will send you a note.

Okay. Okay. Also, again, I can't thank you enough. This is like literally a starstruck moment because you're on LinkedIn, you're on Twitter, you're writing this book, and the work you do I think is so incredibly important. As a fraud primary. I look at fraud, but basically it comes down to ethics or the lack of.

Yes, yes. Thank you for all you do, Kelly. You're a brilliant voice out there as well, and anyone that's helping us have better conversations and kind of make these efforts more effective is— it's so important. Like, all this buzz about ESG and responsible business, I kind of think, like, if we don't get the basics right on ethics, all of this is fluff, all of this is window dressing. So I do think we need a return to first principles, and we need more people you out there fighting the good fight. So thank you for all you do as well. We're very, very grateful.

Oh, thank you, Alison. And when you finish your book, you've got to come back.

Of course I will. As soon as I finished it, all I'm gonna do is go on podcasts and go to parties for at least a year. That's my plan.

That sounds delightful. Oh, so what did you think? Alison's work is so important, and I love the background that she had— started as an Investigator. And basically, she goes to prove and to show you how your career can twist and turn and end up in a spot where you just influence so many people. I can't wait for her book. If you are not connected to Allison on LinkedIn, you need to, because you know what? She posts such amazing stuff. You got to follow her on Twitter. And I can't wait until 2023 because I will be there for Ethical Systems Conference, and I hope to see you guys there too, because it truly was a life-changing experience. Thank you so much.