Q&A with Alison Taylor, Clinical Professor at NYU Stern School of Business

Format for today is slightly different. We're going to have an interview with Alison. Dee's going to run that in a sec, and then we're going to do some breakouts and have some questions with Alison and then hear a little bit more about our new book club, which Rutger is going to talk about. So without further ado, I'm going to hand over to Dee and Alison to take it from here.

Thank you. And I see we still have some people coming through, but welcome. And I'm delighted to be able to run today's session and interview Alison, whose book I'm completely and utterly obsessed with and kind of is always here on my side, not just for today's session, but every day. And for those of you who don't know Alison, Alison is clinical professor at NYU Stern Business School, School of Business, which is in the US, but she's a Brit, so has a good understanding of the kind of that kind of dynamic between the US and the UK context and what we can learn maybe from what's happening in the US as well. And she's also author of the book Higher Ground: How Business Can Do the Right Thing in a Turbulent World. She wears lots of other hats and in her own words has even more opinions than hats, which we will get into today. So as I said, Alison, I have absolutely loved your book and have highlighted many things in every single chapter. And we will be using it, it will be the first of our Pipsi book club, which we'll be talking about later. But first, Alison, could you tell me a little bit more about you and the path that brought you to write this book?

Absolutely. And thank you so much, everybody, for joining. It's such a pleasure to be here and have a chance to talk to you, Dee. There are a few ways I can answer that, but you, as you said, I'm a professor at NYU. I teach ethics and sustainability classes to execs, to MBAs, and to undergrads. But I'm not a career academic. So I spent about 12 years working for a company called Control Risks in corporate investigations. So political risk, bribery and corruption, fraud and money laundering. I worked first of all in the Middle East and Africa and then in the Americas. So that's a certain lens, right, on responsible business. You deal with ethics and compliance teams. You deal with general counsels. You deal with external law firms and bankers. And it's all about regulatory risk. One thing I think you discover when you work in investigations is that the facts matter less than the culture and leadership and how the organization responds to what you find. So I started to notice this. I started to ask a lot of questions, therefore, about culture and leadership and organizational psychology and that kind of thing. I went back to school. I originally have a master's in international relations. I went back to school to study organizational psychology, and then I moved into working in sustainability for quite a well-known nonprofit called BSR. And so one of the origin stories of the book, in fact, is that I was so shocked when I moved to the world of sustainability, thinking about climate change and human rights and inequality and purpose and biodiversity, by how much of a disconnect there was with the ethics compliance conversation and how much the ideas and concepts and certainly the jargon didn't really gel. And so then, you know, I did that job for 5 years. Then I went to work at NYU first to run a think tank called Ethical Systems. And now I'm full-time on the faculty. But my— so my work and my book is really, really informed by my professional practical experience. Experience. So these days I do a lot of teaching, I still do a lot of writing, and I do a lot of advisory work still with corporations.

Fantastic, thank you. And it's, it's just so interesting to be able to have someone with that career path happening, you know, in those investigations, like really getting into, in under the skin of some of these problems, right? And then to go on the path that you have done and being able to connect the various things is, is really very helpful in my understanding of this work as well. So the book is entitled Higher Ground. What for you does a business on higher ground look and feel like? Oh my gosh.

What a great question. So the first thing to say is I had a real hard time naming the book. This was, in fact, the kind of draft title. I looked for a better idea the whole time I was writing it. But one of the reasons the book is called Higher Ground is I found that people I was interviewing responded quite negatively to the term ethics. They said people expect you to start singing hymns. I found that there wasn't a consensus consensus on what that looked like. That's before we even get into conversations about what sustainability or responsibility means. So I was looking for something that wasn't deep in this responsible business jargon, but would express something about what it means to be an ethical business. And so I use this metaphor of hiking throughout the book and trying to get kind of higher so you can see more clearly. But I also wanted to express the idea that this is always gonna be a work in progress. There's never a sense that you're gonna kind of get to any destination. This speaks to many of the ideas that we can have about organizational culture. And if you're not constantly working on it, if you're not trying to build something, then it's likely to be kind of denigrating or, or, or declining. And so what I wanted to express was all those ideas and also an idea that I think We have in responsible business, we're always looking for perfection. We're always looking for the perfect case study. We're always looking for the organization that gets everything right. And I've never met such an organization. And I think we, make a mistake if we try and say, well, who's a good company, who's a bad company. I think what we need to do actually is learn from particular practices in particular organizations. And a lot of the time, what you can learn from whom is a little bit counterintuitive and not really present in the wider discourse. So those are some of the reasons I called the book Higher Ground. There's also a, a wonderful Stevie Wonder song called Higher Ground that came out the year I was born, and it's sort of the theme tune of the book.

Oh, fantastic. Have you ever used that as your intro song coming on stage? Love it. Um, so there is this really great phrase in the book, and I'm gonna read this so I get it right, um, that I would love to dig into a little bit more. And it's: when the ground is shifting and neither higher walls nor faster pace will help, it's time to seek firmer footing. So I'd just love to hear your thoughts on what are the conditions or the contexts that are causing this ground to shift, um, and why is the response to build higher walls and move at faster pace so alluring And what's the limitations of that?

Right. So, okay, let me try and answer this. So the argument I make in the book, which is a little wonky to get into right away, but, but I argue that we treat, we have treated business ethics actually, and also sustainability as a sort of defense mechanism. What we try to do is build a boundary around the organization. So in the compliance context, if you get into trouble with the regulator and you can say we've got adequate procedures in place, we've got policies, we've got processes, we've got officials, we've got training, we've got a whistleblowing line, then you can make the argument that the problem was a bad apple and you've got everything in place and the regulator will leave you alone. So what you're trying to do in that situation is to create a sort of defense mechanism for the regulator and against legal risk. Excuse me, I'm a little croaky. I've been traveling all week. I think unfortunately as well, and I don't think this is the intention of people that work in sustainability, but there's a tendency to treat sustainability also as a defense mechanism. So you write a glossy report full of happy children and you list all the wonderful things you're doing and you disclose all this data. And the idea is if you do that in a— you'll have a better reputation and people will trust you more. So that's also a form of reputational defense mechanism. So we can think about this as a sort of all of an effort to protect shareholder value by giving the regulator a good story about what you're doing and then giving other stakeholders a good story about your responsible business efforts. The problem is that those defenses don't work anymore in the conditions that we have today. So one thing that of course has happened is with the rise of social media and hypertransparency, companies have been forced into a much more interactive and dynamic relationship with stakeholders who are calling them out, trying to hold them accountable. We don't take the company's word for it anymore. There's a lot of concern, of course, about greenwashing, whitewashing, that kind of thing. And then we've also seen the rise of employee activism. So young people using their smartphones, recording town halls internally, leaking emails either onto Twitter or to journalists. And so you can't tell a nice story and create that defensive boundary if what you have is a bunch of people on the inside of your company undercutting that message. So you have to therefore think about your narrative and think about creating trust in a different way. The second boundary that has shifted is in terms of the issues that we expect a corporation to take on. So we no longer really trust politicians to get in and getting done. There's a really negative view of the government in both Britain and the UK and the US at the moment. So we also can't anchor to shareholder value and so on. And then we've seen these kind of generational shifts in values and expectations about what a business can take on. So in all these ways, we can't rely on telling a nice story to the external world. We can't rely on confidentiality. We can't rely on having a different message externally or internally even. So we have to think about, I think, creating trust and interacting with stakeholders in a new way that is less defensive. And part of that, I think, means admitting to imperfection, admitting to the complexity of some of these challenges. And then I have a very strong view that a lot of the rise of ESG has led to box ticking, has led to reporting to ESG frameworks. Has led to a focus on breadth over depth and has led to basically a lot of very unconvincing claims about what corporations are going to get done, which has then further led to the collapse of trust from the general public. So we're not— what we're doing isn't working. What sustainability love— people love to say is this is all, you know, easy and it's just about stakeholder engagement and why isn't everybody doing this? We need to ask why everybody isn't doing this because if it were that easy, I think more corporations would be doing a good job. And so I argue that we need to think about all these ideas in a totally new way.

Yeah, nice. And so many, so many thoughts bouncing. And I guess like when you were talking about this building of the higher walls, we've just all been trained to do that, right? Without actually realizing that that's our natural reaction that we go to in business.

And I think it's inherent in the idea of managing reputational risk. So people, you know, reputation is of course an outcome, but I think there's a real tendency, right, to put the PR, corporate affairs, sustainability lead to put a nice message with the hope you then get a better reputation. But building trust and managing reputational risk are not the same things. They're often used interchangeably, but they're not the same.

Yeah, yeah. And And when it comes to this firmer footing, because I think a lot of people— and we discuss some of these challenges quite a lot, and I'm sure there'll be a lot of people nodding heads as to what you were just saying there— but when it comes to the firmer footing of this and getting a firmer footing, what does that look like? And what should we be paying attention to now in order to get that firmer footing?

Well, I make the argument in the book, and it is a debatable point, of course, and I'm happy to debate it, that What we need to do is base our ethical commitments on our impact on human beings. I think if you anchor to human rights and human impact and the, and the effect that your business has on stakeholders in the outside world, then you do have a firmer footing. And that doesn't mean that there aren't trade-offs and complexities and problems with that focus. But given that you can no longer anchor to legal risk and no longer anchor to ESG scoring, I think that question of impact is, is, is where I land. There is obviously a big debate at the moment and a big conversation going on about how to measure impact. And I slightly fear we're going to get into this sort of effort to quantify and measure impact in a way that's inherently always going to be debatable. But I would suggest that every business knows what its negative and positive externalities are and how big they are without having to get into an exhaustive decade-long measurement exercise. I also think human rights frameworks have a lot to offer given geopolitical conflicts and also, of course, given the emerging regulatory environments. And then given that we're in this situation where values have become incredibly contested in the US, we're very, very polarized. There's a debate even going on about democracy. And capitalism, there's so much misinformation, then I think an anchor to human rights is positive because one of the core ideas of human rights is that you don't impose your values on people that don't share them. And so I think one of the challenges with purpose and sustainability in general is that we've treated this like any other top-down strategic rollout. You know, the leaders set goals and make commitments and then we cascade them down and we hope that's going to kind of magically happen. And I think we need to reframe and rethink ideas of purpose and sustainability as more of a matter of kind of co-creation with the wider workforce, perhaps even wider stakeholder groups. But we can't have this kind of direction from the top anymore because ideas of leadership are changing. The influence that leaders have in organizations is changing. And very often it is young people that know more about these topics and are more passionate than the senior leadership team. So we want to really take care not to kind of enhance those existing hierarchical tensions, which I think are getting worse and worse.

Yeah. And, you know, and for us at Blueprint, there's two core ideas that underpin our view on purpose. One is the common good and one is human dignity. And of course, they're two separate ideas, but they're massively self-reinforcing too, right? Because respecting the dignity of people is part of the common good. And so a lot of the how you do this work is as important as the end what as well, or at least you get to a better what, a more sustainable what by how you do it. And of course, in doing that, it can throw up a whole bunch of inherent contradictions and the potential for polarities. And we've got our lab, our current lab that's just kicked off is around leadership. And I think there is a whole style of leadership now that we need to look to develop. And I don't mean leaders in a hierarchical way. I mean that in all of us, about the comfort of navigating some of this complexity and then holding some of these polarities. And there was quite a few of those kind of tucked away in different aspects of the book. But is there anything that you'd like to draw out today that you see, particularly, I guess, anything we can learn from the US context on this?

Yeah, so I actually found the chapter on leadership the hardest to write of any of them. Maybe the first place to start is to say that CEO job descriptions are changing and the kind of people we look to be CEOs are changing. There's more of an emphasis on social skills, psychological safety, knowledge of sustainability. A simple way to put this is we're moving from barking orders from the top to influencing diffuse networks. We're still seeing, and I'm really seeing it with the kind of return to office course from CEOs at the moment. We're still seeing CEOs say, well, best for our culture to have everyone coming back in, you know, 5 days a week and kind of making these very declarative top-down statements. But I think in this era of more kind of intangible value, rethinking organizations as open systems, certainly less respect for hierarchy from young people, we need to think of this less as kind of barking orders and more about can you bring people along with you? Do people want to follow you? Can you admit that you you don't know? Can you do research? Can you bring the wider employee base into a conversation about values and culture and responsibility so that you're not trying to impose something from the top? And so, you know, I quite often ask, you know, when was the last time you heard a CEO say, I don't know? And I think it's become sort of borderline impossible for CEOs to do that. But in the atmosphere that we have at the moment where there's extreme uncertainty even about the short term, I think this kind of projection of we know exactly what's going to happen, which you see in all sorts of contexts, is just not credible. And we need to rethink the kind of people we're putting in charge.

Yeah, and, um, we just finished our lab around, uh, well, just done the write-up around culture, employee engagement, and purpose. And I think one of the contradictions that came up when we did a bit of research and interviewing, and that was this desire from people in organizations for clarity, for alignment, for certainty. And at the same time, in the context of purpose, wanting to be able to have their own individual needs, their cares, their desires to be acknowledged. And so some of it is like holding that inherent contradiction as you move forward. Yeah, just any thoughts you have on that. And then I'll ask one last question before we jump into breakouts.

Oh, well, yeah, I mean, so that's That's very, very interesting. And the second thing you said is really, really interesting to me because I think one of the things I observe in the classroom and then certainly observe when I talk to senior leaders today is that we have a new generation of workers. And if you're under about 26 or 27, you don't actually remember corporate culture before the pandemic. But the way I would characterize this new generation of workers, and it's exactly what you just said, is the expectation that the organization adapts to me. The organization meets my values and my desire for meaning and accommodates maybe my burnout or my desire to work from home, you know, allows me to have kind of impact and meaning. And then if I want my CEO to stand up on an issue like, let's say, the tragedy unfolding in the Middle East, that will be a way I have influence. And so we're increasingly— young people, I think, are looking to their employer to kind of maybe even express their political frustrations and give them this sense of agency that they don't have in the rest of the world. But of course, that leads to very problematic outcomes. And the Middle East conflict being a very good example of this, where you see people saying, you know, I want my CEO to stand up on this issue and take a position on this issue. The vast majority of CEOs, well, maybe all CEOs cannot actually influence this conflict in any meaningful way. There's also a horrible conflict going on in Sudan at the moment. So why would we speak up on one thing and not another? And if it has nothing to do with the business, we also need to ask what, you know, what justification is there for the CEO of an organization to take a position and represent either stakeholders and employees who may or may not agree? And by definition, if you take a position on the Middle East conflict, somebody is going to be extremely upset with you. And so we've got into this situation, I think, where we're expecting corporate leaders to provide a sort of representation that we used to rely on the democratic process to provide. And this has led to overreach, overpromising, unconvincing claims about the problems a corporation can and cannot solve. I also think it's sucking energy out of the political process. So I think what we need to do is to really then kind of go to employees that are pushing for these various things and say, well, you know, we can't influence this and we could do something or say something about this issue. It will be at the expense of focus and energy and capital allocation on this other issue. So let's have a conversation about where we can focus, the issues we can actually influence. Let's look to help our workers pay a living wage, help our supply chain workers meet our commitments. Manage our own negative externalities before we go out there taking a position on some other kind of wider issue. And so, you know, I think there has been this kind of expansion of the ideas a corporation shouldn't, shouldn't speak up on. I think a lot of it's really dangerous, and I think we need to correct this, but in collaboration with the wider workforce. We can't just say, well, no, we're not taking a position on these topics. But I think we have to have a sensible discussion about materiality and focus and acknowledge that no company company of any size can actually prioritize 30 or 40 things, let alone influence an intractable geopolitical conflict.

Yeah, and there's some great examples in your book in particular about decision-making and decision-making on, for example, on when to speak up on an issue and when not to. And I know you mentioned earlier, like, there is no perfect company, right?

Right.

Like there is no perfect person. And but there is some spotlights of some interesting things that are happening in this space. I'd love to hear just 2 or 3 from your perspective that you think really stand out that might be helpful for the crew today.

Yeah, let me start off by saying I think we spend far too much time in the sustainability and purpose community looking for best practice and looking for good examples and far too little time learning from failure I'm particularly learning from companies on the edge of a particular issue. So that would be a kind of— I'm always asked who I think is doing a good job, and I really struggle to answer that question because, because as I've said already, no one's doing a good job on everything. That all said, I really like— there is a tech company called Atlassian that has written a great guide to getting to net zero that I think really acknowledges the complexity of what's going on. I want to highlight Unilever because Unilever is having so much bad press at the moment for what I think is an absolutely correct decision to focus on 4 material issues rather than 30. I think if you look at their previous commitments, they're absurdly overextended. The company has, under the new CEO, made this decision to focus on nature, livelihoods, climate, and elastics and to drive policy alignment, which I think is really, really appropriate. And they're certainly having a really hard time. I'm hearing behind the scenes that a lot of people are saying, well, I'm glad you went first because we do need this more focused and restrained era to kind of come into view. And then finally, my book starts and ends with Chobani, a private company. So maybe life is a little bit easier in some ways for private companies, but has a very focused commitment to the US agricultural food system. Has managed to hire refugees into Republican parts of the country without suffering the kind of social media backlash that you might expect, and then has employee ownership and I think a really, really healthy culture. So those would be a few kind of interesting examples of companies that I think are trying to wrestle with some of these dilemmas.

Yeah, fab. And I've just posted in the chat there, we've just updated our case study page, which draws on some the examples that Alison, from Alison's book, and that you mentioned today, but also gives a little bit of a preamble because I know for people on the call, you get asked this question. So a little bit of how do you actually manage answering that question in a way that doesn't just reduce it down to, and here, look, here's a perfect list of companies doing great things. So how do you navigate it?

I mean, I go to so many conferences where you hear from the usual suspects over and over again, and people sit on the stage and they're like, we did the right thing, and then we found out it made more money. And this kind of, You know, there's a very sort of fluffy clichéd account of things that we listen to. And I think we need to listen to a broader range of voices. I think we need to have more uncomfortable conversations. I think we need to look more closely at where the best ideas come from because they're very often not from the companies that we hear from at these big conferences.

And as you say, what are we learning from what's not going well, even with some of those great ideas? They'll still be learning about how it— you may have tripped up in a couple of places. And we do quite a bit of that within the community, talking more about the context in which you are trying to activate a practice or a tool or a skill as we are about the specific thing. So Lauren, am I handing over to you now? Because we're going to do a bit of a breakout before coming back for Q&A.

Brilliant. Yes. Thank you, Alison Taylor Taylor.

There is a sort of a tension between practicing purpose and talking about purpose and ultimately having positive impact and mitigating sort of negative impacts. So I guess my question is, how do we, or our question as a group was, how do we hold organizations to account in having positive impact? And then cheekily adding like a second follow-up question around that, if there were one or two metrics that we could choose that are really important, what would they What would they be? And happy to put this in the chat as well, if that's helpful.

Oh, no, I mean, tough questions, right? So there's obviously an accountability problem. This is maybe the, you know, the existential problem of the sustainability movement. There are a lot of people out there at the moment saying voluntary corporate actions will never get us there. We need regulation. I totally take that point. I'm highly sympathetic to it. But I think we need to understand that the origin story of this entire situation was corporations globalizing and going to places with raw materials and cheaper labor precisely to avoid this kind of regulation. And we have an increasingly fraught environment in terms of kind of international oversight and the role of the UN and that kind of thing. We've defaulted then to say this is all about disclosure. And if people disclose, then investors and other stakeholders will be able to hold corporations accountable. I think that overestimates the degree to which even a very informed investor can understand and unpack these disclosures and figure out who is doing a good or bad job. And this has led to a lot of ESG box ticking. So I don't know that I have a great answer in terms of accountability. We can tell a story about investors consumers, employees. I make the argument that employees have become the most powerful stakeholders because they've got all this insider information. And so probably the area where I think we have the most chance for more accountability and meaningful change is by harnessing that kind of employee passion and thinking about culture and trying to reshape these issues. I would also like to see, and I think there's a whole chapter in the book on this, but there's a whole conversation to be had about alignment with the political process. We've seen, I think, a lot of the time, this is probably particularly in the US context, companies making sustainability claims, we care about reproductive rights, we care about climate change, and then very often funding trade associations or particular politicians that are driving a completely different agenda. So I think maybe one of the most promising areas we need to look at is alignment between what the company says it cares about and then where it is spending lobbying, using its campaign finance. And if we could have alignment there, then that would probably be more important than a lot of the ESG disclosures kind of going on. I also think it's a struggle to say, here's a metric that we can, we can say whether someone's doing a good or bad job. But I would like to see meaningful human rights impact assessments. I'd like to see meaningful disclosures on the kind of negative externalities where you need ethical guardrails. And not just talking about the business case. And then, as I said already, I fear we will get into this very esoteric conversation about impact and attribution. Let's take a very simple example. If you fund a healthcare program in a local community and there are better healthcare outcomes, it's just hard to say how much of that is attributable to you. And the last thing we need, I think, is another enormous decade-long data gathering exercise. What I want to see corporations do is make a good faith effort to listen to stakeholders, understand their impact, not impose decisions from, from the top or from inside the corporation. I think this is about listening and reciprocity, and I don't know that that many corporations are getting this right.

Yeah, I also think we need an element, and it's in there in your, in your answer too, a maturity around how we see metrics and not to see them as an end in and of themselves, but an input into our discussions, our decision-making. I think we've somehow come to this way of reducing everything down to a number and then managing to that number. And I think that can be unhelpful as well. Not to say that metrics aren't important, but it's the maturity around how we use and how we see metrics and the role that they play.

Yeah, and I think there's a lot going on given the EU regulatory situation now where we've got a lot more involvement from compliance and kind of assurance and that kind of thing in terms of disclosures and commitments. And that can be really positive, but I think it's also leading to a bit of watering down and ticking the box and maybe a lack of the kind of strategic focus we actually need.

Yeah, great. Right. Another room, another question. I'm sure there was probably other impact questions, metric questions, but any other questions?

I can go from our group. So thanks, Alison. We, we got into quite a few things, but particularly the shift in the power dynamic away from the top. And yeah, it is at all levels, I guess. And I guess they had a bit of a meta question is what is the future of the organization? In your view? And what might that service to business— I just didn't know if you'd done any of the sort of future of work and that sort of thing and what it might mean for this sort of, for the mission we have. That was one. I've got another one slightly different.

Well, I mean, I think we're seeing this kind of shift towards, I call it in various writings, the intangible corporation. So we no longer go to the same building every day. We no longer kind of, you know, end our working day at 5 PM and commute home. We've seen the, you know, the sort of dissolution of many of the boundaries around organizations. And so I think the kind of simple way I'd put it is that it, that leadership is more about influencing a diffuse network than command and control. I do feel pretty positive about a new generation of leaders and CEOs coming through today. I spend a lot of time in the classroom with people that I do think, think differently and take these issues seriously and have more skill sets. I do think we'll see more diversity and inclusion. The young people I work with just don't, you know, kind of understand why this is such an issue. Against all that, you know, we've still got those kind of traditional forces of short-term shareholder value. There's more concentration of power. I'm pretty worried about antitrust, and I'm pretty worried about the political process. So I think, again, kind of depending on what day or hour you catch me, I could spin this in a really positive or negative way. But spending a lot of time in the classroom with people who are passionate about these topics, and even just people who aren't but are required to take my ethics class, makes me feel better about the future of leadership and the— and a new generation of business leaders. So I think it's a big question about what the future of the organization is. But I hope we see new forms of influence, and I hope we see a bit of a more mature discussion about what the role of the private sector is in addressing some of these issues. And that discussion, I think, needs to factor in a lot more explicitly what is the role of other institutions in society, because I think we've tended to sort of talk in sustainability and purpose terms about the problems business can can solve without necessarily fully acknowledging there are many issues where there is a limitation for what one corporation can achieve, and many debates to be had about how far we're expecting a corporation to go, for example, to solve a very intractable issue like child labor.

Yeah, thank you, Alison. And in Lab 3, we— the strategy lab— we explored how do you, you know, if you have a meaningful challenge, how do you decenter the organization? How does that help you map a different type stakeholder map and the connections between them when you're not at the center of it, which is really helpful. And I'd say anyone who wants to develop skills in terms of how do you influence rather than top-down management control, try start setting up a community or a network or help us in developing this network because it's certainly a different type of skill set I'm learning. Right, we've got another question from John in the chat, but is there anyone else that would like to— John, would you like to unmute maybe and ask your question?

Yes, Alison, um, I, I wrote a book about the pandemic, um, and companies and what was most important for survival through the pandemic, and which— because a lot of companies, um, thrived and others just died during the pandemic, and the most important factor that explained the companies that were successful was purpose. It was the companies where from the CEO to the frontline, everybody suddenly put everything else aside around the conventional metrics for driving a business and focused on the purpose and their reason for being. And this is water companies, cafes, restaurants, supermarkets. Everybody found a way of focusing on their role in getting the world through the pandemic. I do a lot of work in shipping and that was the classic—

Sorry, John, I'm going to have to— sorry, because I just realized the time. So super, super interesting.

Did you see the same thing? And what did, what did you learn from the pandemic about purpose and the importance of purpose?

There's a really wonderful paper by— I'm blanking on her last name— Amelia, about COVID And the way that particular companies manage trade-offs and listen to stakeholders and thought about this, I think it highlighted, of course, kind of questions of resilience. It highlighted questions of whether you care about your impact on human beings. And there was then, you know, this enormous reckoning for worker rights and worker impact and how we treat people. So your findings make perfect sense. I think there have been a number of other challenges raised by COVID. I'm seeing a bit of dialing back now and a kind of we're going back to business as usual from a number of American CEOs that I don't think fully respects the fact that so many of us kind of adapted to these incredibly uncomfortable positions and kept things going. And so I fully agree with you. I think the question now is whether we can continue that momentum. And whether those commitments are going to really kind of sustain over the long term. Now we're seeing this kind of backlash and polarization and obsession with AI and so on. So, but your findings make perfect sense to me, and I'd love to hear more about your book if you want to send me a note.

Fantastic.

Thank you.

And I'm sure there's probably other questions, but I am going to hand over to Rutger now. But before I do that, Alison Taylor, thank you so much. That was so rich, and I'm really glad that we captured it on video as well. Um, and, uh, I think if you do want to say thank you to Alison, buy her book, recommend the book for joining this conversation and for having me today.

I love talking to you.