Last month over on LinkedIn, I did a series of chapter-by-chapter posts reviewing Alison Taylor’s excellent new book, Higher Ground: How Business Can Do the Right Thing in a Turbulent World. Taylor teaches ethics and responsible business at NYU and is one of our clearest-thinking guides on reconceptualizing the relationships between ethics, sustainability, ESG, and corporate governance. It’s a must-read for all business leaders, and as such I’ve collected my reflections here in one place in the hope they further contribute to the discussion she’s started.
Introduction: Rethinking Ethical Business (Just Don’t Say “Ethics”)
As I started reading Alison Taylor's new book, Higher Ground, an old memory surfaced from attending Ethical Corporation's annual conference more than a decade ago.
I was teaching philosophy and history at the time and had a fancy "dean of ethical life" title, but I had also begun consulting with companies on their sustainability goals and strategies. In fact, I was drawn to sustainability precisely because it seemed to me to be a place where you could actually have meaningful ETHICAL conversations and take action on them.
Coming out of the academic world, I was shocked that the conference was so reductive: to do ethics in a business context was a simple (or not?!) matter of legal compliance.
I was quickly disabused of my ivory-tower naiveté the more my work shifted into consulting with some major brands who were seriously engaged, but seriously struggling to do the right thing in their businesses.
Taylor's introduction helped me locate myself and my client work in some of the larger themes in play over the past couple of decades concerning "responsible business in society." Both expectations of business, and the scope of issues involved, have expanded dramatically. As she says, there is no more "neutral middle ground" for business to occupy.
Yet this is "an astonishing departure" from the earlier, dominant, and narrow definition of corporate responsibility: "focus on shareholder value and don't break the law."
My, how times have changed. There is tremendous pressure on business due to its scale, and due to society's dire needs. I suspect this will come up later in the section on leadership, but a good part of the pressure to "do something" - if incoherent in the demand - is a result of the abject failures of political, social, and intellectual leadership. When the public sphere can't act, business seems able to do….anything.
Executives, however, tend not to make great social prophets, and Taylor understands this and the limits inherent to what business can actually do. That is not say they can't have great impact, and I'm hopeful that her central organizing principle of business' "impact on human beings" will indeed provide "a more promising route to higher ground."
It's as surprising to me, as it was to her, that the experts she interviewed didn't like the word "ethics." Ethics is simply about how we live, and perhaps that older usage is a clue to her impact approach. We shall see, but this is a robust and promising start. More to come.
Chapter 1: Why Running a Business Got So Complicated
If I have one major takeaway from the first chapter of Alison Taylor's Higher Ground, it's that we all - by which I mean, the whole world - need an extended tropical vacation. Because we have been through A LOT.
Seriously, we are stressed, and everything is unpredictable.
I've been tracking the changes Taylor recounts in a masterfully tight narrative for about fifteen years now. But something about seeing that recent history boiled down to ten pages of the most relevant examples left me just saying, "Whoa. Whew."
The upshot: running a business is so much more complicated than it was thirty years ago because the world is much more complicated than it was.
Politics has invaded everything. Transparency has been weaponized. The professional has morphed into the personal. And how that all happens in any one case is entirely unpredictable.
Taylor's narrative tour makes a good case for why, as she says in the chapter's opening, that business has never been "more powerful" yet simultaneously "so vulnerable."
There be dragons here.
This story obviously lays the foundation Taylor will build upon in the book's central part. But it's worth making a couple of observations to thicken her succinct description.
First, while the detailed examples she gives concern business and corporate life, every industry and realm of social activity right now can articulate a similar narrative. Education, religion, politics and the public sphere - all these pillars of human culture are facing similar pressures and undergoing transformative, unpredictable convulsions. This is an era of churn, of tectonic cultural shifts, the like of which we haven't seen since about five centuries ago. (I'd also argue there's a deeper shift not seen since antiquity, but that's another story.)
So everything she outlines is about business - but it's also bigger than that.
Second - and perhaps this is implicit in her narrative - what we're witnessing is a whole lot of proverbial chickens coming home to roost. We're dealing with all this stuff NOW, because it wasn't dealt with THEN. And it's super messy now, because it was ignored then.
So, biz execs, time to biblically gird up your loins and face the truth. Cuz if you don't, someone will put in on the internet and your stock price will go down. Can't wait to dive into the unhelpful cliches of responsible business in chapter 2.
Chapter 2: How “Responsible Business” Became a Tangle of Traps
Some years ago, while writing the sustainability report for a global retailer, an exec determined we should begin every section with some variation on the phrase, "what's good for business is good for society."
How I wish I'd had the 2nd chapter of Alison Taylor's Higher Ground available then. Cliches, half-truths, and badly-thought narratives abound in "responsible business" these days. In such a complicated world, as she outlined in chapter 1, this kind of fuzzy thinking just makes things worse. We need better.
And Taylor delivers. Chapter two functions as an outline for the rest of the book. If you're too busy to read through, this chapter offers a synopsis full of punch and insight.
She runs through 11 "mini-narratives" that have seduced us into sloppy approaches to business' problems.
Take, for example, the call to "bring your whole self to work." On the surface, one might think, "Yea! I get to be FULLY me!" In redressing discrimination, you can understand why this imperative may be appealing. But business is not a family, or a church. It has never been a place where it's appropriate to, say, "let it all hang out." As Taylor notes, "There's a toxic, self-serving underside to the notion that a workplace might be like family, or that being a billing coordinator or plant supervisor will provide spiritual fulfillment."
There's more to say about each narrative, but I'll save that for the relevant chapters where she goes into detail. For now, I want to highlight what I think is the gem of this chapter, and make an observation about the nature of these narratives.
She doesn't go into a ton of detail, but her observation that a company - really, any organization - is "an open system in constant motion, comprising real human beings who form groups and negotiate over power, resources, strategy, and direction" is key to retelling these stale cliches. It draws on much work that sees human communities as dynamic networks of relationship and power. A corporation, despite its legal status as a "person" (thanks, Mitt Romney), is not a brittle, closed system.
Understanding our organizations in this way ensures a more adaptable response to complexity, and Taylor is spot on here.
Finally, these "mini-narratives" fall under a larger rubric of two "master narratives" that govern how we think about business. And that is this: business is either saint, or business is sinner. We tend to think that business is either going to save the world or send it straight to a living hell. Adopting either wholesale ironically paralyzes us from taking the action we need now.
I think these myths are key to understanding why Taylor says it's not helpful for us to think businesses are good or bad. The truth is every business has both - remember that "open system"? - just as each of us hold light and dark.
So let's ditch the bad thinking, reductive assumptions, and half-true narratives. That's only going to weigh us down as we attempt to climb.
Chapter 3: Building Stakeholder Trust
Chapter three of Alison Taylor's Higher Ground contains a wealth of practical, sensible guidance on the process of building stakeholder trust. If I had to boil it down, the theme is, to paraphrase James Carville, "It's the relationship, stupid!"
Taylor's suggestions highlight the range of needs and problems that arise in any stakeholder engagement process. Anyone working with stakeholders, or as an advisor, can find helpful advice directed to a range of scenarios. It reads as a kind of field guide to the flora and fauna of stakeholder development.
More broadly, I came away from this chapter wondering about our collective ability to forge trusting relationships. Everything Taylor offers here, which I wholly concur with, reads like a primer in "relationships 101." Be clear with your intentions. Respect others. Have some self-awareness about your needs and blind spots. Act in good faith, and keep your promises. Communicate directly, and keep people updated when circumstances shift.
Following this, one of the best parts of this chapter is on "who does the work - and why." Having worked on dozens of reporting projects, with folks from a slew of different departments, I know that who does this work of building relationships internally and externally is so important. It requires incredible people skills, as well as deep political - as in the art of solving problems - understanding and expertise. Lots of that is lacking in the box-ticking exercise of much stakeholder engagement, or in job descriptions for sustainability and ESG that seem far more tilted to so-called "technical" requirements rather than to smarts and listening skills.
For me, this chapter also raised the question of a character-based approach to business ethics versus a decision-making or act-based approach. Theoretically, and temperamentally, I get the attractiveness of standard utilitarian and deontological frameworks as guides for business. I suspect, though, that those tend to focus us on how to address true ethical dilemmas - when you have a choice between two results or impacts that do harm. Much, if not most, of our ethical behavior resides in how we treat others and ourselves and our environment. I wonder if a character-based approach might help us here. That's a question I'll keep considering in this read-through.
Relatedly, the most poignant part of the chapter came from Taylor's quote of a banking exec that "in the moral domain we found we lacked a grammar to explore what is good." This statement, for me, sums up the need for the work Taylor is doing here, and for a deep conversation about that grammar - because we actually have it. We just don't teach it, and we've incentivized ourselves into forgetting it.
Next up: setting priorities, in which I hope we have a frank discussion about materiality.
Chapter 4: Setting Social and Environmental Priorities
When I first transitioned from education into business, I kept running into this phrase: "what gets measured, gets managed." I have a background in religious studies, so I'm trained to identify religious dogma - and boy, was this a prime example. I did a little research and traced the phrase back to an article from the 1950s arguing AGAINST measurement for the sake of measurement, and that measurement can be a DISTRACTION from managing what matters, which might not be easily measured.
I've been using that article in presentations going on 10+ years, so it was very validating to see it referenced in the fourth chapter of Alison Taylor's Higher Ground. This chapter is a primer on how to figure out what's material - what's relevant, what matters - to your business' human impacts and core business.
The process can be challenging, as she notes, but it's also not rocket science. Certain sectors have core challenges, and certain business models come with inherent human impact risks. I mean, even Dunder Mifflin could figure out that, as a paper company, their biggest impacts are going to be in deforestation and sustainable forestry, supply chain and labor impacts, and, let's be honest, employee mental health.
So if you're not doing this process, you're actually missing out on a wealth of potentially helpful information about your company. Ya know, know thyself.
Where this gets really interesting is in how the whole assessment project is tied to strategy. Just to take a real world example, tech companies have traditionally been a sector that's low-ish on environmental impacts outside of the proverbial server farms. As a whole, tech's biggest human impacts have been on the social and governance side of things (data privacy, mental health, employee well-being, diversity, social unrest, etc).
That has all changed in the past year, as AI technology is evolving as a massively energy-intensive endeavor. And that makes energy now a core business material issue for tech. If they had followed Taylor's process, perhaps their current responses to this issue might be more robust. We shall see.
The point here is that not every issue is relevant to every business, and you do yourself no favors by trying to be all things to all people. Better to focus on a few issues where you can actually make a difference, that make sense with your business, or that might emerge as landmines.
I personally think this chapter should be required reading of every manager and executive, and I think Taylor is right that the process could be a significant opportunity for a company to get to know its people, strengthen relationships, and focus where it really matters - even start to make a difference on some of these intractable problems we collectively face.
Where it gets sticky, of course, is when you step outside your zone of control - which will be the theme of the next chapter.
Chapter 5: Tackling Corruption (for Real)
Can we do the right thing - can we be ethical - in an environment rife with corruption? That is the animating question Alison Taylor poses in chapter five of Higher Ground.
Taylor answers with a resounding yes, drawing on her extensive personal experience working on corporate anti-corruption programs. But that is not an obvious yes, as for much of both recent and past history, corruption and bribery have often just been "the cost of doing business." That cost, it seems, is finally becoming too high.
This is chapter is, so far, the most personal. We learn some of Taylor's own motivations for building ethical corporate cultures, and at least a couple of her stories have such vivid plotlines you almost forget you're reading a business book. That's a nice infusion of humanity here, and it lends authenticity and authority to Taylor's case.
One of the strengths of this chapter is how it pulls directly from the previous two. If you build and develop deep, trustworthy relationships with stakeholders (ch 3), and from that web of relationships set your priorities (ch 4): then, you have a strong basis from which to stand up to a corrupt environment and work collectivity with others to either improve that environment, or keep your integrity in the midst of it - even to the point of out-competing your corrupt competition.
The evolution of robust anti-corruption programs in the last couple of decades is a laudable development, and I think Taylor is on to something in her contention that this development could point the way to more robust environmental and social interventions. I would add here, and I think she'd agree, that there have been strong political and historical reasons for addressing corruption now: the fall of communism, 9/11, the Great Recession, these and other events have showed just how tied business can be to a corrupt politics that seeks to undermine the freedom to do business in the first place.
The world is much more interconnected now, and business operates in environments where law itself doesn't have the same history as the US & UK, for example. We might also ask: given the extent of corruption, how much of a risk is it to operate in environments that don't share your values? Are increased revenues and "new markets" really worth that cost?
That turns out to be both an ethical and political question, which is the subject of the next chapter.
Chapter 6: Grounding Your Values in How You Impact Human Beings
Those who work in sustainability are all-too-familiar with the exercise in self-justification called "making the business case" for a particular program or investment. Sustainability dollars are often scrutinized in a way that other business functions, say marketing or employee learning, aren't - at least when it comes to the actual ROI of those dollars. It's not that making the business case for capital investments is a bad idea or wasted exercise. It's that sustainability has to make the case because of how it is viewed and judged in the typical Porterian value chain: the exact same as PEOPLE, as *overhead* - in other words, not "core business."
If companies were to follow Alison Taylor's lead in using human rights as a way to both ground and evaluate their human impacts, the self-justification of sustainability could well be a thing of the past. And good riddance, to be honest, because now we might just get down to real business.
Chapter 6 of _Higher Ground_ might be, conceptually, the chapter that causes the most headaches for business readers. It's the linchpin of Taylor's argument, and it is so well argued that it may well force executives to either get on board with the direction she's leading us, or else offer a mea culpa that they don't, in fact, believe in human rights, or least don't intend to do anything about them.
Taylor lays out a comprehensive case for why a human rights orientation just makes really good sense. It's integrative, it's logical, it's social, it's political, and it's ethical. And while not without challenges, it's part of what most countries have already agreed to uphold through participation in the United Nations.
It's also, shall we say, a very mature way of doing business. One of the strengths of Taylor's case thus far is how relational it is (see ch 3), and how key relationships are to building trust and ethical cultures. Whether Taylor intends this or not, there is implicit in her argument a subtle, but powerful, rebuke of a certain type of leader and a certain way of doing business. That is to say, focusing on human rights and human connections is what responsible adults do; it's not what - to be frank - man-boys who use their businesses to play out their war and conquest fantasies do. That's part of why we're in this mess (see ch 1).
I'll have to wait until the leadership chapter to see if this becomes explicit. But for now, readers have a choice to make: do you support human rights, or do you not? If you do, that's the fast track up the mountain. Other trails might not make it, or leave you stranded when the weather turns sour.
On your way up, though, just watch out for falling rocks and narrow pathways, because they are coming next.
Chapter 7: Getting Serious about Corporate Political Responsibility
I'll admit that, after finishing chap 7 of Alison Taylor's Higher Ground, I had Wilco's song "War on War" humming through my head. "It's a war on war," warbles lead singer Jeff Tweedy, "You're gonna lose."
That's probably a fair, if somewhat depressing, description of the current U.S. political environment for business, especially if you're striving to be ethical. But here we are. And Taylor is clear that hard choices must be faced with nerve and, dare I say, courage, if companies hope to have a shred of integrity in this gotcha landscape. (That might be a big "if.")
I couldn't help but hearken back to Taylor's discussion of corruption two chapters earlier as she lays out several scenarios for companies to consider when engaging politically. Because let's face it: the Citizens United decision let loose a kind of legalized bribery that has flooded political coffers with corporate money and attempts at influence. So there is peril here - not just for business, but for all of us.
What's just a head-scratcher, though, is that is far from clear that all this corporate money brings any real return, financial or otherwise. Its major consequence has been to throw our politics into chaos and increase social instability. Hardly a win-win. Further, when companies pay to support candidates or policies that are in direct conflict with their core business or stakeholder interests, what is even going on? That just goes to show that calls to prove the ROI of sustainability have more basis in ideology than good business sense.
Make no mistake: it's not easy to be ethical when "everyone is doing it," nor when the legal is unethical. But, in probably her boldest suggestion, Taylor recommends that smart companies might consider halting their contributions altogether, to rise above the fray and get a handle on their human impacts. This would take wise and brave leadership, which unfortunately is in short supply right now.
Taylor's focus on human impacts throughout this book presents a real opportunity for business to, in a sense, get back to ethical basics by ensuring they do no harm. That's really the first ethical duty of any major ethical framework, and it can surprisingly go a long way in helping us be more ethical in all realms of life, including contributing to a healthier politics. God knows we need that desperately.
It also positions a company to be clear and shrewd in how transparent they are - and how they deal with unintended consequences, which is our next chapter.
Chapter 8: Being Transparent without Making Everything Worse
With an exploration of transparency, chapter 8 of Alison Taylor's Higher Ground wraps up her tour of all the external pressures facing companies trying to do the right thing. She notes that transparency has increasingly become "an unstoppable force in corporate life," yet the reality is it's a double-edged sword. Everything a company says might, and likely will, be used against them in the court of public opinion, if not an actual court.
Far from being a cure-all for potential and actual corporate abuses, the increasing calls for transparency indicate just how little trust there is in our current environment. It's worth remembering that Taylor began this part of the book emphasizing the need to build trust with stakeholders. If companies start there and go through her process, then transparency becomes less likely to make everything worse. Your stakeholders will trust your efforts to communicate with them and be less likely to weaponize information against you.
Taylor gives numerous examples of how increased amounts of information don't necessarily lead to better outcomes and often have unintended consequences. One particular case in point involves how open committee meetings in the US Congress have led to more special interest pressure and posturing political theater. There's a caution here of companies getting caught up in "corporate responsibility theater" as a substitute for real progress. It's tempting to confuse motion with action.
Ultimately, transparency is not a straight line to accountability. In other words, transparency, in Taylor's account, can't really be an end in itself, despite popular pressure to disclose, well, everything. Here, Taylor provides some advice that could be applicable to our culture at large, not just companies: be adults, not emotionally volatile teenagers reacting to every like or criticism on social media. Good transparency is proactive when it is warranted, not governed by the daily ups and downs of digital culture, honest about missteps, and avoids attempts to control stakeholder perceptions and behavior.
Basically, Taylor is telling our businesses to grow the heck up. Doing business maturely and responsibly is hard work and involves considerable complexity, for certain. We make things worse by being thoughtless, reactive, and untrustworthy.
Having spent the bulk of her book looking outside of companies, we'll now turn inward and think about the kind of leadership needed to shape a better future. The summit is starting to come into view.
Chapter 9: Rethinking Ethical Culture
I used to joke with business colleagues that, having spent the first part of my career in educational and religious institutions, I was something of an expert in dying and dysfunctional industries. That's not entirely fair to either education or religion, but it did capture my sense at the time that I was beating my head against some fundamentally closed systems. Change and agility aren't exactly what I encountered, and part of why I gravitated to work that was more action-oriented.
But I soon discovered that business, too, has its own version of this closed-system structure. Turns out it's a human thing. In that spirit, Alison Taylor's continual call, especially in ch 9 of Higher Ground, to treat organizations as open social systems is a welcome remedy for "black-box" organizational thinking. And it points the way ahead for a more holistic approach to cultivating an ethical culture.
Taylor's strategy in this book is for each chapter to be able to stand alone, as a kind of quick-reference, dip-in-and-out for busy executives or business students. It's a successful strategy, as each chapter has been compact but full of insight. This was the first chapter, though, where I really wanted a bit fuller discussion and more of what she thinks on this. (Organizational and ethical culture building is one of my personal interests and expertise areas, so I acknowledge the limits of my own wish here.)
One example is worth some consideration, and that's her discussion of the "bad apple" theory of ethical failure, which is so popular with leaders. Except that it's not remotely an adequate explanation. In addition to reminding us that the original meaning of the metaphor was that a bad apple spoils the whole barrel, she rightly notes that failures are rooted in the everyday habits, decisions, and incentives of organizational culture - not in the whims of rogue actors.
Cultures large and small are also built on stories, and behind every failed organizational culture is a set of stories about humans and who we are that are, shall we say, a bit off. These narrative underpinnings of ethical culture are more determinative than we often recognize. In the bad apple case, what we find is a kind of reverse "great man theory of history": ethical failures are the result of bad people acting independently and messing up otherwise healthy organizations.
This is not how change happens, any more than history is a result of great people doing great things. Taylor is pushing business leaders to get clarity on this, and to put far more attention and effort into how culture actually comes together and supports healthy organizational development. That is all to the good, and discerning leaders would do well to ponder and act on her recommendations for strengthening their cultures in light of the complex pressures of our time.
Speaking of leadership, that's up next tomorrow.
Chapter 10: Leading in the Mid-Twenty-First Century
I spent the morning at the MFA Boston while my son was in a homeschool art program. I've walked the galleries multiple times now, so my companions were Alison Taylor (Higher Ground, ch 10 on leadership) and the 4th governor of Massachusetts, Samuel Adams (rendered below by John Singleton Copley).
The conviction and persistence of Adams offers us an interesting foil to Taylor's discussion of leadership, particularly her lament that "contemporary examples of moral leadership are so scarce." Convinced that Britain's treatment of its colonies constituted an abandonment of the rights owed to its citizens, Adams embodied just the kind of moral, collaborative, and networked leadership Taylor calls for - and this despite not having the convenience of the internet, and being later subjected to decades of Victorian anti-Puritan slander.
Adams sits squarely in the heart of the rights-based tradition that eventually resulted in the UN Declaration of Human Rights, which Taylor has already advocated as a guide for contemporary corporate ethics. And along with Madison, Jefferson, and his cousin Adams, he advocated for a system of checks and balances on power. Indeed, that very system enabled the possibility of virtuous governance and helped hold bad actors to account.
That tradition of leadership and governance is under direct assault in much of the world, so I find it refreshing that Taylor draws upon it to describe a contemporary version of this that could sorely help us. It is still an incredibly robust and powerful model, despite the challenges it has faced. She reminds us that "it's never sufficient for a leader to be a good person." Checks and balances are needed both from above (the board) and below (stakeholders, especially employees). Real diversity, real deliberation, and real respect are all essential to ethical leadership and culture.
Since we are in an era of "intangible value," those personal and organizational habits provide the key to navigating the turbulence of our times with integrity and vision. This is a very ancient understanding of ethics - all the way back to Plato and Aristotle - but one that Adams recognized and that Taylor pragmatically illustrates with numerous contemporary examples.
I recalled Adams' example of leadership when Taylor related her conversation with Nell Minow, a leading corporate governance expert. In asking Enron board members why they went along with executive requests to waive conflict-of-interest rules, one said, "Well, no one else said anything." Minow observes, "That's the last kind of person you wanted on the board. But that is the kind of person we have on boards."
If Adams is any guide, it's time to speak up, and start a revolution.
Samual Adams, by John Singleton Copley - MFA Boston - Photo by Chad Smith
Chapter 11: Designing Rules for Humans
If you want to build an ethical culture for your business, you need start from the premise of "how humans actually behave." That's the major theme of chapter 11 of Higher Ground from Alison Taylor, and it's a good reminder that a great majority of our organizational systems - ethical and otherwise - DON'T start from that premise. Which might be why we're in such a mess.
There's an old parable about building your house on foundations of rock instead of sand, if you want to survive the storms. The corporate corollary is developing your "ethical infrastructure." Those foundations are structural, procedural, and cultural - all at the same time. In many ways, they operate below the surface of daily operations until a problem arises or is identified, which is when they get shock tested.
Taylor doesn't directly say this, but it's worth noting that her infrastructure recommendations derive from a keen sense of the HUMAN IMPACTS of organizational structure (no surprise there). Clear codes of conduct and policies to navigate grey areas, for example, have a human impact of setting clear expectations. Zero tolerance mandates, unreasonable performance targets, and employee surveillance technology to monitor behavior, on the other hand, might very well create the kinds of conditions that support behavior out of alignment with your values and goals.
One of the most powerful parts of this chapter is on empowering employees to make ethical decisions. If employees trust that your processes and policies are fair enough, they can help create ethical culture from the bottom up. There's a parenting analogy here: fairness and consistency, along with clear expectations and rewards - what parenting experts identify as "high warmth/high structure" - create conditions for positive growth and development. And since we don't educate people in ethics, the organization has the opportunity to train its people in the ethical reasoning that both business and society need.
Ultimately, companies need their employees - and executives for that matter - to act as "competent judges." Perhaps that will appeal to all the lawyers out there on ethics and compliance teams, and help shift ethics roles away from a merely "prosecutorial" stance to something more holistic. The term itself comes from moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, and it helps us see how behaving ethically in a turbulent and uncertain environment requires the development of judgement and wisdom.
That shift from prosecution to judgement may be just what we need most to navigate an era where much "speaking up" is, on the whole, accusatory - which is the topic of Taylor's final chapter, and up next.
Chapter 12: Speaking Up in an Era of Activism
In the final chapter of Alison Taylor's Higher Ground, we come full circle - back to the cacophony of speech that's driven many an ill-thought response from corporations to some instance of their human impacts or social interest. When, where, and how should companies speak up, and talk back, to this deluge of demands? Can it be done fairly? Should it be done at all? If yes, does it help or hurt?
These are a few of the questions that Taylor implores organizations to ask themselves, and to do so in light of their expertise, their real material issues, and their actual implications for employees and other stakeholders. The chapter is a nice drawing-together of many of the themes she has raised throughout the book. It especially speaks to how workforce expectations have changed and how the polarized political climate forces you to be judicious in your responses. Remember, information is not just knowledge, but a potential weapon and risk.
I imagine Taylor's readers will find themselves reflecting on their own workplace experiences here, and how much that shapes our perceptions of the purpose and limits of a company. For myself, as a child of the late 70s and 80s, I still find it remarkable that anyone might expect a human organization, as diverse as any ordinary company is, to conform to all their values. Is it no longer possible, I wonder, to respect the values of others without sharing them? I would hope not, but these are times when words are charged and trigger thumbs are all too happy to fire - more so, if anonymous.
At the same time, recent historical experience has taught us that there does need to be a certain baseline of inclusiveness and psychological safety which allows that kind of values-disagreement to be engaged fruitfully. Perhaps, and Taylor suggests this, companies might work on being laboratories of conversation about their own values and commitments before speaking up to the wider world. It would definitely come off more authentic and believable, if nothing else, and would lessen the risks of opening the corporate mouth.
The lesson for companies in all this is not to retreat from the fray - or the fight, if you choose - but to engage thoughtfully, slowly, in full knowledge of the implications of how what you say might be received. And, I would add, maybe refrain from the messianic overtones and prophetic pronouncements in your communications.
Speaking of prophets, Taylor will wrap everything with a look at purpose - what a word that has come to be!
Conclusion: Purpose Starts with Impact
We've now reached the conclusion of Alison Taylor's Higher Ground, and we can stop a moment and consider the path on which she's taken us. What is this responsible business stuff for, anyway? What is its goal? Or, to use the word currently in vogue, what is a business' *purpose*?
Taylor notes that "purpose is a promising term because it offers a holistic response" to the pressures business faces. She's right, but there are two issues we need to confront with this term.
One, most corporate deployments of purpose, and their attendant statements, programs or campaigns, are - let me be blunt - a whole lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing. They need not be, of course, but purpose is not something you manufacture from your marketing department.
Two, purpose has a long history in ethical thought. That history takes the Greek concept of telos, meaning an end, goal, direction, or - you guessed it - purpose, as its point of departure. But teleological thinking has fallen on hard times over the last several decades. While there is a revival of sorts underway which I support, I'm also cautious about utilizing "purpose" in what amounts to ultimately "non-purposeful" ways.
That said, Taylor's discussion cuts through the noise with her characteristic thoughtfulness, grounded in real life and good sense. As will surprise no one who's followed her this far, purpose is best understood through a grounding in your values and a focused, rigorous assessment of your human impacts. The juxtaposed cases of Starbucks and Chobani vividly illustrate what this looks like practically.
She concludes the book with what I might call a list of "16 Principles for Responsible Business" - a cheat sheet, if you will, about how a company can approach doing the right thing. Plaster these in the actual or virtual breakroom, give them to the board, and make them part of onboarding new employees. Seriously: they're a great synopsis of her whole argument, and a trail map to higher ground.
I hope you've enjoyed my chapter reviews over the last two weeks. I'm grateful that this book is getting such good engagement, which speaks to the amazing job Taylor has done in connecting all these contemporary threads.
Concluding Reflections
After you binge-read a book like Alison Taylor's _Higher Ground_, it helps to take a couple days to digest and reflect. Everything that happened since I finished on Tuesday - elections, SEC announcements, SOTU, IWD - helped put my reflections in sharp relief.
For one, it made Taylor's call for companies (and other orgs) to focus their efforts on their human impacts timely, and it underscores how much we need this kind of approach to guide responsible business. This book comes not a moment too soon to help reframe and guide where we go from here.
I'm also struck by how the human-impact lens works holistically across the alphabet soup we all deal with - ESG, DEIB, SDGs, et al. It's both a radically simple approach - what's the effect of your business on people - and capable of navigating the deep complexity of business in the world as it is. We are in an age where our best ideas need to be simple - without being simplistic - and complex - without being complicated. Taylor accomplishes this beautifully throughout.
If you've followed my reflections this far, you know I believe this book deserves wide reading and discussion. I've tried to add to that by doing a close reading, as I believe our thinking is best sharpened in honest dialogue with one another.
One closing thought. I hope this book helps readers see that, in light of all we face, the way forward is to focus on people - how we live, how we work, how we're formed, how we're treated, how we interact with the world around us. In a lot of our discussions of serious issues like climate and human rights, we've strangely depersonalized and abstracted the issues. We need to shift our narratives. We care about carbon because people need the right balance of carbon in our environment to thrive. We support human rights because people deserve to be treated with respect, as ends in themselves. We owe Taylor a huge debt of gratitude for helping us have the right conversation at the right time.