YouSaid · the spoken record

James O'Toole

lines on the record: 76
first: 2019-09-04
most recent: 2019-09-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“The global leader in terms of how it treats its employees, its customers, and the environment. All the products are going to be healthy and safe. The people who are working even in the places like the Congo are going to be treated very, very well. They're all going to have good living wages and all. And he said it would take him about 10 years for him to achieve this change. The investors got impatient. Investors don't think in terms of 10 years and they didn't think he could do it in 10. And Pullman was honest. He said, maybe take 12. It may take 15. It's going to take a long time. But hang in there with me.”
2019-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "The Enlightened Capitalists" author James O'Toole. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Paul Pullman, who was the CEO of Unilever, Actually, had a much more impressive record even than Mackie, and he was trying to do this on a global scale. Unilevers are truly global corporations. They have operations either. They make consumer goods. Yeah, 100, I don't know, but they're probably in 180 countries or something like that with hundreds and hundreds of goods. And he put out a plan, a 10-year plan, in which he was going to make the company”
2019-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "The Enlightened Capitalists" author James O'Toole. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You have to change your practices. Your profits are too low. He was making a profit, but he wasn't making enough of a profit. They were talking about forcing a sale of the company to a conventional chain of grocery stores, something like Safeway, for example, or Kro And what Mackie saw was that if that happened, all that he created in the culture of Whole Foods was going to go under, it's all going to die. And so rather than give in to those activists, he arranged for a fire sale of the company to Amazon in a sort of a last ditch desperate hope to save what was left of the company. The lesson that everybody has taken from this is look at Mackie. Mackie was successful, he was probably the best American at what he was doing, and he couldn't hold off the activist shareholders. What chance do I have of doing it? And then on the global scale,”
2019-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "The Enlightened Capitalists" author James O'Toole. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, in his case, he calls it conscientious or conscious capitalism in that he believes that the corporation has a broader purpose, a broader social purpose. It includes not only serving the needs of all of its constituencies, but also paying attention to the environment. And that goes for not just in your local communities, but really in the world at large. The business has negative effects and that there's responsibility to reduce those negative effects. And in so doing, that profits will rise. John Mackie is a libertarian. He's nothing but a capitalist, but he shares this belief with a lot of people who are not libertarians. And he tried to put it in place. And his shareholders, mainly the activist shareholders, had been on him for several years saying”
2019-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "The Enlightened Capitalists" author James O'Toole. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The interest of the customers and the employees. We really take care of all them, then the profits will rise, and in the long term you will do better. And so that's really the tension and thinking. And I think at least some of the members of Business Roundtable were saying is that they believe this.”
2019-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "The Enlightened Capitalists" author James O'Toole. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The purpose of the corporation is to serve the short term profit needs of the shareholders. And that became in the 1920s part of the central tenet in the beliefs of business people in this country and in Great Britain as well. It was really only recently that that notion of shareholder primacy has been challenged. There was a woman who was a marvelous lawyer named Lynn Stout who died at a very young age a few years ago. And she went back and looked at the law and she found that the law never really said that, that there's a misinterpretation, but it's become so much a part of everything that every business student has taught, everybody on Wall Street believes, you know, the editors of the Wall Street Journal believe it. Everybody's into business. But she says it really is no basis in the law, but it has become really the central belief of the people. You can't shake it. And so what these enlightened capitalists are saying is that the shareholders will best be served if we serve”
2019-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "The Enlightened Capitalists" author James O'Toole. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That really came to the fore in the 1920s in a lawsuit between the Dodds brothers and Henry Ford, in which Henry Ford did not pay out to the Dodge brothers who were his major shareholders enough they felt in profits because he wanted to raise the wages of his employees. He said he wanted to reinvest in the business. They sued, and one of the interpretations of the ruling was that Ford was wrong and that”
2019-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "The Enlightened Capitalists" author James O'Toole. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the notion of shareholder primacy, which means that the management and the board have to put the interests of shareholders first.”
2019-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "The Enlightened Capitalists" author James O'Toole. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's pretty easy to declare that you're going to be good moving forward. It was very short on specifics, and the cynics were saying that the reason that it happened at all was because we were worried about the proposed legislation that Elizabeth Warren has been talking about. I wouldn't go that far because I actually believe that some of those CEOs really believed what they said and would really want to do it. But what my research shows is that they won't. And that they can't. And the reason that they won't and they can't go all the way back to Robert Owen, that if they attempt to do things that appear to erode profits. They are likely to lose their jobs, or they're likely to lose their companies. And we can talk about two examples of that in a minute. One is Whole Foods and the other is Unilever, which this has recently happened.”
2019-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "The Enlightened Capitalists" author James O'Toole. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you know, you had this 171 CEOs who signed this document, which is sort of a pledge to be virtuous. And I felt that that pledge had all the moral weight of a New Year's resolution in about the same odds of being fulfilled.”
2019-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "The Enlightened Capitalists" author James O'Toole. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So let's talk about where we are today. So, we had the labor movement, which had a lot, the labor movement had a lot of power, has lost a lot of the power that it's had. We've got the gig economy where workers have almost no power, and we have income inequality at record levels and stagnant wages for the most part, except for the very wealthy. And then just recently, last week, the business roundtable, which has been made up of businessmen, the top businessmen run by Jamie Diamond, said that there were more than just shareholders as stakeholders. He said there's a lot there. They were trying to declare, they've done this before. Talk to me a little about what you think of this. And then our next section, I want to talk about some examples of things that work.”
2019-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "The Enlightened Capitalists" author James O'Toole. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, there were efforts in the 1970s by the United Autoworkers to work cooperatively with General Motors and with Ford in a way that would be to the benefit of both. And those efforts never really got off the ground. They worked for a short time, but there was just so much long-standing animosity and mistrust that they were never, ever really to overcome that. And there are very few instances where unions and management have actually come together and formed very useful cooperative relationships. Unfortunately, although they have in Europe, it's been different, particularly in continental Europe. Germany. In Germany, but in England and the US, it's always remained adversarial.”
2019-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "The Enlightened Capitalists" author James O'Toole. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A speed up is that he's going to get us to work harder. He's trying to do everything to make us work much, much harder. We're already working hard. We're killing ourselves. But he wants us to work harder. And that's what this whole thing is about. And unions have always felt that when management has tried To involve the workers in decision making and in profit sharing and the like, that it's all a form of manipulation to get them to work harder to build profits they never really cared about the workers in the first place. It means to an end, exactly.”
2019-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "The Enlightened Capitalists" author James O'Toole. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There was always a contentious relationship. And one of the interesting things that I found in these companies that I studied, and I looked at it, I've followed about 50 of them over a period of about 40 years, and that in almost all of these companies, The owners tried their very, very best to form a cooperative relationship with their employees. In many cases, this meant unions, but not in the majority of cases, because unions have resisted this a lot because they feel that they're being manipulated. They don't trust the owners. And so, like Robert Owen, when he came in, and he started introducing all these marvelous things, the workers resisted. They said, he's trying to do a speed-up on us.”
2019-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "The Enlightened Capitalists" author James O'Toole. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah, it's been that way since we first traded young people. And really, the notion that there are other constituencies, that there are people who are influenced by the organization, but who aren't owners, that they have a say in it. That's the word stakeholder comes in here, that there are other stakeholders. That is a really, very, very recent concept. That's something that really only happens formally in the late 60s, early 70s.”
2019-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "The Enlightened Capitalists" author James O'Toole. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, he went crazy because this broke his heart. He came to the US and he became a utopian and he started a utopian community called New Harmony in Indiana and he lost his entire fortune on this. Then he went back and he became the father of the British labor movement and ultimately the father of the cooperative movement in Britain. But by that time he was fairly crazy. He really went off the deep end because he thought in his heart, he said, if I'm doing the right thing, won't people follow me? Won't they want to do this too? Isn't this better for society when people didn't follow? He couldn't deal with it.”
2019-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "The Enlightened Capitalists" author James O'Toole. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And three times his partners bought him out because they felt he was spoiling in mollycodling these workers. They said, none of your competitors are doing this stuff, so why spend all this money? We could be making greater profit. And so they pushed him out twice, third time it was all over. He came to America. The mills went back to the methods and the techniques and the conditions that were there before, and the profits went back down, and everybody was happy.”
2019-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "The Enlightened Capitalists" author James O'Toole. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It had to do with the fact that his competitors, We were very, very much upset by the fact that he was making them look bad. And so they did everything they possibly could to make him fail. But what really did him in, though, and this is the lesson that runs throughout all these stories is his owners. He never owned the factory himself. He was a major owner, but he was never a majority owner.”
2019-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "The Enlightened Capitalists" author James O'Toole. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was incredibly successful. 30,000 people, including the Tsar of Russia and the father of Queen Victoria, visited the factory to see what he was doing. And most of those people were business people, and not a single one copied what Owen did, not a single one.”
2019-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "The Enlightened Capitalists" author James O'Toole. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, yeah, setting that aside in terms of when he was talking about in the declaration, in terms of what he was drawing on in terms of enlightenment thinking, Is really very much this notion of individual development and how important development is in the life of everyone. And Owen believed that. He thought that the workplace was a crucible for human development, and he was going to turn these people who were illiterate and who were dying in their 20s and 30s, he was going to give them a full good life so that they could make a contribution to society and also to have some pride in themselves.”
2019-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "The Enlightened Capitalists" author James O'Toole. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It wasn't because he was very much a child of the Enlightenment. And his views were very similar to Thomas Jefferson's about how when Jefferson talks about the pursuit of happiness, he's really talking about the opportunity for us to develop all of our potential to the full. And what Owen believed is that the workplace was the place in which that could happen. And so he wanted to make it possible for all of the people who worked for him to be able to develop their potential in whatever direction and then to contribute it to the organization and then be rewarded for it. And so he was really very, very much influenced by enlightenment thinking.”
2019-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "The Enlightened Capitalists" author James O'Toole. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, the kids were in those factories at five years of age and they were working 12-hour days. Owen took over a cotton mill, a very large cotton mill in Scotland. He'd pulled out all the kids and put them in a very, very progressive, wonderful school. He shortened the work hours of their parents. He made sure that everybody had decent living conditions, decent wages, they had good food, they had medical care, he gave people pensions, he put in continuing education for adults. He did all these marvelous things. And the most amazing part of it all was the company made money. And it made more money, the better he treated his employees. And this attracted people from all over the world wanted to come here to see how was he working this miracle.”
2019-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "The Enlightened Capitalists" author James O'Toole. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But in around eighteen oh nine, there was a man by the name of Robert Owen, and this is right at the beginning, and actually the worst part of the industrial revolution in Britain. This is a time of Blake's dark satanic mills. It was a terrible time.”
2019-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "The Enlightened Capitalists" author James O'Toole. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, it goes back to Aristotle, who felt that ethics had to do with leading the good life. And leading a good life. Required people leading a virtuous life, and a virtuous life required people to be concerned with the people they worked with and the people who worked below them. And so as not to impose oneself on the followers, but rather to attract the followers by pull rather than by push, for a long time, most business leaders, most business people, as a matter of fact, We're really only concerned with creating wealth, and they were concerned with their own careers, and perhaps they were inventors, and they were concerned with marketing the products that they made.”
2019-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "The Enlightened Capitalists" author James O'Toole. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, actually, what I teach is ethical leadership And I've been primarily focused on the careers of business leaders for the last 50 years, really. What I noticed was the importance of ethics to really a successful career and how ethics is often the first thing that is overlooked when leaders make decisions. And so I was so struck by these people who I've been studying for years because they always interwove ethical concepts and ethical concerns with all the decisions they made and everything that they did. So that sort of set them apart from the vast majority of business leaders.”
2019-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "The Enlightened Capitalists" author James O'Toole. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thank you for coming. This is a big topic I talk about a lot because I've written about whether tech companies should have ethics, czars, things like that. You've been teaching business ethics for a long time, which is sometimes... People don't think the words go together, but talk about how you got to writing this book.”
2019-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "The Enlightened Capitalists" author James O'Toole. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT