YouSaid · the spoken record

Warren Valdmanis

lines on the record
21
first
2020-08-11
most recent
2020-08-11
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1
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  1. “Actually, giving a platform to different voices. And so that could be having different types of people as CEOs, looking at how do we recruit CEOs. I think that there are some that the average person could name, but I couldn't name more than a handful of CEOs of listed companies. That's just CEOs, let alone other board members and non-executive directors. These are people with huge influence over how the economy runs. And most of us don't know who they are. So when I'm thinking about questions of democracy and economic democracy, which is as important as political democracy, I'm really thinking about that, those structures, those kind of mechanisms through which we can influence how the economy works.”

    2020-08-11 · Intelligence Squared · Can business deliver social good after Covid-19? With Warren Valdmanis and Michelle Meagher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “In the public interest to do so, I think only greater communication, greater empowerment of different stakeholders would help with that. If you can imagine that when union membership was widespread, it wasn't just about one union at one company. It was the idea that there was a structure throughout the economy where different, you know, in that case workers could actually find, share strategies, share best practice. And we don't really have that. It's kind of each individual to themselves. You make the moral decision, you can be an ethical consumer, you can go work for an ethical company, but not everybody has all of those choices. There are kind of class and race and other issues that are all kind of tied into that. So I think that partly it's about opening up this ideology. And I think we agree on much of what that means in terms of importing some broader ideas into capitalism. But from my point of view, I think that means also”

    2020-08-11 · Intelligence Squared · Can business deliver social good after Covid-19? With Warren Valdmanis and Michelle Meagher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “About what happened in Amazon's warehouses when there were concerns about the level of spread of COVID in those warehouses. And it's widely documented that a lot of those concerns were not heard. And we had in London anyway, the example of Deliveroo, which is our kind of version of Postmates. You had delivery riders being forced to make a decision as to do I go to work and risk being the vector that is spreading the disease amongst different households or do I stay home and kind of not get my wage. So the press release saying that they were going to initiate a hardship fund that was going to fund these writers, which is great. But then the writer said, we can't access it. And this is just a kind of idea that's not actually being implemented. And I think that some of those kind of times when you see these interests really pulling apart, when they should really all be pushing in the same direction and that it would be.”

    2020-08-11 · Intelligence Squared · Can business deliver social good after Covid-19? With Warren Valdmanis and Michelle Meagher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “This is a fundamental issue about how our operations are working. I think that there's no need to kind of really compartmentalize those channels of communication and that we have mechanisms potentially to really leverage all of the different knowledge and information that is embodied in all the different stakeholders of the economy.”

    2020-08-11 · Intelligence Squared · Can business deliver social good after Covid-19? With Warren Valdmanis and Michelle Meagher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Fundamentally changing that ideology. And in a way, Warren, when you talk about activating citizens in that way, I'm curious as to, you know, why stop short of the doors of the corporation? We're kind of why not kind of open those doors and allow stakeholders in because I think that there are questions over what does it do to a board, for example, to have employees on the board. The examples from Germany where that's the common model of co-determination show that these companies are more resilient and they were more resilient in the financial crisis. Potentially we'll see that they're more resilient now. Having an employee on a board, for example, when health and safety of your frontline staff is now a pressing issue, those lines of communication so that people can be saying straight to the board, there's an issue here, a COVID issue that we need to be addressing.”

    2020-08-11 · Intelligence Squared · Can business deliver social good after Covid-19? With Warren Valdmanis and Michelle Meagher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “I absolutely agree. I think we need to be transforming our relationship with capitalism away from this idea that we are recipients either of the benefits or the harms. Rather, we should be active participants, as Warren outlines. But I think that in order to do that, we need to be kind of thinking a little bit more about where can you actually leverage that power and how can you actually translate those ideas into action. And I think it's brilliant that we are showcasing better examples, both of us in our books. We have got a list of examples of companies that are doing better. And I think that part of the problem is we have this kind of pervasive ideology that really prioritizes individualism. It talks, you know, it speaks to your wallet and not to your kind of moral sentiments. And I think that if we are to really get the handle on these issues, we need to be”

    2020-08-11 · Intelligence Squared · Can business deliver social good after Covid-19? With Warren Valdmanis and Michelle Meagher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “By trying to say, you know, okay, impact investors can go care about ESG over here. There will always be pools of international financial capital that are willing to invest in the dirtiest possible industries. How do we actually regulate those if those industries also have huge political power?”

    2020-08-11 · Intelligence Squared · Can business deliver social good after Covid-19? With Warren Valdmanis and Michelle Meagher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “But I do think that when we're thinking about the power and potential of business to do good, Warren mentioned the kind of disillusioned workforce and what they could possibly be doing if they weren't constantly trying to undermine the activities of the corporations that they were working for. We look at how we've got about $19 trillion sitting on corporate balance sheets or at least that was what it looked like before COVID, that those are huge resources that could be put to work. But I think we need to be always conscious of how the power is distributed, who gets a say over those pools of money and what actually impacts there are. We talk about accountability and I think it's really great the examples that you use. I suppose I'm maybe more concerned with the bad actors, those that are trying to kind of get away with making as much money as possible without maybe with ticking the boxes.”

    2020-08-11 · Intelligence Squared · Can business deliver social good after Covid-19? With Warren Valdmanis and Michelle Meagher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “I think just to kind of correct the record, the funny thing is that the government actually does have this power already, both in the US and in the UK. State attorneys general in every state have the power to revoke corporate charters. And in the UK, we have this kind of very little used and kind of sitting under a dusty pile of statutes, section 124A of the Insolvency Act, which allows the Secretary of State to petition a court for the winding up of the company in the public interest. And I totally agree that we should not be kind of, for political reasons going around shutting down companies. I do share the concern that, well, if for nothing else, whilst we're talking here about corporate power, there is a whole other conversation to be had and it suddenly applies to certain governments around the world around state domination and oppression at the hands of the state. So I do kind of appreciate that we don't necessarily want to kind of unleash the politicization of all business.”

    2020-08-11 · Intelligence Squared · Can business deliver social good after Covid-19? With Warren Valdmanis and Michelle Meagher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “$150 million fine from the FTC for breaching their promise to not use personal information in personalized ads. So they announced on their earnings call we'll just put $150 million aside so that we cover that risk. So, I mean, if that's the way the business operates, then we're not really going to see any fundamental change. If we look at older models for how we used to regulate corporations, like right back at the beginning of when corporations were created, you actually needed a corporate charter to create a corporation. And that charter could be revoked if you abused or misused your privilege of being a corporation. And so I think there needs to be some kind of point beyond which we say X or Y corporation has outlived their usefulness. Let's break it up. Let's disperse the assets. Let's see what our kind of vibrant economy can do with those resources and put them to better use.”

    2020-08-11 · Intelligence Squared · Can business deliver social good after Covid-19? With Warren Valdmanis and Michelle Meagher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “They can force companies to be good, or at least they can try. I think that the criticisms that Warren makes in terms of the track record of government regulation are totally valid. But I think we have to understand that that regulation in the last few decades has been taking place in an era in which near liberalism has been the ascendant ideology. So government has effectively had one hand tie behind its back. And if we think about the kinds of corporate harms and harms of corporate activities that we've been talking about, ultimately there is no long stop for corporate activities. Anybody can form a corporation for any legal purpose. And as long as they can write down any regulatory fines as a cost of doing business, as long as they can price in any possible risk, then they're basically free to do what they want. We see that Twitter has just announced that they are likely to be subject to a $200.”

    2020-08-11 · Intelligence Squared · Can business deliver social good after Covid-19? With Warren Valdmanis and Michelle Meagher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Applied to this question of maximizing stakeholder value or balancing stakeholder interests or balancing power in the economy. I feel like we've got some Nobel Prizes that are waiting to be administered and kind of given out to people who are willing to take on that agenda. So yeah, I don't have an easy answer to that, but I think that that's really in the hands of our business leaders to show us. If you are going to work in the interest of stakeholders, what does that look like? Because we have some limited models, the B-Corp movement is an example, but we need more. We need it on a bigger scale and we need to see what it looks like when we're dealing with systemically important companies.”

    2020-08-11 · Intelligence Squared · Can business deliver social good after Covid-19? With Warren Valdmanis and Michelle Meagher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “It's a really good question, and I think the answer is there has been almost zero experimentation on this, so we do not really know. We have been working with this model of the corporation for hundreds of years, and yet we've been actually quite narrow in how we've used this powerful tool. And so there's a lot of research and kind of experimentation, as I say, that needs to kind of go on so that we can really see what are the best models. And they won't be the same for each company. And I think that one of the realities is that it's going to be really messy.”

    2020-08-11 · Intelligence Squared · Can business deliver social good after Covid-19? With Warren Valdmanis and Michelle Meagher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “My fear, though, Warren, is that when we measure things, they get taken into account, but that they essentially can then get kind of priced into the share price and then suddenly the bar either gets kind of raised or lowered across the industry and everybody knows, okay, actually, they've got a really bad score. I don't need to actually try that hard because ours is slightly better than that. So I think maybe there's a little bit of a need to know what happens if you get a bad score. So what can people do? Because if you're a monopolistic company, one of the biggest companies in the world in your book, I think focuses on big companies, where else can consumers go? Where can suppliers go? What leverage do they have? Are we enabling them? We were talking about the 1970s. That was a time when union membership was a lot higher than it is now. So there was actually a countervailing force to the force, to the power of corporations that was also part of that distributive mechanism in terms of sharing.”

    2020-08-11 · Intelligence Squared · Can business deliver social good after Covid-19? With Warren Valdmanis and Michelle Meagher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Consider those risks slightly differently. I also think that we have a real issue of enforcement. So how do you go from basically allowing companies to set their”

    2020-08-11 · Intelligence Squared · Can business deliver social good after Covid-19? With Warren Valdmanis and Michelle Meagher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “I was really reassured to see some examples in Warren's book that really get into these tricky industries because I think a lot of the conversations around impact investing and so on really focus on the win-wins. So we can all agree that like sustainable baby products are good. But what about the industries where you really need to see change? And I suppose where I come to with that in terms of time horizons is that Can we really trust a corporate board to kind of take the bigger picture into account? So we see today, for example, British Petroleum has released a big package of changes that it's going to be implementing in its business to achieve net zero. But this is after decades of campaigning of the oil industry hiding information around the true harms of fossil fuels. And whilst I do believe that if British petroleum were a stakeholder-minded business, it might”

    2020-08-11 · Intelligence Squared · Can business deliver social good after Covid-19? With Warren Valdmanis and Michelle Meagher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Restored to a state of nature because the community that they're in. They need the buy-in of the community that they're in. They fish in the same streams, they hunt in the same woods. And so to me, that's a really cool example of people behaving themselves because they're thinking long term.”

    2020-08-11 · Intelligence Squared · Can business deliver social good after Covid-19? With Warren Valdmanis and Michelle Meagher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “This month. You know, because that's going to show up in my quarterly earnings, and then my multiple is going to apply, it's going to create value for shareholders. We have this idea that somehow that's good for business, that creates value. Profit and value. Not the same th Prophets, what happened today? Value is what's built over many, many years. And so to me, that's a little bit what we're missing. So the first chapter in our book is about a socially responsible strip mine. And I love to tell this story because it tends to shock and make impact investors feel very uncomfortable because that notion isn't a natural one for most impact investors. But the cool thing about it is, the cool thing about this particular business is it's a family business that thinks intergenerationally. So when they clean up a site,”

    2020-08-11 · Intelligence Squared · Can business deliver social good after Covid-19? With Warren Valdmanis and Michelle Meagher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “I think that creating durable relationships with your suppliers such that you're helping to shield them when things are going tough for them and they're helping to shield you when things go tough for you. That's what a partnership is. And so to me, a lot of when we talk about kind of engaging stakeholders more completely, what we're really talking about is just time horizons. We're talking about turning transactional things that tend to happen in weeks or months increments or quarters and turning them into things that last years. whether that's at your relationship with your employees, your suppliers, your customers, your communities. To me, it's mostly a time horizon thing. And the truth is, when you think of the value of a corporation, 90% of the value of a corporation is not this year's profits. 90% of the value is what's going to happen afterwards. And yet we're so maniacally focused. We have this sort of meat-headed short-termism that, gosh, if I can squeeze my supplier a little bit.”

    2020-08-11 · Intelligence Squared · Can business deliver social good after Covid-19? With Warren Valdmanis and Michelle Meagher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Linda, and thanks, Lauren. It's really great to be part of this conversation. I have huge optimism as to the ability of capitalism to change itself in light of the COVID crisis. I think that what we've seen over the past few months is that we can do the impossible. We can turn the economy off, we can change completely the way we work, we can change completely the way we engage with the economy. With the COVID crisis and with the Black Lives Matter movement, what we see is that a renewed emphasis on things that we haven't really been thinking about in terms of how to organize the economy. We see mutual aid networks, we see collective action, we see a kind of emphasis on the collective good. I have a huge optimism as to the possibility for reforming capitalism.”

    2020-08-11 · Intelligence Squared · Can business deliver social good after Covid-19? With Warren Valdmanis and Michelle Meagher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Well, thanks, Linda. And first, let me just say what a great pleasure it is to be discussing the future of capitalism, such an important topic with you and Michelle today. The answer to your question in brief is yes, business can reform capitalism and it must. If you actually look back at capitalism's 250 report card, it reads incredibly well. In the first 3,000 years up to 1750, GDP growth per capita was exactly 0%. No change in standard of living. Since then, it's grown by 37 times. Actually, just since 1990, we've lifted over a billion people out of poverty. So capitalism as a system has done incredible things. But there are issues today that need addressing. Over the past 40 years, a number of things have gone wrong, and it's time for business to step up and try to answer these challenges.”

    2020-08-11 · Intelligence Squared · Can business deliver social good after Covid-19? With Warren Valdmanis and Michelle Meagher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source