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The Responsible Supply Chain Show is a must-hear podcast for insights and strategies on building ethics and sustainability into global supply chains. Each episode delves into the challenges and opportunities businesses face as they strive to create more responsible, transparent, and environmentally friendly supply chains. From innovative sourcing and trade disruptions to reducing carbon footprints and combating modern slavery, we explore the critical issues that define the future of global commerce.
Welcome to the Responsible Supply Chain Show where we explore the world of responsible sourcing and resilient supply chains. I'm your host, Justin Dillon. And in each episode, we'll dive into real stories from some of the world's best business, government, and thought leaders protecting people, planet, and profits. Let's get it. Okay, friends.
Justin Dillon:We are deep into our twenties now with these episodes. So it's you know what? It's time for us to get off our parents' health care and open a four zero one k. Today's guest, is NYU Stern School of Business professor, Allison Taylor. I've been trying to get Allison on the show or wanting to get Allison on the show for, ever since I started it.
Justin Dillon:She at NYU, she teaches ethics, sustainability, leadership. She's a LinkedIn top voice, a member of the Financial Times Moral Money Advisory Board, a bunch of other stuff as well, including she's the author of Higher Ground, a book about how businesses can do the right thing in a turbulent world published by Harvard Business Review Press, which was listed as one of the top 10 business books of 2024 by Financial Times. She also writes for Harvard Business Review, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal. Now you can see why I've wanted her on the show. In other responsible supply chain news, this last week, the Trump administration launched forced labor investigations into more than 60 countries.
Justin Dillon:We're talking about China, the EU, Canada, Mexico, Japan, Vietnam, basically every trading partner that The United States has. So here's the lowdown. Last month, as some of you may know, the Supreme Court struck down the Trump administration's tariff regime and really gonna go unconstitutional. So the administration pivoted quickly, and now they're using this section three zero one of the 1974 trade act as a legal workaround. And get this, they're using forced labor as the hook.
Justin Dillon:The argument from the trade department is that foreign producers using forced labor have an artificial cost advantage over American companies, and section three zero one lets them impose tariffs without going back to congress. There's roughly, could change any point, but there's roughly about a hundred and twenty days for companies to get their supply chain documentation in order or face tariffs. Look, I know there's been a lot going on around tariffs in the world over the last year, but just never in my decade and a half of working on responsible supply chains did I imagine that modern slavery would be showing up on the front page news nearly every day, whether it's tariffs or Epstein. Friends, clearly, this is an issue that wants to be addressed. So with that, let's get into my conversation with NYU Stern professor, Allison Taylor.
Justin Dillon:Allison, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
Alison Talyor:Thank you so much for having me, Justin.
Justin Dillon:It doesn't look like you're in New York.
Alison Talyor:In Woodstock, New York. Woodstock, New York. In in the Catskills, I have a house in a little hamlet called Bearsville, which is just outside Woodstock, which is named after the festival, though the festival was not in fact here. It was about 60 miles away.
Justin Dillon:Well, now we're talking. We're already we're we're one minute in. We're talking about music. You've you've you have my full attention. Maybe you can kinda walk me through your journey.
Justin Dillon:I do know that you're a practitioner as much as a teacher, so I really wanna hear about that.
Alison Talyor:Yeah, yeah. I've been NYU since 2020, and I do now teach full time, but I am absolutely not a career academic. So without going back too far and over complicating this, I worked in political risk, I suppose in my late 20s. I then spent twelve years really as a corruption investigator. So I worked in The Middle East and Africa, I oversaw a Middle East and Africa corporate investigations business, right when anti corruption was kicking off, but really in very high risk markets, you know, Nigeria, DRC, Kenya, you know, etc.
Alison Talyor:I lived in Dubai for a little while, and just became really fascinated by the relationship between business and politics, and how big multinationals behave in what we used to call back in the day before the world collapsed, high risk emerging markets. Are now all in high risk collapsing markets. But so I did that, then I moved to, I worked briefly for Transparency International, so really an anti corruption person. Then I moved to New York, I ran the same business, same company, but for The Americas, so that was more Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, that kind of thing. Yeah.
Alison Talyor:And one thing I think you discover when you are an investigator is that the facts actually don't matter nearly as much as the leadership and culture and how the business responds to the fact. So got very, very used to getting yelled at by bankers who wanted to do the deal anyway, got very used to seeing senior people find someone to blame and dump and fire for some broader ethical violation. So that all took me to kind of back to grad school to study organisational psychology. And then I wound up working in sustainability for what is a pretty well known nonprofit, you probably are familiar, BSR. Yep.
Alison Talyor:And I found that wild because I've been working with kind of lawyers and general counsels and compliance officers and bankers on this kind of hard law risk stuff. And I thought sustainability, moving into sustainability would be kind of better and help me answer And I just thought it was wild that all the human rights people and the climate people seem to live in a completely different world with completely different jargon, completely different theories of change, no real relationship with the kind of hard law aspect. And I just thought that was weird. Like, I still think it's weird that businesses respond to these problems with two very different frames and worldviews that don't really hang together. Why are they doing that and what's the purpose?
Alison Talyor:And I've been kind of trying to unpack those questions ever since. And so supply chain is obviously super interesting in this context, because it sits at the intersection now of the voluntary and the regulated and it doesn't necessarily sit squarely in either sustainability ethics and compliance. And it's got, of course, this massive kind of social and environmental dimension as well. So it's a good example of the kind of very multifaceted problem, also clearly a big political risk problem as well that I really love. So I like complicated problems with no easy answers, I suppose.
Justin Dillon:Clearly. Tell me a little bit how your work and your journey thus far, how do you gin up, you know, bringing aligned incentives between two very disparate parties, whether it's supply chain and sustainability or risk management and M and A? It sounds like you've been at the intersection of that.
Alison Talyor:Yeah, mean, certainly incentives are a part of the problem. You know, what behavior are we rewarding? What kind of people are we valuing and promoting? What ideas are in the frame or out of the frame? I kind of think the psychology not just incentives but human psychology is almost more salient, you know, what questions aren't put on the table, how do we frame the problem that kind of takes a lot of things off the table?
Alison Talyor:There are all sorts of kind of questions around this in terms of oversight, you know, I have a perception and you certainly challenge this, that a lot of people that work in supply chain are human rights lawyers, and they believe very, very strongly in these ideas. They have a certain sort of idea of purity and perfection that may not align with the way a risk manager or someone that's got commercial imperatives and incentives thinks. And so there are a lot of kind of questions I suppose about how much we compromise in order to move forward practically and when that starts to tip into collusion and complicity with enabling what the business wants to do anyway. So certainly a question of incentives, I think just as much a question of frame and who has power and who has voice in the room and what problems don't get raised in the room.
Justin Dillon:Yeah, yeah. We find that a lot in the space we're in, a lot of what the listeners of this show find themselves having to develop over the course of their career better and better soft diplomacy skills. Because a lot of the work that they do is advisory, right? They're not necessarily in control of the supply chain, they advise on the supply chain. And to your point, human rights or sustainability, they're gonna see things they can't unsee in the supply chain that the company's or the firm's business is gonna support.
Justin Dillon:And so there are trade offs and incentives. But you talked a little bit earlier about jargon and that kind of, I'm a big, I believe words make worlds. I believe sometimes we're reckless with the terms that we use. Right. And we've been in a war of words in this space for a long time, it's ethical or sustainable.
Justin Dillon:These seem like ended destinations that no one can quite get to. And we use our own in this podcast, it's called Responsible. What the hell does that mean? Right. I mean, if you had to describe to someone what a responsible supply chain practice looks like, how would you describe that in practice?
Alison Talyor:You know, I mean, I think to kind of pick up on your last question about incentives, right? I think one of the problems with good supply chain oversight is that a lot of the problems in supply chains are out of reach or out of direct leverage. And then layered on top of that, a lot of them are low likelihood, high impact. So we all know horrible human rights violations or environmental violations emerge, certain industries, certain sectors, certain commodities get on the hook, there's collective action, that problem gets solved. But I think the broader issue is, you know, I've come across plenty of companies that don't even know where all their suppliers are yet, let alone their suppliers, suppliers, suppliers who tend to be, which tends to be where the most egregious and horrific stuff happens.
Alison Talyor:You know, I think a responsible supply chain ultimately is about really putting kind of collaboration and interdependency at the centre of your negotiations. I think a lot of good faith efforts, and you know, we can take social audits and we can take all the kind of process around this stuff and scope three emissions requirements and questionnaires, there's a lot of very process heavy, well intentioned efforts that purport to present a solution. And so I sort of sound airy fairy when I'm saying what we need is a collaborative interdependent mindset, but that is actually what we need. I think we need corporations in general to aim to have fewer suppliers and more skin in the game and more of a knowledge that this is a sort of back and forth rather than which is what happens in practice, which I think is sort of imposing possibly irrelevant or anachronistic standards from the perspective of a large Western company onto smaller and less powerful suppliers, often in an effort to protect that head entity from legal risk. Mhmm.
Alison Talyor:And a lot of that is not fundamentally addressing the power dynamics or the problems at the centre of this. So a mindset shift would be nice around what these relationships really look like. I mean, I actually think geopolitics is gonna drive this message home, whether we do anything or not, because the balance of power, think is gradually shifting in all sorts of interesting ways. Yeah. But I think, you know, I think part of the problem is the overwhelm and complexity, part of the problem is the sort of cover your ass legally and reputationally mindset that a corporation has and plenty of sustainability people and ethics people encourage.
Alison Talyor:And part of this is just a question about raw power and raw commercial imperatives.
Justin Dillon:That's a lot there. We're in a new era. We've moved out of what maybe history will call kind of a conscious capitalism moment in time where it was popular and sustainability reports were masquerading as marketing. And there's just this whole world of just everyone's arm in arm, Paul Pullman, we're all doing this together. It's great stuff, right?
Justin Dillon:And you get used to that and then things shift, and then all of these laws in Europe that have been built up now being walked back everyone's clutching You their know, it does seem like we're in a new era where geopolitics and trade sitting alongside responsibility, ethics. You look at that and go, those two things don't belong together, but here they are, right? And so I'm curious about how you're seeing, you know, all the tectonic shifts in geopolitics affecting business ethics.
Alison Talyor:Well, I mean, I think it's calling into question both from an ethics and and kind of compliance perspective, but even more from a sustainability perspective, the way we behaved in both fields is sort of context free. If you think about something like ESG ratings, which sort of suggests you can evaluate performance on this and that issue without taking into account the operating context, how risky something is, how culturally accepted something is, how much leverage the company has, what the power grid looks like in the country. I mean, we've we've acted in a weird contextual vacuum. Similarly, in a kind of more hard law context, we sort of say, all you gotta do is have some policies and procedures and a whistleblowing line and do some training and you'll be set on the FCPA, you know, and I I came to this, as I said earlier, really in the context of corruption, like you can have zero tolerance policies up the wazoo. If you're operating in a context where everybody is hitting you up in a kind of extorted, probably with security threats way about getting your goods through customs or getting your car passed a police check, you can have all the policies and training you want if you're not thinking about kind of how you're gonna operate in that context, what delays you're gonna take into account, etcetera.
Alison Talyor:You're just it's just paperwork, you're not really thinking in a contextual smart way. I love that. A more kind of supply chain forward example there, right, would be, you know, I've spoken to, as I can only imagine you have as well, for example, people that have worked on human rights in cocoa farming in West Africa, where there is, as we also know, a dominant approach to say, let's have traceability, let's have auditability, let's know where these beans come from. And there's sort of an argument that, you know, a lot of these farmers want their children on their farms and want their children to inherit this business. And we might be really horrified by child labor happening in that context, but that's what is wanted in the local context.
Alison Talyor:And that we are spending a lot of time and money providing traceability and transparency to make western consumers eating the chocolate feel better, when maybe we could just invest in those local farmers and give them some money and allow them to be entrepreneurs and make money and decide what they would like to do with their children. So there's a lot of kind of stuff going on that fits in one context, but looks really problematic in another. And there are a lot that raises all sorts of questions, I think, about what degree, to what degree the West is still trying to say, this is the right way to do things and we're gonna impose our standards on you. Ouch.
Justin Dillon:Yes. I mean, I think you refer to this as the ESG industrial complex.
Alison Talyor:Yeah, exactly.
Justin Dillon:I've never met a term that had industrial complex in it that I didn't love. Also don't believe zero tolerance policies have any impact in the world, much less Exactly. The codes of And I think people were trained to believe if I just have this, and I have some sympathy for people in those jobs. At the same time, let's just be intellectually honest. This does nothing.
Justin Dillon:We just hold onto these with a little, and we cherish these zero tolerance policies or certifications and think, now I'm done. There is a kind of perverse nature to There always needing to be a problem in order for us to have consultants and software and frameworks and ratings agencies and all the rest of it. And it sounds like you've got an opinion on that.
Alison Talyor:Yeah. I mean, you know, it sounds like we think pretty much the same about this. Like, you know, again, like I'm not against transparency and reporting, I just don't know why that entire discussion has to suck up 90% of the conversation. I've just, you know, I've been kinda talking a lot about this recently. I'm always on sustainability panels where everyone's the alphabet soup.
Alison Talyor:And I'm kinda like, it's not funny, guys. You know, you're just sort of you you look self serving and, like, you're just creating jobs for yourself to make yourself feel better. And what are we really achieving? We just argue endlessly about what disclosure should be required. I think we've alienated at least some proportion of the American public on all of this.
Alison Talyor:I don't know why we can't be straightforward, I don't know how we have to use all this jargon and I get exhausted, particularly in the supply chain context by every time I post about this topic, some bunch of idiots will pop up with a software solution that they just think everyone should buy and that'll sort everything out and so whatever that quote is about there's always a solution that's simple and wonderful and wrong is kind of how I feel. So yeah, I mean, you know, it's not getting us where we need to get to, a bit of it is probably fine but we, I think at this point in 2026, we've got to pause and the other thing I would kind of say about this is I think a lot of people in sustainability at the moment feel very besieged for very obvious reasons. I see a lot of we just got to double down and keep going and keep going through this thing and a pendulum will swing back and I think people get irritated with me being like, well, here are all the things I gotta criticize about you because it's kind of the last thing you wanna hear right now but I think unless at we how we've proceeded and some of our theories have changed and the assumptions we've made and acknowledge they've been flat wrong, we're not going to come up with anything better and more innovative and more convincing.
Alison Talyor:So it is a tough time for lots of things, not least sustainability, but it is also an opportunity I think to say, what are some of the ways in which we might have inadvertently encouraged the kind of backlash that we see today And what might we learn from where we lost control of the narrative and try to come up with something a little bit more to the point that is more about what people care about and is a little bit more ethically defensible.
Justin Dillon:Yeah, know, kinda like what the Democrats need to do right now.
Alison Talyor:So many parallels, so many parallels.
Justin Dillon:So many, but you do have to kill your darlings. We talk about this all the time, like you gotta kill the things that aren't working and remember why you're doing it and use the adversity as a way to make you better. And if you're using adversity to make you a victim, you're done. You're cooked. Exactly.
Justin Dillon:I just don't believe in that. And, you know, I am one of those idiots who created a software solution, but the point, and we always say this with our software, it's like a gym. It doesn't work if you just look at it. Exactly. You do have to use it.
Justin Dillon:Somewhere there was some dissonance in your journey. I think it was back when you were Transparency International, whatever, you're kind of having this moment where you're trying to pull these things together that led you to start studying organizational psychology, which is super interesting to me. I wanna know why, if there was like some little like, you know, sand in the oyster that made you jump into that. And then also why you think that is so important when it comes to ethics in business.
Alison Talyor:I mean, you know, the the first reason was I spent so much time kind of investigating things and writing these reports in good faith and thinking because everybody told me that people wanted the information and the diligence and to make decisions, you know, I spent for example, about a year do you remember that toxic waste spill by Trafigur in Cote D'Ivoire in 2006? Spent a year investigating that. It was horrific. Trafigura dumped all this toxic waste in Abidjan and injured 30,000 people. And I kinda traced that ship, and I looked at it, I looked at who was to blame and I thought something would be done and then it was just kinda like, okay.
Alison Talyor:And so I just, you know, I started asking questions about what I was doing and why I was doing it and what the underlying purpose was of all this work. You know, I was running a business and making money and that was great, but I didn't, I couldn't really justify it on the basis of having positive change or having the positive effect. So I started to ask all these questions about why some companies I work with would take this seriously and do something differently and other companies would not. So that brought me into asking questions about leadership and culture and what's said in rooms and what's not said in rooms and questions about power. And I think the other thing that happened was in my own career, you know, I got very very senior in this investigations firm that was very male dominated, like ex military spy kind of guys and I thought I was fine.
Alison Talyor:Successful business, I got really senior and then I hit some wall where I couldn't get anything done and so it was also about my own career and like, you know, how corporations run, who gets rewarded, who doesn't, what kind of behaviour gets rewarded, so it was those two kind of imperatives caused me to want to study kind of how human beings behave in groups, lot of which is about what is not said and the roles people are taking in rooms and the way that various problems are framed. And it transformed the way I think. Like I still will sit in a meeting that might otherwise be boring and be like, what's everyone doing in here and what position are they really taking and what are people thinking that they're not saying? And so that has really, really informed a lot of how I approach these problems. And then when I moved into sustainability, you know, I just found it super fascinating.
Alison Talyor:The way no one kind of taught much about the fact that the sustainability team didn't have a consistent job description or reporting line, often didn't have any power, often didn't have any budget, was sort of put out there to tell some sunny story about what the corporation was doing. And I was just kind of like, what's the purpose of this really? Why does this role exist? And so trying to kind of give a bit more credibility and thought to how we might centre some of these ideas in real corporations and the way in which that was being resisted by questions of really kind of power and incentives and decision making and information inside organisations. I think at the time, which is ten years or so ago, it was an underexplored question.
Alison Talyor:Now it's a bit more explored than it was, but there's still a lot to be asked and said about that, I think.
Justin Dillon:What's still to be explored?
Alison Talyor:Well, I don't think we have got an idea of what business ethics is or who is responsible for it. I mean, I think there are three separate conversations. There's a sort of maximize shareholder value, don't break the law policies and procedures conversation. There's here's what we're doing about environmental social impacts. Here's how we're signaling that we care about climate change or human rights or labor or inequality.
Alison Talyor:And then there's a sort of employee well-being, voice culture, who's a leader, all these questions have ethical dimensions, but they're deliberately fragmented and we deliberately compartmentalize a lot of things. In a way I think ultimately reinforces the status quo or is designed to reinforce the status quo.
Justin Dillon:Well, I mean, I think when you talk about ethics in business, you're really not talking about the ethics of the business, you're talking about the ethics of those that are leading the business. Is that fair to say?
Alison Talyor:Yeah, I think that's right. And I think, you know, I mean, I think it is being overly framed in the media and in a lot of commentary right now as a sort of modern morality play, but watching how Anthropic is handling this pentagon discussion versus OpenAI, you know, does show that, I mean, at least Amodi is thinking in quite strategic thoughtful terms about how he's going to position himself as an unusual AI firm and gain long term advantage from that. And so that's one person I think that does get how important the signalling is to the public right now. But I'm more astonished by the rest of Silicon Valley and how clueless they seem to be about this.
Justin Dillon:Right, so that's a really interesting use case because it's got lots of data behind it of a clear action, foregoing growth for the sake of At least what it looks like in paper is that foregoing growth for the sake of values. And we saw an uptick in their downloads since the But market worked what it wasn't is someone putting out a statement on the backside of negative press to try to prove that we're good. It was a, and I think we're this way with human beings when it comes to trusting someone. We don't want someone to explain why they're good. Want to just feel it and know it so that we can trust them.
Justin Dillon:So maybe talk a little bit about ethics and authenticity as opposed to ethics as a press release.
Alison Talyor:Yeah, I mean, it's a great question. There is a really good recent book from a wonderful author called Thomas Chamorro Prismewink about how authenticity at a personal level is overrated, but I think what you're talking about is the kind of gap between sustainability as the paramilitary wing of the marketing department, we need to talk about all the wonderful things we're doing, we need to publish a report with some happy children in developing countries and some smiling women in hard hats and you know, a laundry list of all our priorities, etcetera, versus what actually works. So I think it's really counterintuitive to a lot of middle aged people but I see it in the classroom every day. I think that's old, I think those laundry lists don't work. I think everybody is in the supermarket seeing the same green claims in a way that's impossible to differentiate.
Alison Talyor:It's sort of unconvincing, it's sort of eye rolling. I actually think that the way you get credibility now as a company is to say, here's what we've achieved, here's where we failed because it's hard and here's what we can't do and here's where we went wrong and here are the things we can't directly influence. And I think if a company were to communicate that way, one, we would have a better chance of solving the problem because we wouldn't have to wade through a load of green washing first. But two, I actually think it's a much better from a kind of communications and authenticity standpoint. There is a tech company called Atlassian and their sustainability report, very plain language on the first page says, here's what we achieved last year, here's where we failed and why, here's what we're going to do next.
Alison Talyor:And it has the effect on the reader of making you believe everything else that they say. So I think a lot of conventional wisdom about how you frame and communicate and think about these efforts, which is also to do with legal risk, if you admit any imperfection, imperfection, someone's someone's gonna gonna come and sue you for something. But a lot of that really, really needs to shift. I think we've lost younger generations. They don't believe you anyway, so you're just wasting more paper.
Justin Dillon:That's right. That's right. Yeah. I come from a faith tradition that says, Do your good works in private and don't let your left hand know what your right hand is doing. Which is basically saying, if you're doing something good or ethical this matter, in order to get something from it, whatever reward you get, marketing bump you get, that's it.
Justin Dillon:But if it is truly integrated into who you are, will reveal itself in ways that seem a little bit more true. And I'm wondering, I wanna go back to your students here, because based off of that last question and statement, is that what your students are looking for when they talk about ethics? Are they I wanna I'm curious what they're curious about. When they come to your class, like, give give me the name of one of your class. I'm sure you teach more than one.
Alison Talyor:I teach a class called Sustainability for Competitive Advantage, which
Justin Dillon:is So what go. What do they want? What are the what are they come what are they coming to learn when they walk in there?
Alison Talyor:I think so there are a couple of things I would say about this. Like, one is I have a perception, which may not be so true anymore, but that people tend to teach sustainability in business schools in a cheerleading way, right? It's an elective that a certain amount of students are going to take and we come in and we say, yeah, Paul Pullman and it's a win win and net positive and Patagonia and you've gotta be crazy if you're not doing this and that is not working with my students. They're pretty nihilistic, they're pretty cynical, they think the world's gonna burn and me coming in and being like, yeah, Paul Polman is not gonna move the needle. So I think what you gotta do is meet them where they are and take their concerns seriously and be really critical without tipping into nihilism, which they have enough of anyway.
Alison Talyor:So make the space like it is not stupid to critique these ideas. Why might people to critique them? Why is your finance professor down the hall saying ESG is stupid? Somewhat, you know, someone in my, one of my students told me a few months ago, my finance professor said, if you believe in ESG, you must be a liar or an idiot. So if they're getting that in another room, I need to bring that debate into the room and I need to do that in a way that doesn't depress them further.
Alison Talyor:The other thing I think is maybe even more interesting and even more revealing is that they all in the first class, including the undergrads, bring up lobbying and political influence corruption. And the company is saying this over here about climate change. The government relations team is pushing in completely a different direction to undermine regulation or whatever it might be. They are well aware of those conflicts of interest. They are well aware that American businesses are putting their thumb on the scale, they're doing it far, far more overtly, obviously under Trump too, than they ever have in the past.
Alison Talyor:They're aware that the oil industry has been lobbying for decades over this stuff and so they've got questions that go beyond the sustainability team and frameworks that are about power and legitimacy and trust, and you've got to bring those big questions into the room or they're just not, you're gonna lose them, they're not gonna take you seriously.
Justin Dillon:Alison, I'm deeply concerned about this generation's relationship with nihilism.
Alison Talyor:Me too.
Justin Dillon:What? Really?
Alison Talyor:Yeah. Yeah, me too.
Justin Dillon:Any ideas?
Alison Talyor:I'm also pretty I don't know how old you are. I'm also pretty concerned that I'm any fan. They seem very fresh faced. I doesn't and no one looks hungover in my nine thirty glasses.
Justin Dillon:Oh, well done. They're they're taking it serious.
Alison Talyor:I I was can safely say hungover in my 09:30 classes.
Justin Dillon:Okay. Fair enough. Good. Well, that's that that's being relatable. But any ideas?
Justin Dillon:I mean, sounds like this is something you're you're on and you're aware of, and you've got a role in society to or at least you're taking your role seriously about this. Any guidance, any wisdom? Because this, you know
Alison Talyor:It's about, I think, you know, not kind of denying that they should feel the way they feel, but giving them a sense of empowerment, giving them a sense that they can solve these problems, giving them a sense that things will be better, and trying to give them somewhat of a kind of model for progress that makes them feel like there is a point in making an effort. I think that's what I would say.
Justin Dillon:It sounds like that's what you do. They're walking out of your class- I
Alison Talyor:try, I I try.
Justin Dillon:Yeah. Well, thank you for your service on that. I think that is a, it's something, I've got a 17 year old who's gonna be graduating high school soon. And I think about this kind of, and I don't think of it through the lens of politics. I just think of it through the lens of eras.
Justin Dillon:And and and Yeah. And I I don't want him to go into the world thinking that kindness is weakness.
Alison Talyor:I mean, I think that a lot's been written. I don't know if you read the Richard Reeves on kind of young men and the sort of model modern masculinity. And I think there is such an urgent and profound need to create a narrative there that are along the lines that you just kind of explored and explained. And if we can, yeah, if we can help young men to develop that vision, then I think that will solve a lot of other problems. I think, you know, young women have their own issues, but maybe have a little bit more sense of kind of community and options and a model of, you know, of at least kind of collaboration and moving forward with this stuff.
Alison Talyor:I mean, you know, the other thing I think we really need to do for for the 17 year olds out there is give them, yeah, a little bit more real world fun, social skills, you know, getting offline, getting out there, you know, all that sort of thing, which I'm sure you're all over. So, and I start to see that shift, you know, I mean, I think we will, We're seeing a social media backlash already. I mean, I I'm hopeful in another five years, young people will be moving differently through those areas. So, of course, AI is a huge curveball here. So I don't know.
Justin Dillon:Indeed. Well, in closing, if there was one idea or one practice in ethics and sustainability that you could just erase from the playbook, what would it be?
Alison Talyor:Oh, gosh. What a good question. I mean, I think I think the problem is probably around not acknowledging trade offs and imperfection, but rather pretending we've got a neat, sonar, affordable solution for all these problems. And I think, you know, I mean, I think a lot of the rest of it is it probably boils down to thinking more about the political risk and more about the context in which businesses are operating. I mean, there's a lot of answers I could have given to that question.
Alison Talyor:Are a lot of things that really annoy me, but this isn't about process as much as about mindset and context and moving practically forward in a way that asks questions and interrogates difficult issues, rather than pretending we've got a policy or a document or an audit or a tool that can address these very, very, very profound and interesting dilemmas. So we might think of it as a conversation and negotiation, a way to approach really profound challenges with creativity. And I think we've done a pretty good job of turning it into a mix of kind of eye rolling PR and stultifying process.
Justin Dillon:Thank you so much for what you do. I wish I could audit your class. I would be there totally not drunk or hungover in the front row.
Alison Talyor:Well, maybe I can drag you in to talk about in my supply chain sessions in the fall. Will hit
Justin Dillon:you up on that. Let's talk about that. You can do me. Be there. I'll be there with bells on for sure.
Justin Dillon:I'd love that. Thank you so much for that.
Alison Talyor:As students. They're so smart. They would have such good questions for you. So I'm gonna hit you up on
Justin Dillon:Let's do it. Thank you so much. Thanks for coming on. I appreciate your time. This is the one thing, the part of our show where we dig into one section of our conversation.
Justin Dillon:Alison is what I would call a compassionate provocateur who says the king is half undressed because she wants, really wants, the kingdom to work. One of her favorite targets is the ESG industrial complex, as she calls it. And in my opinion, she's not calling out the sustainability movement as a whole, but she is calling out something that I think many of us participate in from time to time in our own work. She's saying, in this movement, lacks some intellectual honesty. Intellectual honesty.
Justin Dillon:Intellectual honesty is the commitment to seek, evaluate, and present truth as accurately as possible, even when the evidence challenges one's own beliefs, interests, or assumptions. It involves acknowledging uncertainty, admitting mistakes, giving fair consideration to opposing viewpoints, and accurately representing sources and arguments without distortion. Rather than defending a position at all costs, intellectually honest people prioritize understanding and evidence over ego and ideology. Doesn't that sound wonderful? Don't you just want just to have a get a big hug from an intellectually honest person?
Justin Dillon:I do. Well, this concept isn't new. It has roots in classical philosophy and scientific inquiry. Philosophers like Socrates emphasized questioning one's own beliefs and recognizing the limits of one's knowledge. I know that I know nothing, as the saying goes, which is often cited as an early expression of intellectual humility.
Justin Dillon:Today, intellectual honesty, if you can find it, certainly not on the internet, is commonly used to describe a norm of fair reasoning and truthful engagement with ideas. But here's the rub: there isn't much intellectual honesty to be found today, just about anywhere. And it doesn't take an NYU professor to show us how divided we are today, or at least think we are. The common ground, or that middle place where ideas become reality has been a little vacant for a while with everyone running to their respective corner driven by whatever social media algorithm is chasing them, cramming content about those people who are not like us people. The most obvious place to watch this circus is in the partisan politics that so many of us in The US have to endure.
Justin Dillon:Yeah. I'll I'll listen to any candidate brave enough to find some merit in their opponent's point of view, but apparently those candidates don't perform well on the Internet. So when people working in ESG or responsible supply chains cannot or refuse to acknowledge some of the flaws or at least the gaps in their premise or its application in the marketplace, it does leave an open door to criticism and we've seen a lot of that. I think what Alison is saying here is that being honest about your weakness isn't weakness. I certainly believe that.
Justin Dillon:It's perspective. It's humility, which still exists, just, you know, not online. When one demonstrates, not merely claims, how how humble they are, they allow us to see them as, well, a perfectly imperfect human. At the end of a long day, much of which is staring into the computer, I find myself longing for real, genuine human connection. I often find a way, no matter where I am, to connect with someone I love and care about, someone who knows my vast imperfections and wants to connect with me anyway.
Justin Dillon:And I don't think I'm the only one who feels that. Intellectual honesty is a way for us to find common ground, connect, and find a way forward. Thank you so much for listening. Please do us a favor and subscribe and tell your friends so that we can grow this community even further. Thank you so much.