All Ears with Abigail Disney - Harvard Business School Professor Rebecca Henderson: Is Business Ethics An Oxymoron?

Harvard Business School Professor Rebecca Henderson: Is Business Ethics An Oxymoron?

07/23/20 • 24 min

This week on All Ears Abby welcomes Professor Rebecca Henderson, who teaches about innovation, corporate culture change, and ethics at Harvard Business School. Her class, “Reimagining Capitalism”, is one of HBS’s most popular classes, and she says that the majority of her students tend to believe that capitalism is broken. But Professor Henderson tells Abby that capitalism is a fundamentally moral enterprise, albeit one that needs to be held in delicate balance with a strong society and a democratically accountable government. They discuss the dramatic pivot point created by the charismatic economist Milton Friedman in the early 1970s. According to Professor Henderson, Friedman’s fervent free market beliefs created the moral, political, and legal arguments for abolishing ethical boundaries in business practices in the name of maximizing profits. Then, using their political clout, unchecked business leaders spend the next decades undermining protections for workers, healthcare, infrastructure and the environment. Professor Henderson urges listeners to lean into their power as consumers and voters as the engine of business cultural change.
Find Professor Rebecca Henderson on Twitter: @RebeccaReCap

EPISODE LINKS
Reimagining Capitalism In A World On Fire (Rebecca Henderson)
“The Business Case For Saving Democracy: Why Free Markets Need Free Politics” (Rebecca Henderson)
“A Friedman doctrine‐- The Social Responsibility Of Business Is to Increase Its Profits” (New York Times, 9/13/70)
“The Powell Memo: A Call-to-Arms for Corporations” (Moyers On Democracy)

Previous Episode

Heather McGhee: The Hierarchy Of Human Value

This week on All Ears Abby talks to author and commentator Heather McGhee. Heather is a distinguished senior fellow at the progressive think tank Demos, where she also served as president for four years. Heather argues that the economic, intellectual, and societal costs of racism affect not only its victims but also its perpetrators. She tells Abby that America’s White middle class grew after WW2, with help from Federal housing subsidies, education grants and other benefits that were largely denied to Black Americans. Once Black Americans began demanding equal treatment, many of those programs were simply dismantled. This kind of racism, McGee tells Abby, cost everyone. Abby and Heather also delve into the political theft of Reconstruction, whether American racism is unique, the misogyny of libertarianism, and if the Karen memes are a harbinger of a backlash on feminism.
Heather’s heavily anticipated book, The Sum of Us, is due out in early 2021.
EPISODE LINKS:
“A White Man Asked C-Span How to Stop Being Racist. Here’s the Fascinating Answer” (Fortune)
“Racism Has A Cost For Everyone” (TED Talk)
“Facebook Fails to Appease Organizers of Ad Boycott” (NY Times)
Color of Change
Demos
Heather on Twitter: @hmcghee
Heather on Instagram: @HeatherCMcGhee

Next Episode

Mary Trump: My Grandfather Was A Sociopath

This week All Ears brings you a special bonus episode: Abby couldn’t pass up the opportunity to talk to author Mary Trump about her new book, “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created The World’s Most Dangerous Man”. As like-minded mavericks, Abby and Mary discuss what it’s like to stand up to a wealthy American family empire from the inside, and the friction and drama that results. Mary brings a gimlet eye to the Trump family mythology, and deconstructs the brutal dynamics that destroyed her father, Fred Trump Jr. (Donald Trump’s elder brother). As Mary relates in vivid detail, the Trump family patriarch, Fred Sr., pitted the five Trump siblings against each other, and Donald emerged as the ruthless victor by emulating Fred Sr.’s narcissism and sociopathy, while Fred Jr. died at 42 from complications of alcoholism, broken by years of emotional abuse at the hands of his father. This is an interview you won’t want to miss!
EPISODE LINKS
Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man (Mary Trump)
The Inside Story of Why Mary Trump Wrote a Tell-All Memoir (New York Times)
Mary Trump's interview with ABC News' George Stephanopoulos (ABC News)
The Men Who Gave Trump His Brutal Worldview (Politico)

Mary Trump on Twitter: @MaryLTrump