On Location at the Aspen Institute Part 1: Diving Into Disruption

Every summer, the Aspen Institute’s Business and Society Program’s annual summit gathers 200+ leaders from the worlds of business, science, government, design, and the arts at the Institute’s Colorado campus. They convene for three days of panels, spontaneous conversations and knowledge sharing- all driven by a shared belief that business can shape and contribute to the health of our world. 

The 2025 Summit took place in July, and of course, DB|BD host Ellen McGirt was there. And this year she got to do something special. Over the course of a 9-5, Ellen interviewed nine different leaders on mic from the worlds of law, technology, academia, food and the UN. And we are bringing excerpts from all nine of those conversations straight to the DB|BD airwaves. Consider it inside access to this invite-only summit. 

Over the next two episodes of DB|BD you will hear from powerhouse leaders on what’s keeping them up at night and how they’re dealing with it. 

Today, we’re covering that first part. Times are tough. A hostile administration, unstable geopolitics and shifting technologies are just a few of the changes disrupting the way we live and do business. In this episode, leaders from different countries and industries explain just how their work has been impacted.

Leaders featured in this episode:

• Justina Nixon-Saintil: Vice President, Corporate Social Responsibility, and Chief Impact Officer, IBM
• Jenny Yang: Former EEOC Commissioner, Partner, Outten & Golden LLP
• Rachel Godsil: Co-founder, Perception Institute, Distinguished Professor of Law and Chancellor’s Scholar at Rutgers Law School
• Cécile Beliot: CEO, Bel Groupe
• Sanda Ojiambo: Assistant Secretary-General, CEO and Executive Director UN Global Compact
• Tim Mohin: Partner & Director, BCG
• Witold Henisz: Vice Dean & Faculty Director, Impact, Value and Sustainable Business Initiative, The Wharton School

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Transcript

Ellen McGirt Hey, everyone. This summer has been a busy one for me. I moved houses and worked with our tireless Design Observer team on some programming, like the relaunch of our newsletters and gearing up for this year’s DO20 list. In the midst of all of that, I got to spend a few days in July in the impossibly lush and picturesque landscape that is summertime in Aspen, Colorado. While I had some time to hike and admire the foliage, I was mostly there to attend the Aspen Institute’s 2025 Business and Society Summit. Now, Judy Samuelson made the cut for our first ever DO20 list for her work leading the extraordinary Business and Society Program. Their summit is an annual convening of 200 or so of these amazing leaders. And yes, they know how to convene. It’s three days of panels, spontaneous conversations and knowledge sharing all driven by a shared belief that business can shape and contribute to the health of our world. This year’s summit centered on trust, namely how leaders must balance risk and innovation while maintaining the trust of their employees and how to lead in the face of growing distrust in corporations and capitalism itself. I’ve been going to the summit for three years now, wow, as a moderator and a journalist and an audience member. But this year, I got to do something different. I spent an entire day holed up in the Aspen Institute’s on-site podcast studio. Over the course of a nine to five, I interviewed nine different leaders from the worlds of law, technology, academia, food, and the UN. Each one was so unique and spectacular that when I peeled myself out of that studio at 5 p.m., I was both exhausted and energized. Exhausted because, you know, nine interviews in one day is no Aspen nature walk, but energized because I got to speak to some of the most tenacious and creative leaders in the world. Like Sanda Ojiambo, the Assistant Secretary General of the UN Global Compact, who is responsible for the largest corporate sustainability initiative in the world, and Cécile Beliot, CEO of the Bel Group, a French dairy company who makes those beloved baby bell cheese wheels wrapped in red wax. You know the ones? She’s leading massive transitions in energy, food sourcing, and food education. So as you’ve probably already guessed this by now, we are bringing excerpts from all nine of my conversations. Consider it inside access to this invite-only summit. Over the next two episodes of DBBD, you will hear from powerhouse leaders and what’s keeping them up at night and how they’re dealing with it. Today, we’re covering that first part. Times are tough for all the reasons you already know, a hostile administration, unstable geopolitics and shifting technologies are just a few of the changes disrupting the way we live and do business. In this episode, leaders from different countries and industries explain just how their work has been impacted. Now, their reflections are not necessarily the most uplifting, but they are honest. And I think you know us well enough by now to know that we won’t leave you sinking into the quicksand of doom and gloom. The second episode of our Aspen series will focus on business’s role in redesigning our world. So make sure you tune back in two weeks for imaginative solutions and practical advice. All right, I think you’ve heard enough from me. Let’s dive into my conversations from the 2025 Aspen Business and Society Summit. I’m Ellen McGirt and this is the Design of Business, the Business of Design. This season, we’re designing for the unknown. In this episode, we dive into disruption. 

Tim Mohin I have a bunch of different clients that are struggling with the dynamic changes to the landscape. I think never in my 40-year career have we seen the pendulum swing so far so fast as it has recently. And when you think about the broad sweep of time when companies started to adopt responsible ethical programs on diversity, on climate change, on the broad swath of sustainability issues, all of that is now being challenged. And that has led to all kinds of questions about what do we do now? And companies are really stuck because if they change what they’re doing, that has a cost. If they don’t change what their doing, that has costs as well. How do we move from here? How do continue our momentum in the current landscape that we’re in? 

Ellen McGirt That’s Tim Mohin. He’s a member of Boston Consulting Group’s Climate and Sustainability and Social Impact practices. Previously, he was a senior sustainability leader with Intel and Apple and worked in the environmental protection agencies and the US Senate on environmental policies like the Clean Air Act. He’s also the author of the 2012 book, Changing Business from the Inside Out, which he originally wanted to call A Tree Hugger’s Guide to Working in Corporations. 13 years ago, the idea of sustainability within a business was considered what he calls an “unnatural act”. Since then, Tim has watched as sustainability became a business given rather than an afterthought. 

Tim Mohin I was speaking to the dean of the Cornell Business School just a few minutes ago, and it’s very clear that as young people come through a MBA program, that sustainability is already baked in. So it’s not an afterthought. It’s not a bolt on. We don’t have to justify its existence anymore. And business leaders of today and certainly of tomorrow are already coming knowing that their company is more than just about returning profit to their investors. It’s about purpose. It is about treating people with dignity and respect as I said before. Looking out for the environment. All of those things now I think are baked in. 

Ellen McGirt We’re starting here with Tim, because I think his question of what do we do now is the central question of this moment. What do we now that the principles and practices we have all worked so hard to develop are under such blatant threat? We can start by determining how empty or full these threats really are. So, change, pendulum swing, pushback, how much of that is fire and how much is smoke? 

Tim Mohin That’s a great question. I don’t think anybody has a definitive answer, but I’ll give you my point of view. I think a great deal of it is fire. Companies are being investigated by the Department of Justice for their DEI programs. If they have federal contracts, they’re being delisted from those contracts. And so there are real penalties to pay. No one wants to be the center of controversy. Nobody wants to get investigated. Nobody wants to lose business. And so they’re struggling with that liability. 

Ellen McGirt Now, when I hear liability, I want to consult with the law, or at least with people who practice it. Luckily, I got to speak to two lawyers at once, both of whom can parse through the fire and smoke of the administration’s rhetoric on DEI and employment policy. The first is Jenny Yang, the former EEOC commissioner and current partner at the employment law firm Outten and Golden. Jenny was appointed to the EEOCs chair by President Obama. And subsequently served as President Biden’s deputy assistant for racial justice and equity. The second is Rachel Godsil, co-founder and senior research advisor to Perception Institute and a distinguished professor of law and chancellor’s scholar at Rutgers Law School. She collaborates with social scientists to identify the efficacy of interventions to address implicit bias, racial anxiety, and stereotype threat. Here is an exchange between the three of us about what aspects of employment law have actually changed and how business and federal contractors have responded. The first voice you’ll hear is Jenny’s. 

Jenny Yang On day two of this administration, President Trump rescinded President Johnson’s executive order 11246 and has moved to eliminate the agency’s role in enforcing anti-discrimination requirements based on race, gender, as well as other bases. And so what I’m seeing is a big shift, right, particularly for federal contractors as they come under increasing scrutiny. One of the changes I’m seeing, is that federal contractors often were doing more to identify and prevent discrimination, and now they’re the employers that are on some of the fastest retreat because of the administration’s action. So that’s an area where I’ve been working with my former colleagues, both at the Department of Labor, former directors of the agency, our solicitors, as well as my former colleagues at EEOC and going back for decades, leadership of our, you know, offices, different offices across the agency or general councils, commissioners. And we’ve been issuing statements and resource documents to help companies navigate the law and to understand that even if you see a new interpretation of law coming out from EEOC, that is, one commissioner’s view that can’t change a commission-voted policy without a quorum, which requires at least three commissioners to be on the commission. So there, I think there’s an important opportunity for companies to better understand that even though there’s a lot of effort to intimidate employers from adopting this administration’s political viewpoints about diversity and inclusion. The law hasn’t changed and their obligations to prevent and remedy discrimination remain. 

Ellen McGirt Wonderful to have you in their corner and these tools in their corners, but I was really struck by, and a little embarrassed by, how surprised I was is that it of federal contractors are everyone and everywhere, it is a huge cohort. It’s not just one a sector like defense or manufacturing. It is literally everyone. And the degree to which I think senior leaders were unprepared for this also feels a little surprising to me. Are you seeing this? You’re nodding, it’s like the same thing. 

Rachel Godsil So definitely hearing at this conference and have heard from some other organizations and companies we work for a surprise at the degree and speed with which the administration came out of the box with these goals of intimidating and these goals, of suggesting that practices were unlawful that in fact are completely lawful and in fact legally required. That’s I think surprised many of us and perhaps it’s not surprising that it surprised the business leaders. What we heard today, which was really interesting, was some of the people saying it may be, in some sense, worth it for us as a company to refuse to comply because the sort of continued practice of DEI, diversity, equity, inclusion work, anti-discrimination work, creating fairness and opportunity for all, that is too core to who we are. So no matter what the administration claims they’re going to do, and they do have the power to decide who they want to fund or who they don’t, we’re not going to change our practices. And that was actually kind of exciting to hear some companies start to think about what would be the narrative where we stand up and Bye. We’re going to stand for what we know to be lawful and what we know to to be consistent with our practices. 

Ellen McGirt And good business. 

Rachel Godsil And good business. And that was the part that was really interesting is they were thinking about what are the narratives that they can tell because their customers care because their employees and staff care because, you know, the sort of potentially even their shareholders care, if their shareholders are committed to certain principles. And so it seems like they’re open to engaging in a broader analysis of what risk is, not just the risk of the administration. 

Ellen McGirt Rachel’s comment here reminds me of my conversation with Catalyst’s Alix Pollock in the last episode of DBBD, where we talked about her firm’s Risk of Retreat study, which found that retreating from DEI is just as risky for companies as sticking with it. Rachel confirms that companies she works with are aware of the reputational risks of retreating from DE I, and they’re standing up for these practices. We’ve seen that with recent recommitments at companies like Starbucks, Disney, and Costco. I also talked with Jenny and Rachel about an idea I’ve been noodling on for some time now. Maybe the DEI heyday of the early 2020s took the bun out of the oven way too soon. 

Jenny Yang What we saw was a lot of superficial efforts around diversity. Let’s count people, let’s meet this, right? Let’s reach a target population by hiring someone from that group to give us some credibility. But they weren’t actually integrating people into the organization itself so that the organization could benefit from those different perspectives and experience the people brought and actually make the culture, the business decisions. better because of that, right? And so often people then felt tokenized, right, that I’m valued because of my background as opposed to the skills and knowledge I bring. And I think as we move forward, more organizations are realizing, you can’t just hire someone who has no idea how to lead across difference and fully engage and incorporate those ideas in the team, or you will not leverage the value of all your people. 

Rachel Godsil And what we learned quite quickly was oftentimes people really did consciously, genuinely want to treat people fairly, but they actually really, really weren’t. But if you just brought that to their attention, they would get defensive and they would tend to sort of, you know, double down on the fact that they were a good person and hadn’t done anything intentionally wrong. And so we developed a set of kind of language and strategies with the goal of kind of meeting people in a sense where they are and affirming what their best selves were and then trying to create the context in which those best selves could translate into behavior. So the current moment where they keep being discussions of, you know, there’s this kind of polarizing and this sense of resentment and that’s suggesting to some that there’s not broad scale support for anti-discrimination and equal opportunity for all. That’s not our experience with most people. 

Ellen McGirt Right, right. And it sounds like you’re feeling optimistic. 

Rachel Godsil I mean, optimistic might be too strong. In a sense because there does seem to be so much fear among even these really quite empowered people at this conference, that the politicization of DEI, for example, is really creating a pressure for people to keep their head down and to be very, very risk-averse. And that’s not something that I think Jenny or I would recommend as a strategy because there’s other concerns. 

Ellen McGirt There sure are other concerns. And I do find it difficult and necessary to hold them all at once. Alongside the attacks on DEI are those on another three-letter acronym I care about, ESG. Both have become radioactive. Companies are trying hard to change the words they use to talk about them while also sticking to the principles they represent. I talked through this dilemma with Witold Henisz. Vit has been at Wharton for over 30 years and he is currently the Vice Dean and Faculty Director of the Impact, Value and Sustainable Business Initiative. 

Witold Henisz It’s a difficult moment. I mean, at some level, nothing is changing because the work we’re doing, which is focusing on building the business case, is important, it is of interest to our faculty, it is a interest to students, it is an interest to alumni. But what’s changed since 2022, when I assumed the role, it was a time of already some contestation, some disagreement around ESG. But we thought the Wharton School, its independent position, its academic rigor, we could provide a pathway to a clear definition of what this project is about, what it means, why it’s material, and we hoped we could contribute to the signal and the noise and help find a path forward. The last two years or last three years have been really challenging and people are walking away from that term. People are afraid to use that term because it has become weaponized. And that is creating real consequences for me. So we’re still doing the work we’re doing, but how many philanthropists wanna contribute to the resource demands of that program? Who wants to have the blank ESG initiative? How many of our students who are going through the process of engaging with our co-curricular activities and taking the classes required for the ESG major are at the end of the day, choosing to actually list the ESC major, to actually file that major? That number is down. How many people are willing to highlight their association with the ESG initiative? How many industry partners want to come to us and claim they are working with us on ESG? They’re supportive of the work. They think it’s important that they’re waiting for us to do it and disseminate it, but that leaves me without the resources to move forward. And so that’s a really difficult moment in that I’m still trying to do everything I was doing before, but now I’m also playing defense and I’m playing defense in an increasingly difficult environment, which I can convince people of the justification for what we do, but I can’t convince them to support it financially. And that’s requiring us to take serious changes in the coming weeks as to the name of our initiative. 

Ellen McGirt Oh, that’s disappointing to hear because I remember as a reporter at Fortune really becoming engaged in the conversation. You know, Larry Fink writes a letter, everyone pays attention, which I’m at 2015-2016. And I remember feeling that the anti-ESG movement was almost insulting in its assertion that it was an equal and opposite force. Right? Do you know what I’m saying? 

Witold Henisz I made that point to so many reporters. I said you’re creating a battle, a he-said, she-said, a David and Goliath story with this incipient anti-ESG movement. But who is it really? What’s behind it? Let’s look at the interests behind it. Let’s diagnose the financial flows. One side is getting 40, 50% of shareholder proposals, votes on shareholder proposals. The other side is giving two or four. Let us look at the amount of money that is going into ESG investment. Maybe five, 10, maybe $20 trillion. Let’s look at the amount of money going into anti-ESG investment. Few billion, maybe tens of billions, but not more. This isn’t a fair fight, but politically, it’s had great effect. And there was a lack of ability to articulate the logic to be true to the 2004 definition in the UN report, Who Cares Wins, which was really, these are financially material, environmental, social, and governance issues. Some of that was due to the practices of people in the movement. People confused what was ESG investing, what was values-based investing, because it was easier to attract more money if you did that. Some people made claims that they couldn’t justify. Some people over-claimed, virtue-claimed because it appealing. So the failure of the ESG movement is not just a failure of over-reporting on the strength of the anti-ESG movement. At some level, they had important claims of weaknesses of the ESG movement itself. We’d hope to address those, but restore confidence that ESG made sense. We’re choosing to go in a different direction in terms of the name, but not changing what we’re doing, not changing the approach. 

Cécile Beliot Food is culture, food is social relationship, food is to some extent a political choice, food is health, health of the people, health of the planet. 

Ellen McGirt That’s Cecile Belliot, who I mentioned at the top of the episode. She’s the CEO of Le Groupe Bel, including its US subsidiary, the Bel Group. The Bel Group is a family company with over 150 years of history and a major player in the food industry with dairy, fruit, and plant-based products. Cecile is the first woman CEO of Bel Group and the second outside the founding family. I was really taken with Cecile. She’s a passionate leader and an innovative thinker who sees her company as more than just a cheese maker. In fact, the group’s corporate mission is to provide everyone with healthier and more sustainable food. This mission has accelerated under her leadership with impressive digital partnerships and energy transitions that fast tracked their sustainability goals. Today, I want to bring you Cecile’s Soundbite and what she sees as a false dichotomy between rising costs and unhealthy lifestyles. To her, it is not inevitable that lower-income people are doomed to a life of food insecurity. 

Cécile Beliot And today we are a bit stuck in the ongoing conversation on there is pressure and inflation and people are not ready to go for, you know, extra few cents. And I challenge this point of view. I think that if people were aware of the real value of food, they would waste less food. I think that if people would be more aware of the impact of food on their health, food on the health of their kids, the impact on the food and the health on the planet, because again it’s CO2 emission, it’s carbon, it is water, it’s biodiversity loss, so the more they are aware, the more they would be ready to pay the few extra dollars to moved toward these healthy and sustainable diets. We need to help them to do so, we need to engage them, not to educate them, but to make it easy, to make fun. That’s where I think we have something pressure at Bel because we are, I think, at the intersection of health, sustainability and fun. So I’m trying to get out of the narrative of the price and to do so, I keep on saying also that if you want to get our of this narrative, we need, obviously, to convey this message on the real value of food, and at the same time, we need to protect the people in need. Because there is a part of the society, and that part of society who is in food insecurity has to be supported, has to supported by us, by the government. Food is not a business like any others. Food is not a commodity, food is a human right. And if you really embrace that food is a human right, you need to give a support. 

Ellen McGirt Food production and distribution is far from the only thing that has historically left marginalized populations behind. There’s another one that was so present at the summit that it was practically the water we were swimming in and that’s AI. Now, this may seem like a hard pivot, but stick with me here. AI is obviously not food. It’s not a basic human necessity, nor can it grow from the earth or be sold in a supermarket. Well, not yet anyway. But AI is being used increasingly, including by the Bel Group, to get food in the mouths of people who need it. But it’s also increasingly displacing people from the jobs they need to buy their necessities. I talked with Justina Nixon-Saintil, the Vice President of Corporate Social Responsibility and Chief Impact Officer at IBM, about the questions she’s asking herself when it comes to disparate access to AI. This is especially relevant to Justina’s work and she is leading IBM’s effort to skill 30 million people worldwide by 2030. 

Justina Nixon-Saintil So just looking at the innovative practices that you can, or solutions you could create with AI is an exciting place to be, but we’re also looking at the workforce. How do we make sure we give people access to tech training, especially in AI, because it is changing the workforce, right? You’re looking at entry-level jobs that, or any type of rote roles that are being, you know, being taken over by AI or agentic AI. So how do you make sure you’re not leaving populations behind and how do make sure give them the right tools so that they could be successful in the new corporate world? 

Ellen McGirt And for Justina, this work is personal. 

Justina Nixon-Saintil I’m an engineer, I’m a mechanical engineer and that was my pathway out of poverty. And I’m an immigrant, I grew up in the South Bronx. You know, I loved solving problems, I love math and eventually, I obtained a mechanical engineering job and a really great opportunity, right? You know, when you think about economic mobility, and it opened a lot of doors for me. So there was such a push over the last, what, you know, number of years that moving to computer science, moving to engineering, and that’s still valid. But I do think when you look at how gen AI is evolving, and the other day I was talking to my son, who ended up being a STEM kid as well. But he’s 25, and I was asking him about vibe coding. I said, I’ve never heard of this. What is vibe coding? And he said, Mom, I just vibe coded over the weekend, and I created a whole new app. Just enter in prompts, right, specific prompts, and you’re able to create an app from that. So you actually don’t even need to enter the code yourself. So think about how that’s changing, how students are learning, or how you look at STEM fields. Of course, you still need to understand that what you’re, first of all, you need to make sure that what the prompts you enter in are the right ones. And then the app you’re creating is doing what you want it to do. So you still needs some basic knowledge to do that. But things have changed, right? So you have the digital divide, which never closed completely, and you just have a workforce that’s changing rapidly because people are looking at entry-level roles where you may have hired someone that’s still in college, right? Or even a high school graduate. And those roles may not exist as much anymore because you can have AI do a lot of that. So what does that workforce of the future look like? 

Ellen McGirt Sanda Ojiambo, the Assistant Secretary General of the UN Global Compact, is also worried about the growing digital divide. Per the scope of her job, she’s thinking of the chasm on a global scale. 

Sanda Ojiambo My biggest worry, actually, is that data and this digital world is not ubiquitous. I mean sitting here it seems like it’s commonplace to us but this part of the world where digital connectivity is not there yet where tech and AI modeling doesn’t necessarily reflect the priorities and needs of some of those countries and economies where bias exists, and there’s a lot of bias that talk around gender around race, and whether or not the large language are fully reflective and representative of various communities, economies, and countries. But the digital divide is one that is just my fundamental. On the one hand, the world is fast moving towards these fascinating uses of technology. And on the other hand, there’s people who aren’t connected. And my desire for tech and AI would be actually to see how we bridge that and not widen those gaps. 

Ellen McGirt For Sanda, this gap in access to data and technology is one part of a much larger division. 

Sanda Ojiambo Trust. Fundamentally broken, I think, in so many ways. For me, at a global level, the North-South trust gap is probably one that has the greatest global impact, I think. The world, we will collectively not succeed, unless we succeed as one. So if one part of the world is thriving and the other isn’t, it just doesn’t get there. And right now, there’s so much intertwining in terms of natural resources, solutions for climate transitions, for energy transitions, for food systems transitions. We know parts of the world is shrinking in population, others are growing. That’s where your future consumer market comes from, your future labor force comes from. It behooves you to pay interest to it because that’s really what’s gonna sustain economic growth. 

Ellen McGirt And here, Sanda explains why global conflict in geopolitics is not something Western business leaders can or should avoid. 

Sanda Ojiambo There’s about 60 elections that have happened since uh,  in 2025, all around the world. And I think politics has shifted. We see that shift in Europe, we see that shift in Latin America, we see it certainly in the US. And I think what we either took as strategic common values or an understanding of the public good has really been challenged in many ways, at least vis-a-vis our agenda and the agenda that we promote as the UNGC and part of the United Nations. I think secondly, conflict has continued to escalate in ways that we don’t know. And this is not even taking into consideration the large number of often forgotten and not talked about wars, because there is a number that have been going on for ages. But what does this mean for business? Cause that’s really who our stakeholder is. You know, the things that impact business now more than ever have fundamentally shifted. When I speak to CEOs and ask them what keeps them awake at night, it’s actually no longer their product. It’s not if they’re on the right shelf or in the right markets, it’s things like global conflict, trade and tariff wars, the climate crisis, social cohesion, employee expectation. Now more than ever I think politics and geopolitics, conflict, all that is suddenly changing and shaping the business environment. 

Ellen McGirt Sanda has a point of view that is different from most others I spoke to at the Summit. She facilitates public-private partnerships between business and governmental leaders across countries and continents. It makes sense that addressing global divides is essential to her work. When I got to my final question for Sanda, which was one that I asked all nine leaders I spoke to, I asked her if we are lucky enough to sit down together one year from now. What would she have hoped to have accomplished? Instead, she diverted me right back to the present. 

Sanda Ojiambo Can I tell you something else first that I wanna talk about? Okay, because I wanna to talk about the issue of polarization. And the reason I say this is that I feel like it’s not something that we should take lightly. And the reasons I say this is a lot of polarization, we talk about this, the world is polarized. I feel a lot polarization is almost becoming existential and we need to deal with it. There’s some big issues at play. Let me take climate. You could sit and say, well, listen, I believe that climate change is an issue and somebody else doesn’t and take it lightly. But when you look at it on the collective, there’s people who will say, and we’re sitting here in the U.S., there’s been tragedy in Texas in the last week and people say, well, look, that’s not climate, that’s just life, poor planning, failure of an early warning system. But there’s lives that have been lost. On the other hand, there’s, people talk about where do I invest my pension funds? And someone will say, yes, let’s look at it and invest in green funds, they’re important for the future. Others will say no, I want my pension money now because it’s gonna secure my kid’s future. So the things that polarize us have been so humanized that it’s become, you know, you’re either on the end of one side or another. I feel like we’re losing the middle. When you lose the middle, you just don’t have places to come together for dialogue. So it’s becoming extreme and I feel it’s becomes existentialist. And I do feel that business has a role to play. In smoothening some of those edges, along with government also. And then I had just wanted to talk about, you know, principles and values. And just my thought that those leaders who will succeed globally, will have to know that their values right now in a fractured and more nationalist world will translate differently across different geographies. It doesn’t mean the values have changed. It’s your entry point in how you articulate it that I think is really, really important. 

Ellen McGirt What a whirlwind, and that was only part one. As I listened back to these interviews I conducted over a month ago, I couldn’t help but reflect. As bleak as things may seem sometimes, there are people in every company, in every country, in every community, in every industry who are working on the bigger issues that are keeping us apart and can bring us together. It is really our job to find those people, And it’s really our job to be those people. That’s it for this week. As promised in the episode intro, we are not gonna leave you sinking into the doom and gloom. We are gonna be the people who are the bright lights. We’ll be back in two weeks with conversations from the leaders in this episode, plus a few others, about what they plan to do in the face of all this uncertainty. Until then, we’ll leave you with a preview. Here’s BCG’s Tim Mohin on why he is, dare I say it, optimistic. 

Tim Mohin People ask me after being in this business for 40 years, like, how do you get out of bed in the morning? And I’m actually really optimistic. And the reason I’m optimistic is because when I started, companies doing anything that wasn’t in their own self-interest was a man bites dog story. You know, they just didn’t do it, right? But that has changed. This is now embedded. It’s part of the economic life of companies. It’s not gonna change. And what happens when we engage stakeholders, to your question, is we’re on that leading edge of what’s next and what should companies be looking at in the future. And even though there’s a lot of headwinds right now, I think it’s super important to say, what are we doing as a business and what could we do better? 

Ellen McGirt All right, beautiful people, one more thing before you go, we’d love your help in making Design Observer even better. We have a short user survey in the field and we would love your take on what you like, what we could be doing more of and how we can continue to be your trusted friend helping you navigate uncertainty. Plus, if you fill it out before August 31st, you’ll be entered to win one of our very cool redesigner tees. You can find the survey link in the show notes. We appreciate you. 

Ellen McGirt The Design of Business| The Business of Design is a podcast from Design Observer. Design Observer was co-founded by Jessica Helfand. Our show is written and produced by Alexis Haut. Our theme music is by Warner Meadows. Justin D. Wright of Seaplane Armada mixed and mastered this episode. Thanks to Sheena Medina, Sarah Gephardt, Rachel Paese, and the entire Design Observer team. And for more long-form content about the people redesigning our world, please consider subscribing to our newsletters. The Design of Business, and the Observatory at designobserver.com.