On Location at the Aspen Institute Part 2: Redesigning Leadership

If you missed Part 1 of our Aspen Institute special, you can listen here.

Every summer, the Aspen Institute’s Business & Society Summit gathers more than 200 leaders from across business, government, design, law, and the arts in Aspen, Colorado. It’s an invite-only convening that sparks three days of conversation, connection, and candor about how business can contribute to the health of our world.

We’re back with part 2 of our peek behind the curtain of the 2025 Summit. And this time we are asking the big question: in a period of global turmoil, does leadership need a redesign?

It’s clear that today’s leaders- whether of a business, a government or a family- require an unprecedented level of courage, vision and integrity. But what exactly does that type of leadership look and feel like? And can you develop the skills needed to be an audacious leader, or do you have to be born with them?

These are big, hairy questions. And in this episode of DB|BD, our guests take a stab at them.

You will hear excerpts from conversations host Ellen McGirt had with nine different leaders onsite at the Summit. All nine leaders, whose expertise spans across business, law, design, and government, share invaluable wisdom on what it takes to build trust with customers, employees and shareholders in a world where trust itself is scarce. 

2025 Edelman Trust Barometer

Leaders featured in this episode:

• Jim Andrew, Executive Vice President, Chief Sustainability Officer, PepsiCo
• Heather Higginbottom, Managing Director, Head of Research, Policy & Insights, Corporate Responsibility, JPMorgan Chase
• Trisch Smith, Global Chief Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Officer, Edelman
• Justina Nixon-Saintil: Vice President, Corporate Social Responsibility & Chief Impact Officer, IBM
• Alphonso David, President & CEO, Global Black Economic Forum 
• 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

Transcript

Ellen McGirt Hello, hello. And just like that, Labor Day has passed and we are jumping feet first into fall. As working people and parents and students and probably farmers, you all know that September is when things start getting real. Our slow summer days turn into a frenetic rush of back to school and back to the office filled with packed lunches and fresh school supplies, stuffed inboxes and board meetings. I know what you’re thinking. Ellen, we know, we know. But there is something refreshing in the fall rush. It’s when you get to look ahead to a new start, a new season, a new school year, and if you’re a leader of a business, a family, a publication, you are setting your priorities for the upcoming new year. So in today’s episode, we want to offer you some words of wisdom to help you on your journey of resetting and future planning. And these words come from the leaders I spoke with at the Aspen Business and Society Summit back in July. A few weeks ago, we published the first part of this Aspen series. In it, leaders from a wide range of industries described the unique challenges they’re facing in this moment of global turmoil. It was sobering, to say the least. But as promised, we are not leaving you in the doom and gloom. If you listened to the previous episode, you’ll remember we left you with this question from Tim Mohin of Boston Consulting Group’s Climate and Sustainability and Social Impact Practices. 

Tim Mohin 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 This was the million dollar question on the minds of all nine leaders I spoke to on that hot Colorado summer day. And while their perspectives on what business could do better varied, they all boiled down to one essential sticking point. This moment needs to be met with a different type of leader. Not necessarily a better leader, but a different one. Take this response from Alphonso David, the president and CEO of the Global Black Economic Forum. 

Alphonso David Because, at least for marginalized communities, I’m talking about Black and brown people, I think there is a point now where people understand they can’t trust institutions. We will have new standard bearers, if you will, who will be carrying the cross for what trust should look like, and I think it’s going to be directly tied to authenticity. 

Ellen McGirt That word authenticity. It’s become somewhat of an internet buzzword, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t useful. So what does it mean to be an authentic leader? What does it take to lead with honesty and courage in such a difficult moment? Big, scary questions. We’ll let our guests take a stab at them. Here is part two of our peek behind the curtain of the 2025 Aspen Business and Society Summit. As always, I’m Ellen McGirt, and this is the Design of Business|Business of Design. This season. We’re designing for the unknown. In this episode, we’re redesigning leadership. 

Ellen McGirt I want to start at a place that feels natural for me. As a writer, journalist, and professional talker, I’m into words. I have fun stringing them together and admiring how other writers have strung their words together. I also think a lot about what words and language mean and what they represent to different people, especially in the business world. One day a phrase, whether it’s DEI or sustainability, is on the tip of the business-world’s tongue. The next, they won’t touch it with a 10-foot pole. Many of the people I spoke with at Aspen reflected on whether evolving as a leader requires evolving how they talk about some of the fundamental aspects of their business. Here’s Tim Mohin from BCG again. 

Tim Mohin I think that we would stop labeling sustainability as woke, you know, throwing labels at each other doesn’t help anything and it doesn’t really inform anything. 

Ellen McGirt Yeah, let’s slow down and understand what’s actually happening. 

Tim Mohin Yeah, and I think, to be honest, my side is a big part of that. We started labeling things ESG. Well, it’s really easy to vilify a three-letter abbreviation. When you start talking about what it actually is, all Americans are for things like cleaner energy, clean water, treating people better. When you really de-average it and look at the fundamental issues underneath, it is really hard to be against. 

Ellen McGirt Tim’s making a specific point here about his particular field, ESG and sustainability. But his specificity got me thinking about how progressive business principles are framed. They’re often boiled down to one-word phrases or three-letter acronyms that make them easy to misunderstand or weaponize. Here’s Witold Henisz. He’s currently the Vice Dean and Faculty Director of the Impact, Value, and Sustainable Business Initiative at Wharton. And he knows a thing or two about radioactive language. That initiative that he’s the vice dean of? Up until August, it was called the ESG initiative. While the initiative’s focus hasn’t changed, Wharton thought the ESG was too polarizing for potential students and donors. To hear more of Wit’s thoughts on this change, tune into the first episode of our Aspen series. In this clip, Wit discusses the limits of “net zero” commitments in which organizations commit to cut carbon emissions to a level that can either be stored or reabsorbed. 

Witold Henisz Should we assess the insurance industry on its net zero? Like, what’s the energy use of an All-State office? It doesn’t make sense to ask that question. We should be asking different questions about their work practices, about the way they’re helping with climate resilience. We need a more nuanced approach where we say, what’s material? What’s this firm actually doing? And how is it positioning it either to avoid risks or to embrace opportunities? That’s an active investment strategy that’s expensive, requires industry knowledge, and for which we don’t really have a ready data set off the shelf that’s available. It’s much harder, it’s gonna take time, and we rush too quickly to bring something to market that was cheap and easy to explain, and now we’re suffering some of the consequences for it. We’re trying to do the deeper research and contribute to it, along with many of the people here at the Aspen Summit. 

Ellen McGirt Okay, easy to explain. That seems to be one of the key factors in packaging and repackaging a buzzy principle so that it’s more palatable for all stakeholders. Another factor, you need buy-in from your stakeholders, boards, shareholders, and possibly even customers, that pursuing Net Zero or ESG is worth the risk, including the time and money invested. I’m curious how you do that. Luckily, I spoke to two leaders about how they’re messaging on sustainability got their employees and partners invested. Up first is my exchange with Jim Andrew, the Chief Sustainability Officer at PepsiCo. He currently leads PEP+, PepsiCo’s efforts to weave sustainability into all aspects of their business. 

Jim Andrew Life’s about trade-offs, right? And life’s about making choices. And so we work very hard to be able to say what matters in a given location that is relevant for them to help them address the business problems that they have. Because if we can anchor sustainability in business problems, if we an anchor it in things that help us run a better business, we’re gonna be a lot more successful. Because then it’s not sort of sustainability somewhere out there. It’s sustainability squarely in the center of how we run the business, how we build a business that will allow us to be successful in the short-term and in the medium-term, and in the long-term. 

Ellen McGirt I hadn’t really thought about it that way, but obviously it’s a very powerful lens to look at it. Do you think the idea of sustainability, or corporate sustainability, could use a brand refresh? 

Jim Andrew I don’t know, it’s an interesting question. Certainly PepsiCo has been working in and around sustainability for decades, right, on things that matter. And what we did in 2020 was to say, how do we build on that and then really move to put it squarely in the center of the strategy and the operations? And then what are the goals that we aspire to, that we wanna talk about externally? And we know that for us to be able to communicate that to 300,000 plus associates around the world in 200 plus countries and territories, a variety of languages, we needed to brand that. And we wanted PepsiCo, obviously the name of the company, positive, we liked, it gave us a way to, we put those together and that is something that we have worked to bring deeply into all parts of the company, whether it’s, you know, what shows up on the screens in a facility, whether the poster’s on the wall, what shows up in the town halls that we do, what shows up and people’s compensation systems, right? How do we have recognition for innovative ideas, right, where we really work to take that consistent branding. And we’ve got a visual identity for it, like you would with any other brand. We’ve got, you know, approved language and we’ve really worked to just relentlessly communicate that, communicate that. Because a big part of, at least for us, what we found is there’s a, to land what we’re trying to do in PepsiCo, again, a big complex company, we’ve gotta educate people. We also have to incentivize them. And then third, we have to make it easy for them to be able to accelerate. Once they understand, and again, what a country general manager needs to understand is different than what a person in the finance department needs to understand, which is different to what a frontline worker, but they all need to understand something. 

Ellen McGirt Right right, so the branding effort is really about, just to restate, make sure I understand, is giving people a shared common language with which to do their jobs and excel. 

Jim Andrew Yeah, and again make it easy, make it memorable, make it fun, make is visible, make inescapable. 

Ellen McGirt And how do you measure the success of the internal brand of your work? 

Jim Andrew At the end of the day, it’s, how are we doing against the goals that we have set? 

Ellen McGirt Cause you can’t do it without everybody. 

Jim Andrew You can’t do it without everybody. It’s a team sport internally, and it’s a team sport externally. We can’t it without our bottlers around the world. We cannot do it without our suppliers, we cannot do without our retail partners. So everybody internally and a whole big network of companies and organizations, NGOs, governments, as well as other companies externally. 

Ellen McGirt What Jim is describing here is a redesign project. He and his team redesigned how PepsiCo’s sustainability practices were taught, messaged and incentivized globally. He took it as his responsibility to educate and motivate Pepsi employees to adopt these practices using tools and incentives that fit their individual needs. That’s smart. You know who else is smart? Cécile Beliot, CEO of the Bel Group. You remember the makers of the cute Baby Bell cheeses? Her company products are designed to not be wasted. 

Cécile Beliot The beauty of what we do is that it’s portion control, which means that usually, you know, a kid will have one Baby Bell, an adult will have two Baby Bel as a snack, but not more than that. And we know that, and we know that because it’s potion control. With that kind of proposition, not only we offer the right amount of calories for the people, we offer right amount of nutriment. We can even design specific recipe to adapt to personalized diet. But there is also another topic which is there is zero waste. You never throw away a Baby Bel. 

Ellen McGirt No, you never do.

Cécile Beliot No, it never happens because the packaging protects the food inside. And I don’t know if you know, but one third of the food which is produced is wasted every year, which is insane when you see the impact of the food system on climate, on water, on biodiversity. So we need to protect the food. So, you don’t waste a Baby Bel, and it has, I think, for this reason, massive positive impact not only on health but also health of the planet. 

Ellen McGirt Cécile speaks with urgency about sustainability, and she follows that up with urgent action. The Bel Group is in the midst of an ambitious, AI-driven digital and energy transformation that will make their supply chain more climate-friendly. And Cécile says that the urgency of this transition requires financial sacrifices. 

Cécile Beliot The first biomass boiler that we have invested to transition towards green energy in one and a half of our factory. The moment we decided to invest, it was, I think, 10 years ago already, the payback of this boiler at the time we did it was 17 years. 

Ellen McGirt Wow. 

Cécile Beliot In most of the company, you would say, okay, 17 years, it’s insane. It doesn’t make any sense from a financial point of view. Why do we do that? We’ve done that because we believe that this is what is right. We’ve done it because we believe there is an emergency to move towards green energy. So it was not a financial decision, it was a decision based on our mission and beliefs. 

Ellen McGirt I had to ask Cécile, how do you get your shareholders on board with losing money? It’s all about language, she says. 

Cécile Beliot If you are genuine in your commitment to deliver on both sustainability and performance, if you believe like me that, I keep on saying that at Bel, we put an end, A-N-D, in everything we do. We do financial performance and sustainability. There is no more Chief Finance Officer at Bel. There is only Chief Global Impact Officer. So what have we done? I think that there is one function within the company which is here to operationalize things. To measure, to make sure that you put stretch so that you deliver performance. They are the one who frame what winning means. And you know, in a company, we are all here to win, except that the meaning of winning at Bel is different. I do not define winning like winning market share. My playground is an infinite one. I’m here to showcase that there is a way to change the food model and to build a sustainable one and there is way to feed the people of the world and the kids of the word in a healthy and accessible way. So when the finance team has became the global impact teams, when they were in charge of piloting both legs at the same time equally important. Of course, you have tension between both legs. Of course you need to arbitrate short-term and long-term view, but it’s embedded into one function. In doing that, we have massively accelerated the operationalization of the sustainability roadmap. 

Ellen McGirt And it also sounds like it gives your executives and your leaders and your employees and stakeholders an ongoing lesson in the language of sustainability. So everyone knows how to speak it.

Cécile Beliot Absolutely. It’s common language. And by the way, to accompany this transformation, because I can tell you that if you reframe the meaning of winning, every function of the company has changed. Finance has changed, they are not finance anymore. It’s Global Impact Officer. But let me give you an example. When I am someone who purchased milk at Bel, 20 years ago, they were here to purchase milk at the lower cost possible. Right now, my purchase team, what they negotiate with the farmers is not the lowest cost for the milk. This is how do I leverage the revenues that I provide to the farmers to accelerate as much as possible to regenerative agricultural practices everywhere I operate. So you negotiate transition towards regenerative agriculture. And that’s true for the purchase team. When you are in logistics, you work with our logistics suppliers so that you negotiate transition and acceleration on sustainable transportation. When you’re in marketing, you believe that brands that will stay forever are brands that stand for something, our brands have an impact that goes much beyond just the product that you proposed. It shifted, changed the conversation of everyone. 

Ellen McGirt So purchasing is partnering. 

Cécile Beliot Yea, obviously, because there is no other way, you know, to have an impact and to build a sustainable, you know ecosystem than partnering. Even seeing that we have to be what we call an activist company, meaning that our role is not only to deliver on our mission, but also to bring others with us, to show the way.

Ellen McGirt The Bel Group’s commitment to showing others the way brought me back to a concern raised in our last episode, who is getting the opportunity to be brought along? If you remember back to the first episode in the series, Justina Saintil-Nixon, the Chief Impact Officer at IBM, raised a very important question. 

Justina Saintil-Nixon Things have changed, right? So you have the digital divide, which never closed completely. You have STEM fields that are changing now because of GenAI, 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 workce of the future look like? 

Ellen McGirt Justina and her team at IBM have committed to skilling 30 million people by 2030. By the end of 2024, they had already reached 16 million people worldwide through free online platforms and programs such as IBM skills, built in partnership with NGOs, universities, and governments. Justina also led the launch of the IBM Sustainability Accelerator, a free two-year program that matches IBM technologies and experts with projects that support climate stress communities. The program is already collaborating with 20 organizations on projects in locations such as India and Kenya. What I wanted to know from Justina is how do you make these global partnerships successful, particularly when you represent a powerful American corporation? Like, do you just walk into your meeting with the Kenyan government wearing a polo shirt with an IBM logo? 

Ellen McGirt I’m curious a little about that, do people in other parts of the world in emerging economies or maybe invulnerable situations, know that it’s IBM that’s helping them? 

Justina Saintil-Nixon Yes. I think it’s important from a brand perspective to make sure that people understand that a company like IBM is a responsible company, that we are creating societal value. So we do have IBM as a brand when we go out, we partner with organizations, and we allow them to actually also share that they’ve partnered with IBM. And I think a lot of them, there’s a lot of gravitas that brings to nonprofit organizations and other entities. And I think that’s a good thing. So yeah, people do know that it’s IBM. And even when we partner with other entities, we can bring them together in a coalition. So although it’s IBM bringing these companies together, I think it’s still important for that brand recognition. 

Ellen McGirt I do too. I’m thinking a lot about that as I’m having these conversations. I want to dig into the coalition piece because collaboration is something that we spend a lot of time on. It is the stakeholder manifesto. We must collaborate. We must be different from each other. We must bring all these voices together. Coalition building, particularly around big brands that have complicated footprints in the world can be very challenging. What have you learned about what, what needs to happen for a successful coalition to take root?

Justina Saintil-Nixon I think one major precondition is what is an asset or something you have that I don’t have? If you’re coming together and you have the same thing, actually that’s more difficult because it doesn’t give you a moment for your brand to shine in that situation. But if we’re saying that we have these, say, AI tools and you’re come in and you to provide access to data, or you can provide access to mentoring, or some other value you’re bringing in that’s very equal to what we bring, I think that’s when it makes sense. Because we’ve had conversations with other entities who do almost exactly the type of work we do, and it’s sort of, well, why would we get together? You’re already doing it, you have a great brand, but I think it works when we all come with our unique parts to it. And no one outshines the other. And the design phase is important, right? You don’t want to design all the way 100% and your partner does not have any input or insight into it. So I think that early conversations and the design phase of what you wanna do and accomplish is extremely important. And that’s where that value comes in. What are you bringing? What are we bringing? And how can we do this together? 

Ellen McGirt In the back half of this episode, I wanna turn to something tried and true, advice. We all ask for it and give it when asked, then we can decide what to keep and what to, you know, respectfully decline. I asked all of my guests at Aspen for a lot of advice, advice for leaders, advice for consumers, advice for journalists. We’re all different degrees of lost and bewildered at the moment, and I wanted to know how these smart, successful people are coping. Let’s start with the advice they had for leaders. What’s great about these nuggets is that they apply to brand new leaders taking on their very first direct report, as well as to CEOs of global corporations. First up, Heather Higginbottom, Co-Head of Global Philanthropy, Head of Research and Policy for Corporate Responsibility at JPMorgan Chase. Heather’s team has committed to diversifying their hiring pools to include more people with criminal records. Her team has established a business coalition of over 50 companies with the Business Roundtable that are committed to more second chance hiring. According to Heather, this achievement is impossible if you can’t relate to your people. 

Heather Higginbottom My advice, generally speaking, you know, for a young leader is to understand that people are not robots, they are people. And everyone is different and unique. And if you want to lead people, you can have the best idea. But if you can’t bring them around to working with you or to understanding their perspective, it’s going to be very hard to be successful. I’ve had the privilege of working with some of the brightest minds and some of my roles in government and certainly now as well. And I’ve seen some of those people struggle to get traction or follow through on their brilliant ideas because they haven’t taken the time to understand that they are part of a process and they have to bring people along. 

Ellen McGirt Sanda Ojiambo, Assistant Secretary General and CEO of the UN Global Compact, believes that this ability to bring people along is more important than ever. 

Sanda Ojiambo I would say, we are in a highly transactional world, and I think one needs to think about what incentives really look like and what incentives you have to stick to your principles in a world that is fast moving, that is transactional, and that really might not always have your shareholders and your stakeholders, actually more importantly, at the heart of it all. That challenges, I think, a lot of philosophies. I think that there’s a lot more of, a lot more need, for business leaders to be very much in tune with their employees now more than ever. I think employees are such a great sense check for what’s happening in the world. And employees are equally expecting a lot from business leaders than in the past. You want a leader who’s going to give your signals, a sign about what’s most important in society. I don’t think a business leader can sit in any economy right now and not react or have a view on what’s going on socially. It’s not simply about is your business successful? Is your businesses successful in the context within which you’re operating, and how do you relate to that? 

Ellen McGirt When it comes to relating to your employees, there’s one major caveat- not everyone knows how to do it. Rachel Godsil, co-founder and senior research advisor at Perception Institute, says it’s a skill that must be developed, especially when it comes to managing across differences. 

Rachel Godsil You raised the topic of identity threat, which a lot of people don’t really know what that is, and what it refers to is this worry that because of my identity, my interaction with someone’s not going to go well, and that of course could be experienced differently depending on if you are of a kind of underrepresented identity in a space, or if you’re part of the overrepresented or dominant identity in the space, and the people who are managers who are in the quote-unquote dominant identity, well represented, might be worried, am I going to say or do something that’s going to make this person feel like I’m biased against them? And get anxious, and their anxiety will translate into behavior that the person who’s receiving this manager acting weird is going to be like, why is this person acting weird with me? They don’t act weird with anybody else. Or avoiding me, which is so frequent, or not giving me any feedback, or not giving stretch assignments, do they not trust me? So the skills that we hope managers of any sort, but particularly new managers, can develop are the skills to really confidently and with genuine curiosity engage with people of whatever identity and recognize, you don’t know anything about anybody based upon what you think their identity is. And if you engage with respect and with curiosity and with disclosure about yourself, you can create that environment where they want to tell you about themselves too, because it’s not this awkward who are we to each other dynamic, it’s a I want to know you so I can support your growth. 

Ellen McGirt Not everyone is a business leader, and all business leaders are also people who vote and buy things and have preferences. So what role do we as the public, as consumers, play in creating a more stable and more just world? Wit Henisz from Wharton says that where we spend and don’t spend our dollars may have some unintended effects. 

Witold Henisz If everyone who cares about the climate transition or everyone who care about what’s happening in a region of the world divests from certain companies, by definition, by logic, people who don’t care, who care less, who are on the other side now have control of those companies. I can’t help you. Engaging with the companies, making the case about the costs, about the benefits, about the strategies, about the nuance gives you voice. And if you can build a coalition that has voice, you can affect change. If it’s so important to you on a values basis, not on a financial basis, right? So now we’re stepping outside the ESG realm. If it so important for you on values basis not to be associated with fossil fuels or with companies engaged in Israel, that’s your normative or your right to not participate. But I’d ask you to think through the consequences for the cause you claim to care about. And it is very hard to trace through the logic about how that moral outrage which might make you feel better, actually translates into action. The analogy that a former colleague really conveyed powerfully is divestment sounds so powerful. But another word for divestement would be disengagement, which sounds a lot less powerful. It’s like on election day, if you don’t vote, well, I’m protesting, I disavow the system, I’m not going to the poll. Did that help or hurt your cause? I think the power of engagement, the power of voice, the powerful participation is a much more important lever for change than standing on the sidelines. 

Ellen McGirt Now to be clear, Design Observer isn’t taking a stand for or against divestment movements or the choice not to vote, rather we’re offering a perspective on how these actions can be perceived as inaction. Food for thought. But in the spirit of advice, I couldn’t let myself off the hook. I had a question for Justina from IBM. 

Ellen McGirt Before I let you go, is there any advice you can give me as a journalist in thinking through the intersection of AI and the workforce? Particularly for the vulnerable folks.

Justina Saintil-Nixon Yeah, I think, it’s all changing so fast. And just a huge concern is what happens to people, right? You have years of trying to help vulnerable communities have the skills to get these entry-level jobs, you know, so that they can at least take care of their families and, you get a great education, et cetera. And now you have a technology that’s moving at a speed that I don’t think we ever thought it would. And then of course, right around the corner is like quantum, right? Which we haven’t even started talking about in a big way yet, from a societal perspective. And I think really understanding is the awareness being brought to these populations? Like, do they understand what’s happening? So I think a big part of what I try to do the awareness part. Right, especially when we work with organizations, because even nonprofits we are finding are not always aware of the big changes that are happening around AI. I’m aware because I’m sort of in the midst of it all the time, but not everyone is understanding that. So I think awareness, like making sure people understand this is how this is going to impact you and your life and your children’s life. I think getting those stories out, because people need to know that they have to, whether it’s skilling, whether it is seeking support, help, whatever it is, they have act quickly. And that’s my big concern. And I think that’s where journalists can help significantly.  

Ellen McGirt Of course, none of the above is possible without trust. Employees have to trust their managers. Consumers have to trust who they’re buying from. Readers have to trust the journalists who are publishing stories about AI, about everything. But trust is in a tough place. BCG’s Tim Mohin has some thoughts on its erosion. 

Tim Mohin Each side, you’re seeing there’s definitely a division, companies that are sort of standing up for long held values and weathering the storm and those who are caving in. And I think those who’re caving in will pay a long, long term higher price, because they will have broken a trust. And so I think we are in a moment right now and the question of trust is really at the top of many business leaders minds, because let’s face it, they’re not incentivized to look long term. They’re on a 90-day shot clock, you know, what was that earnings? And if they’re going to take a hit because of some sort of, like, attack, they’re likely to say, well, okay, we’re just going to drop those programs that embodied our corporate values. 

Ellen McGirt The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer is an amazing tool. It surveyed over 15,000 people across 15 countries. Here’s just one nugget, over half of those 15,00 had experienced some form of financial distress in the past year. But people are still putting their trust in brands they love. The Barometer found that 80% trust the brands that they use over other institutions like their employer, big business, government, NGOs, and the media. I caught up with Trisch Smith, Edelman’s global chief diversity, equity, and inclusion officer after the summit. Here’s what she had to say about trust and the trust index. 

Trisch Smith Businesses are navigating this, what we call, high trust and high stakes environment, with 79% of employees trusting their employer more than any other institution, including government, which is at 55%. Our Trust at Work report reveals that there’s a 39% trust gap between executives and associates. So when we talk about trust, they trust employers the most at almost 79%. The more senior you are, the more trust there is. So the again, you wouldn’t imagine it, but when you see the big gap in numbers, it just shows where the disconnect is within our organizations and where you need to work to bridge the divide. So 39% trust gap between executives and associates. We also know that based upon this year’s trust findings from our 2025 Trust Barometer, that there’s a heightened degree of grievance that everyone is in reach. That across various demographic lines, there’s high level of grievance. And so people are carrying that. They’re bringing that grievance into the workplace, into whatever place that they frequent and wherever they might be. And so it does definitely require a new approach, new innovation, new thinking around the role and the work of an employer and business writ large. 

Ellen McGirt So I asked the other leaders at Aspen their thoughts on how brands kept this hard-earned trust and how do businesses build back trust they may have lost. In other words, what’s the future of trust? Let’s start with Vit Henisz from Wharton. 

Witold Henisz I think we rebuild trust, not with talking heads, not with scientific reports, not with CEOs or presidents making claims, but with actions that address the root causes of the grievance. Growing segments of many countries’ populations are left out of the benefits of free trade, of the climate transition, of technological change, and they’re angry. And so we restore trust. By delivering some of those benefits to them and not just promising things will trickle down. And so we restore trust through action and not just claims, not just speeches, and importantly, not just from the people who are gathered here today, but things that filter all the way down through their organizations to their customers, to their employees and to their communities. Because that’s where we all agree. People don’t want companies that defile their communities, that harm their employees, that destroy the natural environment. They don’t want to be associated with those companies. That’s bipartisan. So let’s focus on showing that we’re companies that treat our employees well, that enhance our communities, that reinvest in the natural and environment. And let’s prove that case. Then I think we can start restoring trust in the leadership of those organizations. Until we do, we have a really serious societal problem that we need to face. 

Ellen McGirt Jim Andrew of PepsiCo thinks that in order to prove the case that your business is trustworthy, you have to be straightforward, especially when it’s hard. 

Jim Andrew I, if you step back, I kind of boil it down to, you know, trust is transparency plus accountability equals trust. Right. And, and I’m, uh, I’m a strategic thinker. I’m also very pragmatic. How do you, how do we get stuff done kind of guy? Cause at the end of the day, things got to happen. So for us, it’s, what’s the transparency? What are we, what are we trying to do? Because if, if I tell you what I’m going to do, uh. So we recently restated and refined some of our sustainability goals. Some of them we increased the aspiration on, some of them, we adjusted for some of the realities of the systems, you know, until the point we’re having that need to change. But the one thing that we did across all of it, and literally every person I talked with, whether they liked or, you now, wish we had done something different, said that transparency that you are bringing to this discussion is something we’ve never seen before. And so transparency, and then accountability, how we doing? Are we doing what we say we’re going to do? If we are, we tell you, if we’re not, we’re also open about that and we’ll tell you why. And that, we found, leads to trust. 

Ellen McGirt For Cecile Beliot of the Bel Group, building trust is an act of courage. 

Cécile Beliot So creating a trustful environment, an environment where everyone can be himself, herself, and can speak up is for me the base of leadership. So this is a never-ending journey. We are far from being perfect on that, but we keep on nurturing these different ways to lead because you have some organization where you lead by fear and to some extent, it delivers results. You can drive, you have teams that deliver performance and action through fear. We do not believe in that on the long term perspective. We really believe that trust is the base for that. So when it comes to courage, the way we define leadership at Bel, we believe that we use different values and way to describe it, but we believe you need to use two polarities that is inside each of us. One polarity would be dare. Dare is part of our core values. Could be courage. And the other polarity is vulnerability. Why do I insist also on vulnerability? It’s because you are ready to express when you fail because you learn from that. It’s beacuse we are deeply human that we succeeded to have everyone having a seat at the table. When your people feel that you are the type of CEO who knows everything, why would they speak up? 

Ellen McGirt And there you have it. Summer is turning into fall, at least in my hemisphere, and you have some fresh perspective and advice to carry you through, at least we hope so. Times are challenging, the future is uncertain, and that’s going to be true for a while yet. And yet I truly believe that the wisdom and perspective of the leaders in this episode can help us deal with it. There’s one more nugget that came up a lot in Aspen, behind the scenes, before panels, and in the many roll up your sleeves learning sessions we all participated in. Joy. We need it. We need to insist on it. Those moments of wonder and awe in nature, found in art and culture, all the little moments with each other that remind us that we are both in the world and above the fray, even for just a moment. You can design for joy, and every new type of leader, the ones we’ve spent two episodes trying to define, is on a quest to do just that. And that leads me to you, dear listener. The Design Observer community is full of wisdom and collaborative juice and joy. And that word Alphonso mentioned at the top of this episode, authenticity, that too. Let’s stay connected on the journey ahead and let us know your thoughts on what went down at Aspen. We’ll be back in a few weeks with our final regular episode of the season. And for more coverage of what’s going on at the Aspen Business and Society Institute, head to designobserver.com. ‘Til then, keep being you, and redesigning a better world. 

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.