Interview with Ed Freeman

Transcript

[Sheldon Young]
Welcome to No Footprints, a podcast brought to you by Alfa Laval. I’m Sheldon Young.

[Jason Moreau]
And I’m Jason Moreau.

[Sheldon Young]
We’re here to talk about impact and to share the efforts of people behind making sustainability real. Yes, we are. We are.

Every two, well, twice a month.

[Jason Moreau]
Bi-weekly, which is one of those weird English words where you’re not sure if it means every other week or twice in one week.

[Sheldon Young]
But it’s not, though. It’s not every other week, because technically, we do two a month. So sometimes there’s three weeks in there, right?

Yeah, see, I’ve thrown the whole theory out the window, but, you know, bi-monthly? Is that the word?

[Jason Moreau]
Look, people, they come out when they come out.

[Sheldon Young]
They do. That’s right, right?

[Jason Moreau]
You know, the first and third Tuesday of the month.

[Sheldon Young]
It’s like Netflix. They just sometimes, sometimes you get the whole thing at once. Sometimes you get random episodes, seasons broken in half, whatever works.

[Jason Moreau]
Also, as a side note, I’ve been completely spoiled now. I need entire seasons to drop all at once. I can’t go back to how it was when we grew up, and it was just, they drip one episode a week on you.

[Sheldon Young]
And if you missed it, you missed it. Right. We didn’t always have recording capabilities.

[Jason Moreau]
Correct. Yeah. You just had to hear about it at school.

But no, I’m saying, like, at this point, we have the technology. We’ve all now been trained. I just want the entire season.

Just like the book, right? You read an entire novel. They don’t come out in serial chapters anymore, like they used to in Charles Dickens’ time.

[Sheldon Young]
But sometimes books do come out, number one, number two.

[Jason Moreau]
I’m okay with an epic fantasy series as long as they finish it, talking to you, George R.R. Martin.

[Sheldon Young]
But yeah. That’s right. Well, Stephen King did that to me with The Dark Tower.

That took like 30 years.

[Jason Moreau]
That took forever, but he did land the plane.

[Sheldon Young]
He did land the plane. He finished it finally. He did land the plane.

Except Wolves of the Calla. That was not a great book in the Sheldon opinion.

[Jason Moreau]
In total, I thought it was a good series. I thought he ended it well.

[Sheldon Young]
Yeah. He landed the plane at the end, for sure. Okay. Well, now that we’ve distracted everyone and lost three-quarters of the audience with our side topics.

[Jason Moreau]
With our nerd talk.

[Sheldon Young]
I know, right? Okay. I’ll start this week with my sustainability topic.

Okay. So, Jason, my story today is about a brand that I kind of embraced, and they have unfortunately not made it. It is Allbirds.

Allbirds. I probably have, I don’t know, six or seven pairs of Allbirds in my collection. They are a sustainable …

They were kind of a, I guess, a sustainability darling. They were a multi-billion dollar company that, at its end, was worth about $39 million. And essentially, they had a goal of the first net zero, or carbon neutral, negative shoe.

And they were getting there. I don’t think fully quite achieved it, but they really moved the needle in sustainability for shoe production, which traditionally isn’t the most sustainable production, right? Using materials like merino wool, using mid-soles made of sugar cane.

They really made a difference. Their challenge was, again, I guess they tried to grow up too quick. And it was an unfortunate thing that happened, because they expanded into retail, they started having multiple brand extensions, and having so many, so many SKUs, I think, that it just caught up with them at the end.

The world didn’t buy enough Allbirds at the end of the day. I will say, though, while it’s a sad end, and the brand was sold, so we’ll see. I think I could still go buy Allbirds.

I think it’s owned by a new brand. We’ll see if they continue the sustainability, I guess, heart as they go forward. We’ll find out.

And I guess the remainder of the company went on to become an AI company. We won’t get into that, but interesting path. For me, what I want to take away from the legacy was that all the stuff that they learned from the production of the mid-soles to the use of different materials, they shared.

They made it public. They wrote white papers on it. And so, what I hope happens is that other shoe companies pick up the torch for sustainability and at least try to adopt some of those principles and tactics to try and give us a more sustainable industry and a very important piece of clothing that we all wear.

We shall see.

[Jason Moreau]
Yeah, from a legacy standpoint, I mean, not all that different than Tesla sort of providing that catalyst to maybe more traditional car manufacturers to sort of really start focusing on electrification and they even open-sourced some of their technologies to try and get more, we’ll call it, progress as an industry and not just from their perspective, right? So yeah, we’ll see if that happens. We shall see.

Not all businesses work.

[Sheldon Young]
True, yeah. It’s a sad day for my feet, but we’ll see.

[Jason Moreau]
But now those shoes are collector’s items, so.

[Sheldon Young]
I guess so, right? We’ll go with that. Okay, man.

Well, now let’s move on to your story.

[Jason Moreau]
Yeah, mine’s more of a seasonal story. We’re recording this and it’s summer, which for us here in the US means a lot of good like produce, fruits and vegetables, fresh, and the sustainability aspect is how do you store all of those things properly so that it lasts longer, so that you are throwing out less waste, which obviously means your money is going farther. But from a sustainability standpoint, food waste is a really big topic and it’s something to pay attention to.

So some of the tips were really good. Let me see here. Washing your produce, not before you put it in the refrigerator, but like right before you’re ready to eat it, because if you wash it and it goes into the fridge, any moisture left over could be essentially a better medium for like mold and bacteria.

For sure. Let’s see. Obviously, putting food in the fridge can slow down the process of it going bad, but some foods are actually better at room temperatures, like tomatoes.

So you kind of need to decide. And then what was also interesting is root vegetables like carrots can be kept in water to maintain crispiness, but herbs last longer when treated like flowers and they’re actually trimmed and placed in water. But the other interesting thing I found out was potatoes and onions best stored outside the fridge, cool, dark, well-ventilated place like your pantry or cabinet.

However, they should not be kept together.

[Sheldon Young]
Oh, that’s right. I’ve heard that before.

[Jason Moreau]
They will make each other spoil faster. Basically certain fruits and vegetables release ethylene gas and that speeds up ripening. So if you have green bananas next to ripe banana, if you put them close together, the ethylene gas coming off from the ripe will cause the green to go faster.

So yeah, basically just one of those tips of like, it’s a small, it’s a small thing you can do to just sort of make sure that you’re making the most of the season and the fresh fruit, the fresh fruits and vegetables and while minimizing waste. So I thought it was a cool article.

[Sheldon Young]
It’s a cool, I’m going to give you the move that changed my life when it came to fruits and vegetables and reducing waste. We have a vacuum jar sealer. You can get it on Amazon.

It’s like, it was like less than $30. It wasn’t expensive and it fits on a Mason jar and I tell you right now, you know, I eat a lot. I like blueberries and blackberries and stuff like that makes me crazy because we’ll buy them and then like two or three days later that’s like they’re moldy, they’re gone.

Week two weeks in this vacuum jars, like you can like, they stay really, really fresh a long time. So I highly recommend that and you know, it’s kind of cool because you have little Mason jars in your fridge. You look very, very homey.

[Jason Moreau]
It’s very Martha Stewart.

[Sheldon Young]
Yeah, it is. It is. It is.

Okay. So now let’s get on to our guest. So I, you know, I brought kind of the Allbirds story and stuff and you know, I was kind of, you know, it kind of made me lose my faith a little bit in sustainability.

Not now, just for a minute, you know, it was one of those things, you have a fleeting moment of, of despair and it reminded me, having, talking to our guest who is Ed Freeman, he’s a professor at the Darden School of Business where I went to school and I’m at University of Virginia. He’s, he’s been a professor there for something like over, no, sorry, I met Ed over 20 years ago. He’s getting ready to retire next year.

So it’s like 40 plus years. And you know, he reminded me, it was a refresher reminder that, you know, the, what really it all boils down to is this is stakeholders. Sustainability is about stakeholders and a mindset of really thinking and stepping back and understanding the ecosystem that makes business happen.

And you know, a sustainable future is a part of that ecosystem. And so what I really, really appreciated about this was, was that Ed kind of bringing me back to that reframing and you know, he, Ed’s influence on me is, is I don’t, I don’t talk about my influences that much, but if any one person, I guess, helped shift my mindset throughout my path, it was probably Ed Freeman at the, at the Darden School and his ethics class was in my, in my first year. And it really opened my mind to how sustainability in business and the perspective of stakeholder really, really matters.

And it really changed my mindset and helped me, I guess, reposition a lot of thinking. And so for that, I am forever grateful and I am completely honored to be able to interview him for, for the podcast. And so what do you say you and I, let’s go do that.

[Jason Moreau]
Let’s listen.

[Sheldon Young]
Today we welcome a very special guest, Professor Ed Freeman, university professor and Olson professor of business administration at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. Ed is widely known as a father of stakeholder theory, which is the heart of sustainability as a concept in general.

His groundbreaking work has redefined how we think about business ethics and sustainability, making him one of the most influential voices in building a more responsible, inclusive economy. He was also my instructor when I attended Darden and I can truly say his influence shifted my personal approach and philosophy and how we think about business and my work. And for that, I am forever grateful.

It is my honor and pleasure to welcome Ed to No Footprints.

[Ed Freeman]
Thanks, Sheldon. It’s a real pleasure to be here. Thanks.

Thanks for inviting me. I’ll tell no stories about you in class.

[Sheldon Young]
Thank God. That’s funny. I have something here I want to show you before.

If you remember, one of the classes, probably one of my favorite classes at Darden is where you had us read a bunch of books and they were fiction books mostly. Dinners with Ed. Dinners with Ed.

I believe it was. There it is. Dinners with Ed.

[Ed Freeman]
And you guys are the ones that did the recipes.

[Sheldon Young]
No, you did the short stories. We did the short stories, correct. And we basically have them all published in a little hardcover book, which I keep on my shelf.

Yeah. That’s cool. I remember the main lesson was you want to teach us to learn how to read.

Yeah.

[Ed Freeman]
That’s right.

[Sheldon Young]
That was the notion of the course. And you know what? It worked.

So I do agree.

[Ed Freeman]
Well, business reading drives out real reading. I mean, business reading, you read for the nugget, you read for the number, you read for the point. But when you read fiction, you read for particularity.

You read for nuance and gesture. But wait, that’s how we learn to read other people. We read for nuance and gesture.

And so you find someone who’s really good at reading fiction, who reads for more than just plot. You’ll find someone who’s pretty good at understanding other people. And that’s why, I mean, I taught the course for, what, 25 years or so, and I have to say it was my favorite course ever to teach at Darden.

[Sheldon Young]
Yeah. And it was, I would say, my favorite to take. So it was a smashing success, we’ll just put it that way. So a lot of our audience here are people that work in various industries, so they may not know much about you.

So can you quickly just give a little history of your journey and kind of what led you to Darden and the world of ethics and stakeholder?

[Ed Freeman]
Well, there’s a press release version and a real version. The real version is I grew up poor on a farm in South Georgia, went to Duke as an undergrad, became a lifelong Blue Devil fan, though the basketball team was terrible when I was there. Was studying mathematics and decided to take some philosophy courses.

And that ended up getting a PhD in philosophy from Washington University in St. Louis. And of course, there are no jobs in philosophy. And so a guy on my committee says, what are you going to do next year?

Usually that was the question, what cab company are you going to drive for? And I had done every crap job known to mankind from being an umpire to a butcher to pay my way through all that education. So I said, I don’t know.

And he said, you should do a postdoc. And I thought, well, OK, I think there’s a check that comes with that. So, you know, that’ll that’ll be OK.

And I said, where? And he said, well, University of Pittsburgh. I know people there.

Great philosophy department. And I thought, OK. But he said, you know, you’re interested in ethics and decision making.

You should go to Wharton. And I honest to God looked at him and said, what’s that? I’d never heard of Wharton.

You know, I’m what, I’m 23 years old, 24 years old. And he said, it’s a business school. In my face kind of fell.

I mean, I didn’t know what they did at business school, typing in shorthand. I just didn’t know. And I said, is there a good one?

And he said, well, well, yeah, it’s one of the best in the world. And I said, where is it? And he said, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania.

And I said, well, I might be interested because my girlfriend at the time was going to graduate school in city planning there. So I show up there, get hired for some bizarre reason and for a research center, kind of a postdoc thing. The Dorfman thing worked out.

Today is our anniversary. We’ve been married 49 years. And then in the research center there, this stakeholder idea, I didn’t invent it, it was around.

Nobody had done anything with it. And so my boss comes down to my office one day and says, you know, you want to see if you can do something with this? Well, I mean, what would companies be like if people really took this stakeholder idea seriously?

And I said, well, yeah, I could write a paper on that. One paper led to another. Now the count’s at about 200.

The books are at about, I don’t know, 35 or so. I kind of lost count. And I’m still trying to figure out how best to get people to take this seriously.

So I was kind of in the right place at the right time. It came from sort of pure serendipity. And I still have a little bit of imposter syndrome.

How could this guy from a poor dirt farm in Georgia, you know, end up teaching at a top business school with a Ph.D. in philosophy? It just doesn’t make a whole hell of a lot of sense to me.

[Sheldon Young]
Well, it made sense to us because, like I say, you’ve certainly, again, of all the different structures that I had at Darden, for sure, it was, who is this guy that comes in and is talking about stakeholder theory? What is that? I mean, I also grew up in a very rural little town in Maine and, you know, moving down to the big city of Austin.

Right. And then eventually, very rich in Virginia. And like, wow, all I knew was what I was taught.

And that was, you know, capitalism, sales, things like that, engineering, all very linear, binary things. And then I show up at this business school and all of a sudden this guy with, you know, wild hair and a beard comes in and starts talking about stakeholders. And like, OK, well, this is refreshing and interesting and, you know, kind of aligns with who I am as a person.

So stakeholder capitalism, stakeholder theory, whatever the right term is. Can you just kind of talk about what that really means? Sure.

And and how someone can kind of dive into it.

[Ed Freeman]
Look, the stakeholder idea is the simplest idea in the world. It just says every business has always and will always create and sometimes destroy, usually they don’t mean to, value for its customers, its suppliers, its employees, its communities. And the people with the money, its investors or shareholders or other financiers, and maybe some others as well.

But but certainly those five, I figured that out by trying to figure out what business was at the Applied Research Center at Wharton that I’d helped start when I was there. I got put on a whole bunch of consulting projects where I didn’t really know much about what business was, had never had a course. And it seemed to me that’s what that’s what business people did.

That’s what business was about. I thought that was a blindingly simple idea. I still do.

And I never understood why people thought that was that was radical. You know, there are various ways of understanding this. People call it stakeholder management.

That’s what we originally said, or stakeholder engagement. Or I think I, as a little bit of a joke, talked about stakeholder theory, because as a pragmatist, theories aren’t these connected sets of propositions that, you know, you go out and collect data and test. Theories are just useful tools to solve problems.

And so this stakeholder idea spans a wide, a wide swath of ways, different ways to think about business. Sometime in the 90s, you know, I don’t know if I was the first or not to talk about stakeholder capitalism. A lot of people mean different things by that.

Some think that, you know, at least the World Economic Forum, their view is that what we need to do is get elites together, you know, CEOs and and elite government ministers and and non-government organizations and fix the system. I am deeply distrustful of elites fixing systems. That, in general, has led to totalitarianism.

You know, other people think, well, this is just corporate social responsibility or sustainability. The problem with that is that it distinguishes the economic part of business from the social part. And I think those things go together.

Every economic action has social effects. Every social action has economic effects. So why the hell do you want to take them apart unless you’re an economist?

So I think this is about. And of course, there are a whole bunch of people who think this is about being woke. You know, I think there’s a there was a I don’t know what woke is.

I know the opposite of woke is asleep. So if I had to pick, I think I’d rather be awake than asleep. But, you know, business is a societal institution.

It needs to deal with issues that affect it. You don’t have to deal with all of them. But, gee, if you’re if you’re Coke or Pepsi, you better deal with water availability.

You know, if if you’re if you’re a resource company, you better deal with mining or extraction. You better deal with the effects on the community, at least if you live in a free society, because if you don’t do that, then again, in a relatively free society, people will go to government to have their rights enforced. So the way I explain stakeholder capitalism, and we have a new book that hopefully will be published early next year called Stakeholder Capitalism, what it is and what it isn’t.

And what it is is about the business model. You know, now business model for me is not just how you make money. Business model is about what’s your purpose?

What are your what are your ethics and values? Who are your stakeholders? How are they interconnected?

A lot of people get the idea that stakeholders are important. They don’t get the idea that how you deal with customers affects how you deal with communities, which affects how you deal with employees, etc. So it’s the interconnection of stakeholders.

I think that that people have haven’t begun to explore enough. Great companies get that. But it’s really hard to it’s sometimes it’s really hard to see, you know.

So this is a very, very simple idea by stakeholder capitalism. I just mean there’s a bunch of businesses that pay attention to their stakeholders and try to create value for it, for it, for them. And that seems to me like, again, a pretty blindingly obvious idea.

When I wrote this old book that has something like 80,000 academic citations, I didn’t think the stakeholder idea was even the interesting idea in the book. It gets cited all the time. No one actually read it, but it gets cited all the time.

Somebody asked me, Sheldon, what’s it like to write a business bestseller? I said, I don’t know. They only printed 2000 copies.

So if there are 80,000 citations and 2000 copies, I don’t have to tell you that nobody’s read this book, you know. So again, that’s just the way those that’s just the way those things go. So I see this as a really simple idea.

[Jason Moreau]
Just picking up on a thread that you were talking about where you jokingly said the stakeholder theorem was the theorems are general rules of thumb for solving a problem. And I was just curious, is is at the heart of it the problem of equitable value? Or is it different problems based on the different industries that companies in like the two examples you gave in terms of water sustainability or mine?

Like, yeah, I’m just curious if it’s if it’s always one, if it’s there was one core problem or if it’s a if it’s a framework that can be used to solve multiple.

[Ed Freeman]
No, the idea and I would say stakeholder theory, not stakeholder theorems. The mathematician, the math major in me wouldn’t wouldn’t let that stand. I’m sorry.

[Jason Moreau]
Perfect. Sorry, I misspoke.

[Ed Freeman]
But, you know, what stakeholder theory tries to do is it changes the unit of analysis. Economists see business for the most part as a set of discrete transactions. And the theory says, well, many buyers and sellers, markets clear, marginal costs, marginal price, et cetera, et cetera.

All those beautiful theorems. Generic deliberate theory is mathematically a beautiful thing. The problem is it’s just I mean, it’s nice.

It’s just a fairy tale, though, for how the world actually works. You know how you build a great business is you have a set of relationships that can endure over time. And it’s important to distinguish a relationship from a transaction.

You know, think about your personal lives. There are some transactions. It’s a what am I going to get?

What am I going to give? But in a relationship, there’s a presumption that it’s going to continue. And if there’s no presumption that it’s going to continue, you know, it’s a transaction.

And personally, you know, there are apps for transactions, et cetera. People engage in those to try to find relationships. But in a relationship, because there’s a presumption it’s going to continue, both parties have to care.

And so when you have that, I mean, truly great businesses love their stakeholders. They have to really care about their employees. They have to care about their customers.

We saw this in spades in the in the pandemic. Companies, especially in hospitality, who kind of laid their employees off, you know, because it was hard, had a hard has had a hard time hiring people. Companies that stuck by them and maybe salaries had to be cut or things had to be shared or, you know, that sort of stuff.

People are stuck by their employees, have not had trouble hiring people. And so I think that what stakeholder theory does, it changes the basis of business. It’s about it’s about relationships and it’s about relationships that are interdependent.

You can’t look at this in the typical business school functional way. Marketing does customers, finance does investors, et cetera, et cetera. So I think it tries to do nothing less than change what business is about.

It’s not about the money. It’s not just about the money and just about this transaction. It’s about how a set of relationships can can build on each other and and contribute to each other over over time.

That’s how you build a great business, I think.

[Sheldon Young]
Yeah. It’s a man, it resonates so well with just everything I think about. What we do see a lot of companies that I would say they just don’t adopt this.

Right. They go after the pure, I’m going to call it Friedman capitalism. It’s like, you know, the purpose of business is to make money for their shareholders.

[Ed Freeman]
Yeah. Well, look, Friedman gets misinterpreted a lot. He’s a hero of mine because what he was trying to do was try to try to tell us how markets work.

He didn’t know anything about how businesses really work. Most economists don’t. You know, they’re not they’re not they’re not out there on the firing line with the people actually interacting with customers and suppliers and that sort of stuff.

So so they have these these models which are which are great. I don’t have any problem with them. It’s just not about how to build a great business.

And there’s a great set of essays. If your listeners are interested in Reason magazine some years ago. But if you just Google Milton Friedman, John Mackey, Reason magazine, you’ll get it.

John Mackey is the founder of Whole Foods. And fortunately for me, a personal friend. And so so John says to Friedman, well, look, you said that if things build a business, that’s fine.

And let me tell you, all the stuff we do with community and employees, etc. That’s about building the business. The business model is the stakeholders.

And Friedman at this point in his life, just he couldn’t accept that because he was worried about something. He was worried about having companies do stuff that they didn’t know anything about in the sort of corporate responsibility era and or run businesses in their conglomerates where they didn’t really know anything about the business. And he thought the stock market could do that better, which it can.

And I worry about the same thing. I think he was right about that. But that doesn’t mean I don’t pay any attention to sustainability or I don’t pay any attention to understanding the needs of my workforce.

You know, so in what’s doing the work there is this artificial division between this is economic and this is social.

[Sheldon Young]
Right.

[Ed Freeman]
And that is absolutely artificial. And we need to get rid of that.

[Sheldon Young]
How can the what I think some at least my experience from working with some of these companies around sustainability and things like that is how do you put a framework in place that lets you analyze a decision that weighs both the financial ROI and the economics that are, I guess, so, you know, easy to look at, for lack of a better term, versus these other aspects of stakeholder that maybe are more challenging to, I guess, quantify or put into a decision matrix, I guess, for lack of a better term. Well, how do how do they go about that?

[Ed Freeman]
Well, first of all, I would say you don’t analyze a decision. You analyze a relationship and you look at how those relationships are intertwined with each other. I don’t accept the fact that you can’t measure this stuff.

OK, you can measure anything if you do nothing more than do a perception measure. After all, what is stock price? If stock price is not a perceptual measure, I’ve never seen one.

You know, it’s about what 27 year olds or 26 year olds, if they haven’t gone to MBA yet, really, really think is going to happen. And they look at particular numbers. And while doing the numbers is important and you all learned how to do them.

We teach people how to do them. What’s really important is the story that’s behind the numbers. Even for investing, if I if I say you say you want to invest, I say, well, I’ve got two candidates for you.

You tell me, let’s say you’re a 10 year investor, not a not a not a day trader. I offer you company A, never been profitable. Doesn’t look like it’s going to be profitable for a few years.

It’s always invested everything back in the company. Or there’s company B. It’s very profitable right now, but it’s at the tail end of its product lifecycle.

It has nothing coming up. And so one of the things it’s done with its profits is buy back shares and make dividends high, et cetera. Which one you want to invest in if you’re a 10 year?

Well, company A is Amazon. And company B, look, there are 100 companies that have failed there. So it’s what’s important.

It’s not the numbers. It’s the story behind the numbers. I think that’s one of the things we do reasonably well here at Darden is we we we focus more on having you understand the story behind the numbers.

It’s why I think the way we teach accounting is so difficult, you know, because it focuses on that rather than just the formulas, et cetera. So, you know, I would say one more thing about the sustainability thing is I think we’ve we’ve we’ve sort of. I think our idea of sustainability needs a lot of work.

It needs resetting. It does. When you think about sustainability, I wrote this book about the environment that literally no one read.

I’ll read it, I promise. No, it’s out of print. I don’t think I even have a copy.

And it’s, you know, sustainability for the longest time was let’s let’s not consume as much. Let’s conserve. Let’s, you know, cut back things.

Let’s go in its worst case. Let’s still live in the woods with the bears and the tigers and eat nuts and berries. Or let’s trade our microwaves, our toaster ovens, our microwaves for toaster ovens, you know, this this sort of stuff.

It was based on on essentially on this idea that we could we could conserve our way out of this. I think we need to think about sustainability. Conservation is important, but I think we need to think about sustainability as transformation.

How do we transform the resources that we have into ways that lead to human flourishing? Well, we’ve transformed air and water into things that are not leading to human flourishing. And sometimes when we got to think about how we transform them rather than think about scarcity and conservation.

So the way I want us to think about sustainability, yes, scarcity and conservation are important in some areas, but transformation and abundance are important in others. We live in an abundant world. Given our ability as humans to transform resources, we transformed resources into into iPhones.

Right. There isn’t much we can’t do, but we got to think about it like that. We can’t think about this as, you know, don’t take don’t don’t take longer than a one minute shower.

And, you know, other kinds of stuff. Now, I know it’s more complex than that, but I think especially for companies, they’ve got to be on the cutting edge of that transformation. I love the companies that think about carbon sequestration or, you know, those guys that figured out how to plant trees with drones or people working on hydrogen power cells.

I’m not saying technology is all the answer, but I don’t think we have a hell of a lot of time for some of these so that we better, you know, try to get several million companies going that are trying to work on this. And that that’s I think what so I like to think about sustainability.

[Sheldon Young]
Yeah, for sure. I mean, it’s it is it is it is a definition that is evolving and for sure from something I would say is more amorphous. How do we get it to something that’s actionable and something that is, I guess, more thoughtful in the approach that we take to it?

Jason, why don’t you jump in your question, buddy? Well, I know it’s just me. No, I’m I’m I’m in my zone here with my one of my favorite people.

[Jason Moreau]
So no, no, I’m just really listening. And on that last point that you made, do you do you feel like. A certain there’s a tipping point where if a certain number of companies adopt stakeholder theory in this sort of bottom up way that that leads to better outcomes than if.

Government regulation leveled the playing field for everybody. And I I say that just to say that, like. If you’re a first mover and you’re all in.

Then if unless it’s conveying some type of advantage for you, then you might feel like you’re at a disadvantage relative to competitors if they’re not also. Taking on extra responsibilities, right? And so I was just wondering how you square that circle a little bit.

[Ed Freeman]
Yeah, that’s a that’s a great question. First of all, I don’t I don’t look at it as I’m in this life or death race with my competitors. Yeah, I look at it as I have this purpose.

And what I’m about is trying to figure out how to make that purpose real. And if I’m in the same if I’m in the same game as all my competitors and we all have the same purpose, which I don’t think is almost ever the case, that’s not a game I want to play. So thinking about what you stand for and what your purpose is.

Look, that’s what entrepreneurs do. Entrepreneurs don’t start a business to be like everybody else.

[Jason Moreau]
Right.

[Ed Freeman]
I’m not going to start a biz. I’m not going to start a soft drink company to do exactly what Coke and Pepsi do. Well, I might, but I’m stupid if I do.

Right. Entrepreneurs start a business because they’re on fire about an idea, you know, and sometimes those ideas are small. Some people just know that putting a red stripe on toothpaste will revolutionize, you know, mouth care.

Other people, no one noticed, is trying to rid the world of diabetes. You know, there’s not there’s not one size that that fits all here. Competition is important because it’s a second order property.

In a free society, it gives people choice. But I think we pay way too much attention to to our competitors rather than figuring out how how to how to innovate. What makes capitalism work is our imagination.

It’s our creative imagination. That’s why, Sheldon, I’ve always tried to teach literature and theater and music and those kinds of things, because that’s how you build creative imagination. And when that creative imagination isn’t there in a company, the company’s not going to do very well, I think.

So I would see it again. What stakeholder theory tries to do is kind of change the channel. It’s not about in this about competing in the industry.

It’s about doing something that you believe in and that you’re good at. It’s not not enough just to believe in it. You got to be good at it, too.

And you got to figure out how to do something that nobody else can do. But that’s who we are as human beings. You know, we are these incredible, you know, imaginative creatures.

And sometimes this gets beaten out of us. I saw this study where humans are most creative when they’re six years old. And then what happens is they go to school.

Their creativity tracks. They’re taught to learn. Yeah, you taught to learn, et cetera.

And I think we need a kind of massive overhaul of that. Jason, I loved your point about if government levels a playing field. I would put it a little bit differently.

I would put it as if government just doesn’t do a lot of stupid stuff.

[Jason Moreau]
Yeah.

[Ed Freeman]
You know, look, it’s fine for government to regulate. So the problem with regulation is it’s one size fits all. And business is not a one size fits all institution.

It’s fine for government to redistribute. People have different come into the world with different backgrounds and different needs. That’s fine.

But the third idea about government, which I don’t think we understand, is we need government to facilitate value creation. What do I mean by that? Think about some of the things that facilitate value creation.

Civil rights. It gives people who’ve been shut out of the system an entry point. One of my favorite ideas here was if you think about facilitating value creation, the the old surgeon general’s report on smoking and health.

How much value did that create? Cigarette companies worked with it fine. But how many people were living longer?

And more productive lives? Because it didn’t cost very much. Their governments, not the national government, but their local governments everywhere who are doing, you know, accelerators and ways to help people who are out of the system.

I work with one in West Baltimore who, you know, works with people there to try and help them figure out how to start businesses. And we teach them about stakeholder theory. I actually think we’ve reached the tipping point.

I think it’s possible to go back because, again, the current the current fractured politics on on the left and the right, I think totally misunderstand what business really is in terms of stakeholder relationships. So I’m actually pretty optimistic for the future despite the fact that a lot of the stuff, the political debates is crazy.

[Sheldon Young]
Try to step away from that as much as I can these days. Yeah, it’s the so so many companies are already in existence and I think. Are not adopting these ideas yet.

Well, maybe they want to.

[Ed Freeman]
They adopted some of them.

[Sheldon Young]
True. Yes.

[Ed Freeman]
You know, it’s a it’s a little bit like the character in the Moliere novel who gets angry because he thinks he has to learn to speak prose and people tell him, no, wait a minute. You already you already speak prose. That’s that’s what you do.

So look, there’s not a company that doesn’t pay attention to its customers. I mean, maybe they do it badly. But but once once you understand that you have stakeholders and that stakeholders are important to making money, you can do it better.

I was at a dinner recently in D.C. trying to raise some money for our Institute for Business and Society. And a former congressman said to me, well, suppose I just care about the money. Suppose I’m a business person, investor, all I care about is the money.

And I said, OK, let’s suppose you’re the kind of greediest, most narcissistic, most money, money grubbing human being on the face of the planet. I looked at him, I said, how are you going to make it? I said, you better have some products and services that customers want.

You need to have suppliers who are trying to sell you their stuff that makes you better. You want employees who are showing up with their ideas and their support, not just for the paycheck. You at least want communities who are not trying to run you out.

And if you do those things and you get a little lucky, you might make some money. So I don’t get the, you know, I think there’s once you see it that way, then it’s a matter of someone saying, oh, yeah, I already speak prose. Now I can figure out how to improve this.

And I think that’s kind of where we are.

[Sheldon Young]
Yeah.

[Ed Freeman]
You know, the Business Roundtable statement 2019, people said, well, they’re not doing it at all. Yeah, but but they’re beginning to. I mean, you got to have you got to be able to talk first.

And that leads that leads to action. So I’m pretty optimistic about that.

[Sheldon Young]
OK, so yeah, yeah. So you make a fantastic point, as usual. Absolutely.

I think all those factors are on a company’s table and or at least envision where they put their focus and how much attention they pay to some of those, I think, is where the the the needle can be moved. That’s right. Let’s let’s say I’m a company and I have some power.

I want to do better. I want to move forward. Is there are there some, I guess, framework tips?

How do you bring everyone to the table and get them to see it the same way? What are some, I guess, tips or yeah, or I guess levers they can pull to help move to a more holistic approach and adoption of a stakeholder approach?

[Ed Freeman]
Well, I think there’s a difference between a holistic approach and getting people to see it the same way. OK, I think trying to find alignment by which you mean we all got to march to the same drum is a fool’s errand here. Stakeholder interests are different.

Now, the trick of being a great leader, a business leader, manager is to harmonize those interests, get them going in the same in the same direction. Sheldon, you know, as a musician that, you know, notes, notes are different. But when they’re in harmony, they sound good together.

And furthermore, if they’re only always in harmony. So you always play, you know, one, four or five chords that resolve into the into the root is boring. So you’ve got to have disharmony in this, too.

So that that friction, which is always there, is a good thing, because that’s where it lets you create something new. And so I think the idea of harmonizing stakeholder and interest, but not trying to make them all the same. You know, that that’s the that seems to me to be the the real skill.

And again, you know, you got to do that one relationship at a time. I am distrustful, even though I’ve invented some techniques for for for how to do that. You know, there are a lot of those things around, a lot of a lot of consultants around who are who are trying to do that.

And that’s good. There’s no there’s no harm in that. It’s just I don’t think there’s a there’s a magic bullet here.

I think it’s about engagement. I’ll never forget sometime in the 80s when I was working on this stuff, I’d gotten into kind of a pissing match with the chairman of General Motors. He written letters, you know, this sort of stuff.

And and so they asked me up to the research labs in Detroit. They’re going to show me how how this in the 80s now how how much General Motors took my ideas seriously. So I walked in this room and there’s stakeholder maps on the board and analyses and somebody’s putting stuff in a terminal.

And as a young guy, I’m thinking, hey, this is this pretty cool. You know, this big corporation is actually taking these ideas seriously. And so I looked at all this and I said to my host, you guys talked to any stakeholders?

And they said, no, we haven’t had time for that. And I said, well, you know, all this process stuff is not going to really help very, very, very, very much unless you do that. And that’s the engagement part.

There’s no substitute for engaging with that. You can plan all the products, do all the data, you know, get all the measurements, talk to all the marketing professors in the world. But if you hadn’t talked to any customers, it’s not going to help you.

[Jason Moreau]
I’m on that note, maybe. And if if at the heart of everything is relationships, how do you. Where do you how do you see that being influenced by the growth of A.I.? And I know it’s the topic du jour, but the more that people outsource their own agency, right, like I don’t I don’t want to talk to customer service, I as a business don’t want to talk to my customers. And it’s just robots talking to robots in an echo chamber. Where does that leave us in terms of advancing value for stakeholders? If the stakeholders have all these intermediaries who are potentially hallucinating some percentage of their interactions?

[Ed Freeman]
Which they do. I can speak for that. Well, look, I the A.I. stuff is one of the reasons I’m glad I’m going to retire next year. I think. But I think you raise a really, really interesting question. What’s it like when our our interactions with each other are mediated by A.I. or mediated by screens?

[Jason Moreau]
Yeah.

[Ed Freeman]
And therefore, you’re going to a restaurant here in town and seeing these four young young women having dinner together. I thought, oh, isn’t that nice? You know, there’s friendships, et cetera.

But all four of them were were were on their phones. You know, all their relationships with each other was being mediated by screens. What does that do to us?

What does that do to our ability to have relationships? What does that do to? And again, we’re just seeing this with the first generation to have had screens since they were born.

What does that do to our ability to form intimate relationships? I think these are real questions. Now, having said that, two weeks ago Friday, I changed my life by downloading Claude and, you know, some stuff that’s just really useful, right, that it can do.

So I think we need to sort out where it can be useful for us to solve our problems and where it’s not. And maybe we’re moving towards a world like Asimov’s Foundation where we have relationships with with our with our robots. And it’s hard to tell.

There’s a it’s a great short story, Sheldon, you might like called Doozle by Ian McEwen, in which it’s he’s he’s with his lover. And it’s a world in which humans and silicons have sort of interspersed. And he’s wondering whether his lover is real or not.

And it’s a pretty it’s a pretty. And I think it’s it’s in a way it’s a it’s it’s a place where where we’re headed. And what’s it like to have a relationship with a robot?

I think, again, relationships are still going to be important. Right now, I don’t think robots, the AIs are sophisticated enough to understand that. Though I did ask Claude if if if Claude was a stakeholder and the answer was the answer was was actually really pretty interesting.

The answer was he didn’t know. Oh, wow. And it was fascinating.

Yeah. Yeah, it was it was pretty it was it was it was really it was really pretty amazing. I’ve had a whole bunch of tasks that I’m happy to delegate to Claude so I can spend more time with the human beings that are in my life.

But that’s a real concern. What worries me more right now is so many CEOs see AI as simply a way to cut costs.

[Jason Moreau]
Right.

[Sheldon Young]
And we’ve seen a lot of evidence.

[Ed Freeman]
Yeah. And there has never been a business, to my knowledge, that has had enduring greatness by cutting costs. It’s always that’s that’s the only thing I know about accounting because you can’t do single entry accounting.

The question is not just how you cut costs, but what value is created. And, you know, we got to figure out how to use AI and how to how to not to give up our agency, but to improve it so that we can be better. That’s the point behind what we call the La Crosse Center for Ethical AI here at Darden.

But again, I don’t think there’s any magic. And I haven’t read much stuff about AI ethics that that strikes me as as other than pretty standard, you know, about fairness and fair algorithms and privacy and those kinds of things. But, you know, if I want to really think about this, I would go back and read Asimov’s Foundation.

[Jason Moreau]
Yeah.

[Ed Freeman]
And then things like that.

[Sheldon Young]
So speaking of human interaction, you have a podcast that you do called the Stakeholder Podcast.

[Ed Freeman]
I do. Which you’ve been on, I believe.

[Sheldon Young]
No, no, I’ve not. Oh, you haven’t been on?

[Ed Freeman]
No. Well, Christ, I’ve done 300 episodes. I’ll have to get I’ll have to get you on.

[Sheldon Young]
You’re getting close up to the bottom of the barrel. No, no, no.

[Ed Freeman]
You are certainly not the 301st on my list of friends and former students. So so anyway, you can count on that.

[Sheldon Young]
OK, I’ll put I’ll take that as an invitation. But it was it’s a great little podcast and I love listening to it. Can you just talk a bit about why you kind of started it?

[Ed Freeman]
Yeah.

[Sheldon Young]
And and the types of people in conversation you enjoy having on it.

[Ed Freeman]
Yeah. So so my son, Ben, comes to me during the pandemic and he says, look, dad, you want you want to get people to think more about stakeholders. You have to do a podcast.

That’s where my generation he’s he’s 40. So he’s a millennial. That’s that’s where my generation gets its information.

And I’ve never listened. I knew what podcasts were, but I really hadn’t listened to them and still don’t. I just do them and are guest on them.

And and I said, OK, I know what a podcast is. I I can do that. I know a few people who might be on.

And he said, now, look, if you do a podcast, the first thing you got to realize is nobody will take you seriously until you do 100, because most podcasts don’t last to to 100. I went, OK, well, I’m in it. If you say say so.

I’m in it for the long time. He’s the reason I started a band. He’s he’s the reason I did a lot of stuff.

And and he said, now, second of all, you know, none of this academic bullshit. He says you say the podcast drops Monday at five o’clock. It drops Monday at five o’clock because you want people to, you know, see it as a as a part of what they listen to.

I said, OK, well, I can do that. I spent years doing martial arts. I know what discipline is.

And he said, I said, how often do we do we need to do them? And he said, you got to do one every week. And I kind of gulped at that.

But for the first few years, the first 250 of them or so, we did one a week. Now, this year, we’ve moved to one every other week. And it has has been like Liberation Day for me.

So, you know, I get up in the morning. I think, oh, I don’t really have to worry about the podcast today. And so it was just a matter of trying to get people to talk about stakeholder ideas.

I’ve had a wide variety of people on on there from CEOs of big companies like John Mackey, Kip Tindall, other other folks to activist to I think the recent one is Eric Reese, who’s from wrote a book called The Lean Startup, has written a new book called Incorruptible about ethics. I’ve also had a number of students on there, a number of your fellow alums, Sheldon, who started their own companies, et cetera. And it’s really an incredibly kind of mixed bag of people.

Usually I ask them, just as you asked me about what their journey is and if they’re academics, I ask them about their ideas. If they’re business people, I ask them about their businesses and how they see creating value for stakeholders. And so I really just enjoy listening to them.

I don’t talk nearly as much as I as I am today.

[Sheldon Young]
The guest is supposed to be for sure. Well, I guess I’ve incredibly enjoyed it. And in the spirit of your podcast, I’m going to flip a table on you a bit.

You do something every podcast.

[Ed Freeman]
You do three burning questions. Yeah. By the way, that’s a rip off of an NHL, a hockey thing where they do for every team five burning questions.

I couldn’t quite bring myself to do five, so I just did three.

[Sheldon Young]
Well, we’re going to I want to flip the tables on you.

[Ed Freeman]
Yeah, I knew you were going to do this.

[Sheldon Young]
I took the three for you. You asked Eric in this last episode. And what are the same ones every time I try to remember now?

[Ed Freeman]
Not not always.

[Sheldon Young]
Yeah. You mix them up a little bit.

[Ed Freeman]
They’re pretty much the music and dinner one are pretty much all the same. Yeah.

[Sheldon Young]
Yeah. So we’re going to go we’re going to go right down your questions. So what five albums do you take on a desert island?

[Ed Freeman]
OK, that that I’m certain of. Yeah. But I’m also want to say if I had asked my wife of forty nine years to to this question before we got married, we probably would not have gotten.

This is a question where you really get to know someone when when you ask them this this question. OK, so for me, the answer is pretty straightforward. So it’s hard to get it down to five.

Allman Brothers live at Fillmore East. Nineteen seventy one greatest rock and roll album ever made. To live at the Regal BB King.

OK, the greatest blues live album ever, ever made. Three something by Bob Marley. OK, if you if you make me name an album, I’d name legends.

Yeah, but there may be better Bob albums than that. I just don’t know. I haven’t explored all the, you know, 50 albums that that that that he did.

So that’s three for Bach’s cello concerto by Yo-Yo Ma. Quite, quite possibly the most beautiful music I’ve ever heard because Yo-Yo Ma doesn’t play it in the sort of, you know, that that that that that that sort of thing, he plays it as a as a romantic. And it’s incredibly beautiful.

And fifth, got to have something by Miles kind of blue. I wrote it down. Miles Davis is going to be on the list.

I knew it.

[Sheldon Young]
Oh, yeah.

[Ed Freeman]
Yeah, absolutely. So that’s my five. There are a lot more that that that I would put on.

But you got to pick five. That’s if I had to pick five.

[Sheldon Young]
OK, so then the next question, obviously, when you mentioned the dinner question. So you start with dinner with anyone alive today.

[Ed Freeman]
Yeah. I somebody asked me that the other day and I was I’m not sure about this. I think if I if I what I responded was, I’ll say it here.

I’d love to have dinner with the Obamas.

[Sheldon Young]
Oh, yeah.

[Ed Freeman]
But I like to have dinner with both of them. And one of the reasons is that not politics so much is I loved it, that there were there was a couple in the White House who appeared to really be in love and care for each other. And that that combination of very powerful political forces, both of them and their ability to to to show real love is important because I think this idea of thinking about relationships and love go hand in hand with thinking about stakeholders.

So that that’s that’s what I think that’s I’d stick with that. I’m sure there are other there are other really interesting people. I’ve been lucky to meet people like Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank.

And of course, John Mackey and the very famous guy, Roy Vagelos, who was CEO of Merck for a long time, et cetera. And Jim Burke from J&J. But I’d like to have a couple of hours with the Obamas just to to talk with them about love and relationships.

Now, maybe they’re maybe that’s all fake and I’m just gullible. But I mean, I’m kind of a sucker to fake it that long. I’m kind of a sucker for rom-coms.

So, you know, maybe that’s maybe that’s why.

[Sheldon Young]
Yeah, I think part to be of that question is anyone from history. Yeah.

[Ed Freeman]
Well, I’ve thought about this as well. And I’d make change. Well, I would say if I had to pick, I’d probably pick between Freud and Darwin.

OK, because both Freud and Darwin completely de-centered human beings. They took us both out of the center. Darwin showed us how we didn’t need to believe in God.

We could, but we didn’t need to. We just needed natural selection and time. And Freud taught us that we that we couldn’t trust always that we would be the ones who know what’s in our hearts.

And so I think either one of them would be would be an interesting thing if Freud was not doing his cocaine, of course.

[Sheldon Young]
And then question three, I want a slight alter to this.

[Ed Freeman]
Yeah.

[Sheldon Young]
The question you asked in the podcast was you have all Congress in front of you. What do you tell you to do or ask them? Yeah, I want to switch a bit.

You have any audience you want in front of you. Yeah. And you can tell them what to do or ask them or a question to do something.

Who would you pick and what would you ask them?

[Ed Freeman]
I don’t know. I would probably. You know, vainly, I might pick CCEOs of big businesses.

I’ve given up on politicians or or I might pick, you know, a whole lot of adolescents.

[Sheldon Young]
Yeah.

[Ed Freeman]
And and talk about the importance of love and relationships. And and that and how important that is. Now, the problem that is, of course, they won’t their brains aren’t developed enough to understand that.

So that’s, you know, that that’s that’s a part. But but if I had the CEOs, I would talk about the importance of love and relationships and and seeing business as a human enterprise, because unless we can do that, we got to screw it up. Yeah, you weren’t wrong.

[Sheldon Young]
Wow. This has been such a delight. I mean, it’s the only way I only word I have for it is to have this kind of conversation with you and get to share it with the world is is a pleasure.

Now, you mentioned you have a new book coming up next year. How can people learn more about your work and find books that are still in print and connect with you if they want to learn more about the teachings and things that you can bring to the world?

[Ed Freeman]
Well, I’m on LinkedIn. I’m easy to find if you just do Google Darden faculty. I have a website that’s our Edward Freeman dot com.

It looks like it’s a red word, but it’s actually our our our Edward because it was already taken. So that that was a thing. And I’m pretty easy to find.

I think I have, I don’t know, 11000 followers on LinkedIn. And I do that stuff. And, you know, there there there there are lots of I get I get again way too much credit for people call me the father of stakeholder theory, but that’s actually not true.

The father of stakeholder theory is Eric Renman, who was a Swede in the 60s and some people at Stanford Research Institute and some other pioneers. I just sort of put it all together in a book and and have been really fortunate that for the longest time, nobody cared. And now people have started to listen a little bit.

[Sheldon Young]
Yeah. Well, I guess say you’re the testament of of good lessons. And for me, you know, at the heart of my work and the things that I do here at Alpha Label, it’s teachings I lean on frequently.

And so I thank you for that. And thank you for joining us here on the the podcast of No Footprints. And I please listen to Ed’s the stakeholder podcast as well and have some really wonderful guests there and learn a few more things from them.

[Ed Freeman]
And I’m going to have another guest. You guys.

[Sheldon Young]
OK.

[Ed Freeman]
Absolutely. For sure.

[Sheldon Young]
So thanks.

[Ed Freeman]
Thanks so much. It’s great. It’s great to catch up with you again.

So nice to meet you, Jason.

[Jason Moreau]
Thank you.

[Sheldon Young]
Oh, yes, the the legendary Ed Freeman. That’s the only way I can put it.

[Jason Moreau]
No. And I mean, every everything I understand now, the impact and why the impact on on you.

I even during our conversation with him and then listening back to it, I wish Ed was my neighbor. I wish I wish like I could literally just kind of like, you know, socially harass him a little bit and just hang out with him and talk about literally everything.

[Sheldon Young]
Yeah, he is one of those people that is exactly no question. Yeah, it’s I’ve always I’ve always had every conversation I ever had with Ed is he always challenges you. He always pushes you and makes you think different.

I think that’s what I like about him the most. He makes you think different. And we can all use that a little bit more in life, you know, challenging your thinking, making you just kind of push yourself a little beyond the paradigm that you’re stuck in and just kind of open that door.

[Jason Moreau]
He did not answer any question I asked the way that I thought he was going to answer it. And I’m better for it. Yeah, because he challenged my own thinking of me asking the question and kind of going, I bet the answer is going to be this.

And he’s like, no, I hold my beer. I gotcha. Yeah, I guess.

No, I did not see that swerve coming. And I that’s pretty cool.

[Sheldon Young]
Yeah. Again, imagine going to the class every day and having that as well. Or is, you know, you have a bunch of again, this is business school, mind you.

[Jason Moreau]
Right.

[Sheldon Young]
We’re business school. And, you know, you know, a lot of like total type a very, very like finance and, you know, oriented people that are thinking about money and money is kind of like, you know, it’s a big thing when you’re in business school. It’s kind of like the purpose of business is to make money.

Well, he really pushed us and challenged us and made us really think differently about the concept of business. And to me, that was such a gift, such a gift. I’ve never been so thankful for a teacher that was able to do that for me.

And, you know, the I love the way it just when he tells the story of his just kind of his journey, it doesn’t hold back. He doesn’t try to make it doesn’t try to polish it up. And he’s like, yeah, I didn’t have a farmer with a farm boy.

He said, you should get a word of my what is Wharton? Right. Yeah.

You just you can’t not appreciate someone that is willing to just, you know, put that out there and just, you know, be honest about it. You know, most people will try to spin a story that that’s more appealing for, you know, a certain audience. It just tells you his story.

And if you like it, great. And if you don’t, hey, also great. You don’t have to like anything.

But you can’t help not liking it, though.

[Jason Moreau]
No, he’s he’s very humble about his own accomplishments, of which there are many. I don’t know, I just I really enjoyed listening to him. And I would say my.

My big takeaway was is or is how much of a humanist he is, like at the heart of at the heart of everything is people. And the way he frames everything is relationships. I think that came through loud and clear.

You know, the stakeholder theory is basically just managing relationships over time instead of being so focused on a transaction and extracting value.

[Sheldon Young]
Yes. Which honestly, it’s like when you think of way businesses taught many a time, it is exactly that. Yes, it is about maximizing your value.

I mean, I took a bargaining, negotiating class before and it’s like, you know, they try to teach you there’s that zone of potential agreement. Right. But it’s about extraction.

You want to get as much as you can be within the Zopa. Whereas what is what if it wasn’t a zero sum game? That’s what Ed does.

What if the answer isn’t zero sum? Well, the answer is almost like improv is like what the answer is. Yes.

And right. And so I think that’s why, you know, he has a creative brain as well. I think it allows him to be, I guess, more open to possibilities than, say, someone that doesn’t have that open.

[Jason Moreau]
And also just. I found it really refreshing how he likes to reframe things. The two examples were sustainability, specifically when you asked him about that, not being about scarcity and conservation.

[Sheldon Young]
Yes, I highlighted that one. Yeah.

[Jason Moreau]
Yeah. Being about transformation and abundance. Yeah.

And I thought so. I thought that was great. But on a larger sense, like he talks about relationships, but also the more that I listen to him, the more that he’s not.

He really kind of leans into this idea of love, which is why I say he’s just like a humanist at heart and love almost in the same way as like the ancient Greeks looked at it, where there were all these like different forms of love. There’s practical love. There’s obviously there’s like flirtatious and romantic love, but there’s like family love and there’s love of like the Greeks, like parsed out love into like all of these myriad forms.

And I think, yeah, he really kind of like, yeah, I don’t know. Reminded me of that. But the relationship aspect is at its key love.

And it’s it’s valuing others. It’s valuing the collective of all of us as a society. And yeah, I don’t know.

That framing is just super powerful as a I don’t know, as a as a counterweight to some of the stuff that you encounter in day to day life, you know, where it’s like, you know what? Let’s let’s keep the big picture. This more sort of positive abundance filled future.

And let’s let’s convince ourselves that we can get there if we really want to. You know?

[Sheldon Young]
Yeah, absolutely. And it’s funny the way you framed up around the relationship and love. Like when I asked him his own question, like, you know, the lightning round one.

[Jason Moreau]
Yeah.

[Sheldon Young]
And he’s like, you know, who do you want to have dinner with? Well, I want to be I want to have dinner with the Obamas. Why?

Because for their example of love and relationships. Yeah, it’s exactly what you’re saying. It’s like that’s the thing that kind of, you know, manifests itself when you think of the way that and all the stuff that it talks about with with the stakeholder frameworks and such, you know, it does boil down to that.

It boils down to that. And it doesn’t surprise me that that’s the people he’d want to analyze and have dinner with and have a have a conversation with. It’s people who seem to have a very unique love and relationship with themselves.

And honestly, this is after we interviewed him when they opened the Obama library. Oh, yeah. Did you hear the speech she gave to him about him?

[Jason Moreau]
I saw clips and I saw him tearing up.

[Sheldon Young]
Yeah, I recommend listening to it. OK, it’s again, it’s again, a public. This is not a political statement at all.

This is like. I have I can’t remember the last time I’ve heard someone talk about another person with so much respect and admiration. And I can absolutely see why, you know, everyone have dinner with them.

I would do. I would like to just learn from that, to be very frank. OK, so I guess, you know, overall, again, I again, I’m just so I’m just so tickled pink about being able to interview my I guess you say don’t meet your heroes.

Why is it like fortunately for me, my hero kind of taught me. I had no choice in the matter. And it turns out he’s a pretty good dude.

And so I was very lucky to have this opportunity. And so with that, let’s close this out, Jason. If you want to learn more about Ed, he’s doing work, a lot of work right now.

And obviously at the Darden School, he’s also involved with the looking for the Lacrosse Center for Ethical AI at Darden, focusing on how AI can improve human agency. He’s also on LinkedIn. He’s also you can find him at the at the Darden faculty page.

And he has a website. Even it’s like R Edward Freeman dot com.

[Jason Moreau]
So his podcast.

[Sheldon Young]
Oh, yeah. Thank you. Thank you, Jason.

Let me say, yeah, it’s the stakeholder podcast. Fantastic. He has lots of great guests.

Highly recommend you listen to them. And again, the way he questions and ask questions. It’s in that curious way that you would expect.

It does bring out some interesting answers for folks. And the dialogues are always interesting. So highly recommend it.

And if you like this podcast, you know what you can do. You can like, follow, subscribe, share it with your friends, networks, babies. We don’t care.

Anyone that wants to listen, send them to know Footprints. We’re available pretty much everywhere you go. You want to go to Spotify.

You got it there. You want to go to what’s the other one? Apple, Apple, Amazon, all those good ones.

You can find it there. We’re talking about even dabbling a little bit on YouTube, maybe some clips. We’ll put some clips on YouTube.

We’re dabbling, thinking about that. We’ll let you know when those are up. If you want to find us, we have a web page.

It’s nofootprintspodcast.com. And if you have a question or want to recommend a guest or a topic, nofootprints.podcast@alfalaval.com, a L F a L A V a L dot com. Oh, it’s a lot.

It’s a lot of talking, Jason. It’s a lot of talking. It was a lot of friends.

Thank you. I was so glad I got to share this interview with you. You know, now you get to see a little bit of what made me and someone I respect and admire very much.

I’m glad I got to share it with you and you get to meet him as well.

[Jason Moreau]
It was a joy to participate. I appreciate being here.

[Sheldon Young]
All right. We’ll see you next time on No Footprints.

[Jason Moreau]
Bye.

[Sheldon Young]
Our guests come from many industries and companies, as we’re talking about how the world makes sustainability real.

Our company, Alfa Laval, is a global supplier of process solutions. So it’s very possible that the organizations our guests are with may use Alfa Laval or even our competitors’ products. This does not mean that we, the hosts or Alfa Laval are endorsing any of the company’s guests or the specific ideas that we discuss.