Fewer and fewer people, apparently! According to Fast Company, it is all about personal boundaries and sanity.

Here, two things are true at the same time.

One, we are in a massive leadership crisis. I have been talking to a brilliant former CEO who now coaches senior executives, and he notes that the pressure and stress of senior roles is now so extreme, that he fears the best people are turning down the opportunity. So, we are left with a bunch of people who have no business being leaders in the first place.

Two, we have way, way over-centered work in our lives for several decades. Perhaps ambition is changing. The pivot away from overwork is healthy, refreshing, and worth celebrating.

Those two forces — the pandemic and social media — inspired many to reevaluate how work fits into their lives, and question whether the expectations that came with career advancement were worth the trade-off, Escalera says.

According to a recent survey conducted by global HR company Careerminds, one in three workers turned down a promotion last year. The top reason respondents gave for doing so was that they didn’t want to lose their current degree of work-life balance. Furthermore, 16% said the pay increase was not worth the extra responsibility, and an equal proportion said it wasn’t worth the extra stress.

“It’s not that people are necessarily less ambitious, but that they’re defining success differently than before,” says Careerminds certified professional career coach Amanda Augustine. “It’s not enough just to get a better title and a bump in pay. They’re really looking at what that promotion means; not only for my career, but my personal life.”

Just an idea, but maybe we could use the productivity gains of AI to give people more fulfilling careers? As opposed to an overriding sense that they are expendable resources, training technology to replace them?

Leaving corporate sustainability

My weekly long read this week is a guest post by beloved friend . She writes about why she left her corporate sustainability job, offering a sharp and deeply uncomfortable critique of the role, the pressures, the corporate virtue signaling, and the unbelievable stress of being someone who deeply cares, feeling cornered into performative, pointless tasks. And it seems to have struck a nerve with readers. We have both been overwhelmed by messages from people saying they felt so seen by the piece:

No, leadership did not really want change. Yes, it was wrenching to have a boss who “got it” and then suddenly get another boss who didn’t. Yes, it felt like backsliding to be unceremoniously moved from an integrated functional team to an island disconnected from company operations. Yes, I was super frustrated that my new boss had too many jobs and didn’t have time for me. Yes, I was constantly scrambling to find ways to get things done while trying to protect my teams. Yes, the endless emails and meetings crushed my soul to the point where my day-to-day felt entirely outside of my control. No, it didn’t seem normal to me either to be crying nearly every day about work. When I was described as a “firecracker” to the Board of Directors, I knew it was not a compliment. When the person who made it all bearable left the company abruptly, I was told “you’ll find a new work wife.” I didn’t. That’s not how any of this works.

That’s not all! The bigger story is about personal transformation, risk, courage, and what it takes to set sail and live a new life on a boat in the South Pacific.

Read it! It’s beautiful. I am so proud to feature her work!

Maxxing

Have you noticed that brands are all maxxing and mogging this summer?

“Marriott recently pitched Labor Day hotel stays for “weekend maxxing,” Harry’s joked that its new razor was great for “jawmaxxing,” and the Cheesecake Factory floated “cheesecake-maxxing.” Carl’s Jr. this summer released a Spicy Chicken Maxx sandwich.”

This is pretty interesting, as looksmaxxing and mogging all have their roots in disturbing, often misogynistic online discourse around incels and pick up artists. Indeed, Clavicular is claiming credit for coining the term.

I spoke to Patrick Coffee at the Wall Street Journal about this, pointing out that, like six seven, when brands dive in, it is usually a sign the term is already over the hill:

“The rush by big advertisers to use “maxxing” and “mogging” may be a sign that the language’s cultural relevance has peaked, said Alison Taylor, a clinical associate professor of business and society at New York University who specializes in corporate responsibility.

As the idea becomes “cringe,” creators who popularized it could resort to even more extreme behaviors to satisfy the algorithms, Taylor said.

Clavicular, for one, doesn’t appear likely to leave the spotlight soon. Last month he released an app called Face Harmony that rates users’ features.

His 10-city U.S. college tour started last week.”

You can read the full analysis here.

Chart of the week

From Bloomberg, Lara Williams’ take is a good read.

Ethics, AI and collective courage

Caroline Pankhurst, host of Quiet Courage, hosted friend Annabel Gillard of LSE FORGOOD and me for an episode about courage in organizations. Caroline explores the idea of courage as a collective capability, shaped by the systems and people around us. Echoing my conversation with Deb McNamara of ClimateVoice on employee activism, we have more courage in community than alone.

Caroline started wondering whether cooperative is the truer word. The second voice in the room. The colleague you check in with first. And as I say on the podcast:

If you just have one other person backing you up in the room, that dramatically changes the dynamic.

The conversation spans what really makes people speak up at work, why it’s so much harder than it sounds, and why “all progress depends on the unreasonable (wo)man.” We also cover fairness, bringing your whole self to work (or not), courage as innovation, joy and growth. And skydiving, conformity, belonging, safety and values. And Eyal Press’s incredible book, Beautiful Souls. Enjoy the listen!

Back to school

I welcomed the new A28 cohort of the NYU Stern Executive MBA program this week. As always, it was an amazing experience, but a hard re-entry going from no teaching to 14 hours in four days. Still after a week with my beautiful niece and nephew, it felt like a vacation!

I also got to see one of my oldest and dearest friends, Richard Bistrong, who is an FCPA, anti-bribery, ethics and compliance consultant and so much more. Our friendship has had touchpoints across the globe, from Paris 🇫🇷, Helsinki 🇫🇮, Vilnius 🇱🇹 , London 🇬🇧, and of course, New York 🇺🇸. Here we are, nine years ago!

Have a fantastic summer weekend. I will be eating tomatoes, climbing mountains, and enjoying the beautiful light of late summer.

Alison XX

xx Alison

“I am SO here for Creative Boat Stephanie,” my dear soul friend Lis Best said back to me in early 2024. We were talking about a version of me that did not yet exist, although I had been writing about her in my journal over and over, as if I could will her into existence. I wanted more time and space in my life to be rather than do. I yearned to be someone with spaciousness, who could write what wanted to be written, who centered joy and pleasure and played with new ways of being, all while living and sailing on her boat.

My partner and I had dreamed of sailing to other countries since the moment I met him in 2009. Back then, I was largely unfamiliar with and mildly terrified of the ocean. However, as an adventurous woman with lots of experience on other conveyances (see: bicycles, skis), I was game to learn the ocean from him as a natural extension of my love of the outdoors. We showed up again and again for this sailing dream over the years with many twists, turns, stops and starts along the way. 2024 felt promising, a time we could actually finish the many boat projects, untie the lines and sail down the California coast to Mexico for an extended adventure.

At that point, however, Creative Boat Stephanie felt light-years away from my day-to-day existence. I was Tired Corporate Stephanie, putting on a mask each day of positive, we-got-this attitude to do my job. I led sustainability and social impact at a large company: also known as rolling giant rocks up mountains. I was living on land, running a household full of all the normal yet overwhelming adult logistics, holding space for alarmingly frequent meltdowns from my partner who also worked full-time in a stressful job, and numbing myself by playing Candy Crush after wildly long work days filled with endless meetings and emails topped by evenings filled with boat projects. Never mind trying to be a person who takes care of her body and self and has interests and friends (and fun? What was that again?) somewhere in there.

Grief was omnipresent at that time too. I was trying to be there for our friends whose young son had died on Christmas Day, three days shy of his sixth birthday. There is no way to comprehend a child’s death. The only thing to do was show up imperfectly in heartbreak. In our own home, I keenly felt the absence of the sound of paw steps on the floor after the recent loss of our doggo, our adventure companion for our entire marriage. These new bereavements piled onto the nagging thought that my own mother had died suddenly of a heart attack, too young and in the midst of life. Tomorrow isn’t a given rattled around in my body every day, and the last thing I wanted was to die young in front of a computer, Tired Corporate Stephanie wondering what else could have come to be.

Finally (finally!) after years of working toward this big dream of sailing to another country, we were ready. By summer 2024, the million steps had been taken: the boat was ready, the midyear bonus had hit the bank account, the lease was up, and I had decided not to continue working remotely from the boat given the omnipresent, bone-deep exhaustion I carried with me everywhere. All that was left was to quit what I had once thought of as my dream job.

I was practically levitating when I gave my two weeks’ notice, giddy with the thought of freedom and of no longer being tethered to my computer screen. The easiest thing to tell people who asked was “we’re going sailing.” The people I worked with were generally excited about the prospect of my adventure to Mexico, and I fielded a lot of questions about the sailing world. These ranged from “how do you eat?” (it’s like a floating RV, there’s a kitchen and a refrigerator and a stove and a microwave) to “where do you get your food?” (you aren’t at sea constantly, sailors spend a lot of time at anchor or in marinas with access to everything you have access to like supermarkets, only we take a dinghy to get to shore instead of a car) and “How long will you be gone for?” (until the fun or the money runs out, hopefully several years).

My teams threw me a gorgeous sendoff replete with well wishes and Zoom backgrounds with ocean puns like “So sad to SEA you go” and “O-fish-ally sending you off on your journey.” We turned the boat left out of the Golden Gate Bridge, and we were off. I left with a heart full of gratitude for all the incredible people I met along the way and for all the ways I grew in my career. So, sure, saying “I’m going sailing” was an easy, straightforward answer about why I left my job. It just wasn’t the whole story.

Like many people in the sustainability and social impact field, I got into the space because I give a shit and think we can do wildly better than we are. As someone who loves the outdoors and nature, I wanted to help reverse the damage that humans and capitalism were perpetrating on our beautiful planet. I was a do-gooder, a believer in change, a solution finder, an ambitious person, a natural extrovert, someone who enjoyed finding where the levers of influence lie.

And as Anne Helen Peterson articulated in her Culture Study community, and I feel uncomfortably but appropriately seen by, I also largely had subscribed to “type A eldest-daughter people-pleasing bourgeois white lady perfectionism.” I gave so much of myself to my jobs, seeing the change narrative of the sustainability field as an expression of living my values. The inherent challenge of the sustainability job felt like the ultimate validation.

And yet. It was not easy. I doubt anyone in the sustainability and social impact field would be surprised to hear this:

No, leadership did not really want change. Yes, it was wrenching to have a boss who “got it” and then suddenly get another boss who didn’t. Yes, it felt like backsliding to be unceremoniously moved from an integrated functional team to an island disconnected from company operations. Yes, I was super frustrated that my new boss had too many jobs and didn’t have time for me. Yes, I was constantly scrambling to find ways to get things done while trying to protect my teams. Yes, the endless emails and meetings crushed my soul to the point where my day-to-day felt entirely outside of my control. No, it didn’t seem normal to me either to be crying nearly every day about work. When I was described as a “firecracker” to the Board of Directors, I knew it was not a compliment. When the person who made it all bearable left the company abruptly, I was told “you’ll find a new work wife.” I didn’t. That’s not how any of this works.

Most sustainability professionals will also understand that the job context had shifted considerably by 2024, even before Monsieur L’Orange was re-elected. The European regulations continued to be murky and ever-shifting, yet imposingly omnipresent in sustainability teams’ lives. We worked on seeking more budget, hiring consulting help, and trying to conjure more resources (and senior commitment) out of thin air. Meanwhile, we drowned in one-off tick-box questionnaires from customers, none of which made sense. My team spent an inordinate amount of time trying to wrangle various nonsensical ratings platforms (Alison wrote about them just two weeks ago). So much time was spent on the busy work, and everything involved review, layer after layer, lawyer after lawyer. The social impact side of the job was relegated to rah-rah employee volunteerism, despite the huge potential to align business with impactful social outcomes. Still, we packaged all of that up into shiny reports replete with endless photos of smiling faces, as if everything in the world is all hunky-dory. I was told that I worried too much and that everything was going to be fine. Things didn’t feel fine.

Did I worry too much? I certainly worried about my teams’ well-being amidst clear overwork. I worried about my own mental health while making sure I had cucumbers in the fridge to heal my puffy eyes from crying if a video meeting was looming, which was basically always. I worried about who I would be when I eventually quit my job and no longer had this “proof” that I was here for big change in the world, but knew I wasn’t living my values anyway. And so at the California Women’s Conference in March 2024, I heard something that changed my perspective on my worries. Speaker Tara Schuster, author of Glow in the F*cking Dark, told a story about a time where she was anxious and worried and in the throes of burnout, and her therapist said to her: “You’re not anxious, you’re furious.”

I felt that sentence to my core. I wasn’t anxious, I was furious. Furious at leadership that represented the systems I deeply wanted to change but that didn’t really have any desire to change. I was furious that I had been sold a false bill of goods that our worth as humans is tied to how productive we are, spending our best years and most sunlit days in front of a screen. I was furious at the entrenchment of ruthless capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy, as we march onward while the billionaires make even more money and inequality reaches epic proportions, the climate crisis makes our planet unrecognizable, and we are frozen in a trance of overwork and fear that prevents us from imagining what else could be possible in our lives and in this world. I could not continue to pretend that making business as usual appear “responsible” was enough. Yeah, I wasn’t anxious. I was furious, though it wasn’t acceptable to express that anger or even acknowledge the disconnect. Suck it up and smile, Stephanie. Stop worrying. It will all be fine.

This continuous emotional drain is often described as burnout. However, Pooja Lakshmin calls this betrayal, not burnout. In her book Real Self Care, she underscores, “While burnout places the blame (and thus the responsibility) on the individual and tells women they aren’t resilient enough, betrayal points directly to the broken structures around them.” So although I had it better than many, I was betrayed by the same broken systems that I was unwillingly bolstering by my presence within them, and was supposed to be grateful for the opportunity.

I was also curious. I wanted to see what else might be possible outside of my identity as a change agent in corporate America, how else I might live my values. On the surface, I was worried about all kinds of logistics: from health insurance, to keeping in touch with loved ones, to the insanity of abandoning the most financial security I’d ever had. But underneath this, I trusted my gut feeling that told me that untangling myself from the known path would lead to unexpected treasure. As Tricia Hersey writes in Rest is Resistance, “Instead of fearing the unknown of what’s on the other side of slowing down, begin to see it as a sacred place that is ready to hold and make space for your gifts and inherent talents. Grind culture has placed fear as our only compass and keeps us frozen in a way that is a habit.” Who would I be if I let my desires and dreams unfold?

I am very cognizant of what an utter privilege it is to have been able to choose to walk away. There are a number of inherent factors in how I show up in the world that made it possible for me to leave where others cannot, including, but not limited to, being a white, able-bodied woman with an American passport and access to mental health care. I also had a partner at the time, am child-free by choice (which is a choice that continues to be purposefully eroded in the US), and have savings from both corporate jobs and from a small but meaningfully influential inheritance after my mother’s death. None of what came next would have been possible without this mixture of unearned advantages, support, and inherent privilege. I want to acknowledge all this, and to keep advocating for systemic support that makes flexibility and freedom of choice available to all of us.

Two years into quitting my corporate job and career, my desires and dreams have unfolded in surprising, difficult, and joyful ways. The journey I’ve been on is not the journey I expected — as a friend wisely pointed out, that’s why it is called an adventure. The boat never ended up heading to Mexico. An unsolvable administrative issue from a prior owner meant that this version of the dream was not possible. I knew with every fiber of my being that I wanted to keep sailing this boat, and I convinced my partner to sail with me to the South Pacific. For a whole host of reasons, the ocean crossing included, he then left the boat and divorced me, which is a completely different story. I did not quit my job expecting to sail thousands of miles across the Pacific or to lose my marriage, and yet here I am, more alive than ever to tell the tale.

I am now captain of my boat, which is currently moored in the South Pacific on various tropical islands, depending on the week and my whims. These islands have been the place where my body and soul have found actual rest and joy beyond my imagination, amidst heartbreak and grief. I have befriended people from across the world and shared laughter, dinners, and sunsets galore. I have been in, on, and under the water every day, allowing the marvels and power of the ocean to guide and delight (think: swimming with whales and manta rays and kissy-faced fish). I have learned countless skills in boat repair and life repair. I have launched my freelance business working with some seriously incredible women who inspire me every day. I’m experiencing, collecting and writing stories of sensuality and adventure that I will be telling the rest of my life. Creative Boat Stephanie has emerged, and she astonishes me every day.

There is no map for how to step outside of the strictures of the “normal” life of corporate America that I lived before, so if you were looking for the answer, I can’t give it to you. I don’t know how you personally can make a big change work. I do know it will require courage to follow what’s true in your heart; if you’re in corporate sustainability America trying to effectuate change, you’ve already got that in spades.

At many points, this new life has felt like jumping out of an airplane into freefall. As an adventurous person, I do rather enjoy the feeling of freefall, most of the time anyhow, though it also comes with facing the associated fears you didn’t even know you had, over and over. I’m still the same person I was, I still give a shit, I still think we can do way better than we are doing as humans, and I also have far more space to be different, unmasked versions of myself. I’m still here for big change, and my life has been the biggest change to date.

So did I leave my job and my career to go sailing? Yes. And I also left to experience other possibilities and horizons. It turns out that I’m the kind of person that abandons her corporate career, then writes about it. The kind of person that jumps into the ocean from her boat and floats, sometimes even in between meetings. The kind of person who is writing a book. The kind of person who is open to so many futures and who will keep leading with kindness, and will continue discovering how to keep advocating for a world other than this hellscape of cruelty we apparently call business as usual. The kind of person who continues to work with people who are in sustainability and social impact, because wow, we need love and support. The kind of person who will 100% cheer you on if you too decide there just might be something else beautiful beyond the routine overwhelm that we could create, if only we give ourselves the space to do so.

is a sea witch, adventurer, captain, relational alchemist, facilitator, and strategic communications advisor. She writes about feminine leadership on the water, desire in all its forms, and imagining different futures on her Substack, Sea Witch Diaries. You can also follow her on LinkedIn.

The head of ethics at OpenAI, Chloé Bakalar, just quit, along with the head of revenue, which is sort of a bad look?

I’ve been wondering about the scope and remit of these roles, which always seem intentionally narrow and focused on designing how the tech works, much more than the wider consequences: “Bakalar had been primarily tasked with coming up with ethical approaches to AI model development and studying how AI interacts with humans.” Those are dealt with via a lot of rhetoric about self-regulating, most of which is implausible. I would love to read more on these roles, if anyone has good examples to share. There was a great Data and Society study on Ethics Owners in tech but this was back in 2019.

In this article from Futurism, Bakalar is quoted as saying at a recent conference, “Ethics is actually everyone’s responsibility.” This is one of those comments that is undeniably true, and also basically meaningless. I think I would have rather heard her say it is the responsibility of the C Suite, who are in turn responsible for the entire direction of the company.

Here’s my former colleague Lindsey Andersen, with more insight:

“I generally think it's important not to read too much into what a singular departure means for an entire company absent other information. There are a few reasons for this--one is that OpenAI, along with the other big labs and most big tech companies in general, has a well established and growing array of teams whose entire job it to think about and figure out how to implement practices on responsible development and deployment, identify safeguards, etc. They stem from public policy/external facing to trust and safey to model development to research. Companies often hire SMEs in certain areas to bring in that expertise (e.g. applied ethics, human rights, application domains like healthcare, natsec, finance, etc), but they are hardly the only voice / perspective and they generally don't own broader processes themselves. So a departure of one such person may mean losing an important voice, but does not mean all attempts at ethics or mitigating risk are going out the window. Second is that it's an incredibly intense and competitive industry and people are poached constantly and burn out quickly, so there are a wide variety of reasons people leave.”

A new era of clarity

This week, I had a brilliant conversation with my dear friend Lisa Sachs, the Director of the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment. In this conversation, we explore on decarbonization and why the current approach of having countries and companies focus on entity-level net zero is the opposite of systems thinking. She tries out a new analogy for how we might think about climate risks. Her metaphor is giving a dying medical patient actually useful advice and NOT “trying everything” as a last resort. We also talked about what sustainability teams can and should be doing about all this.

I love this paper from CCSI, which helps disentangle the difference between the physical impact of climate change and its effect on the financial system. Really useful in the classroom.

Derric Pennington listened to the conversation, and resurfaced this cartoon he had drawn in 2022. He’s always on point!

CEO side hustles

I am sure you know by now that I love Beth Kowitt’s writing. Her piece this week is about new content creation efforts by CEOs, who are now, “posting…podcasting, blogging and vlogging, conference headlining and LinkedIn influencing.”

This is not what actual transparency looks like, needless to say.

It makes perfect sense that actual disclosures are heading in the opposite direction. As Kowitt puts it, the CEOs are telling selective stories, so this is even a distraction from quarterly reporting and other required transparency. To top it all off, all these disclosures are aimed at AI rather than at reaching humans.

This paragraph sums it up:

“There’s a strange paradox to all this. CEOs are trying harder than ever to appear authentic and human. But increasingly, they’re doing it for AI rather than people. That may be the future of corporate communications. But it has raised, not lowered the stakes, for the standardized disclosures — the one space that is still relatively free of noise, narrative and CEO spin.”

Online trends are no longer culture

This interview in WIRED with a cyber-ethnographer, Ruby Thelot, is fascinating. Topics range from online virality’s misleading elements, male bonding and gambling, the myth of heteropessimism, and of course, AI. Well worth reading. These paragraphs nails so much:

Most of our issues in the world are not bottlenecked by intelligence, but by the promise of cooperation, coordination, and essentially alignment of large groups of people toward a common shared goal. That’s the first part. The second thing is, when you start to quantify specific things, once again, the metric becomes the goal in and of itself.

The belief that intelligence is the most powerful thing comes from the assumption that there’s a group of people on this planet who are the most intelligent. Sir Francis Galton, the father of eugenics, also believed this. With AI, they are just projecting what they value about themselves onto the superintelligence. It’s philosophically unsound and actually quite dangerous.

I personally am here for more of what Thelot identifies as emotional intelligence, artistic intelligence, bodily intelligence — who’s with me?

Cats and children

August! Time to reflect, recover, and plan.

My beloved cat Munkus died suddenly of a heart attack, aged just 7, in 2023. Life chaos and disruption mean that I have had his ashes in a little bag ever since, but not been able to celebrate his life. Last weekend, on International Cat Day, I buried him in the garden, with a bunch of my dearest cat-loving friends. We had pink champagne and talked of all the kitties we have loved and lost. It was beautiful!

Now I am in the middle of a visit from my niece and nephew (and, thankfully, their parents), which is every kind of beautiful chaos. We have been to the lighthouse, the woods, swimming, a farm, to the unicorn garden next door, and eaten a lot of ice cream. I have set up a nature cam for my nephew so we can track the wildlife at night.

Here they are, incoming:

Terrifying stuff, I think we can all agree.

Next week I am going to a rural executive training center to teach on the first week of the Stern Executive MBA. Which will be very relaxing, in comparison!

I hope your summer is equally glorious.

Have a fantastic weekend!

Alison XX

In this conversation, we go in deep on decarbonization and why the current approach of having countries and companies focus on entity-level net zero is the opposite of systems thinking. She tries out a new analogy on how we might think about climate risks involving a caring for dying medical patient and NOT “trying everything” as a last resort. She then offers some incredible advice for sustainability teams to think differently and to really consider who they could be thinking differently with.

I’m making the entirety of this video available to everyone without a paywall, because the topic is so important, and Lisa is so awesome!

To follow Lisa’s work, here she is on LinkedIn and here is the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment website to learn more about her and her teams’ excellent work.

I spoke with CNN about how the Cracker Barrel CEO, who resigned over changing the brand’s logo, needs security because an enraged mob continues to pursue her. Nathaniel Meyersohn and I discussed how this kind of culture war story (see also Target and DEI) is drowning out more important stories. Like corruption. Back to that a bit later.

Also hard to ignore that she is female, so this also looks like a glass cliff situation. The brand was already failing. People seem to have gone nuts over a store many of them haven’t visited in years.

The toxic myth of the sustainable company

This week, I argued at length that the myth of the “good” sustainable company makes everything so much worse than it needs to be, and perpetuates a lot of horrible, shallow practices. I picked apart the methodology used in TIME’s “World’s 100 Most Sustainable Businesses” list as a prime example.

I also offered a number of ways we could fix this situation, including one big one:

There is one action that would make the biggest difference: If we covered corporate political behavior as a sustainability story, and spent more time exploring influence peddling and corruption, we might start to actually unpack corporate accountability and responsibility as well as give the public a deeper understanding of what matters most. There are so many good examples here, including at HEATED and at Popular Information.

Reader Nathan Wendlend pointed out a statistic I hadn’t previously seen, which is that PR professionals outnumber journalists 6 to 1, and that feels like that might sum it all up completely. Let’s support our independent journalists where and how we can!

Polar icebreakers

Another day, another ethics scandal that nothing will get done about. It used to be that these kinds of headlines would bring down governments (indeed, a similar scandal had a seismic impact in Israel). In the US, they are just another passing headline.

Jennifer Brown and me

If you missed it, here is my conversation from last week with Jennifer Brown. It was such a joy though I again lost wifi towards the end. Fiber is being installed in a few weeks and cannot come soon enough.

Also, stay tuned for my conversation with Columbia’s Lisa Sachs, next Tuesday at noon. We are going to talk about climate change and finance, and it will be fascinating, I promise.

A wilting platform

The brilliant Lily Zheng, who I was also lucky enough to talk to a few weeks ago for Higher Ground, called LinkedIn a ‘wilting platform’ this week. I agree that the platform seems in a bind, and it seems to be partly because it is simultaneously trying to counter AI use, and push it hard via its owner, Microsoft. Here’s a good piece on this from Patrick Coffee in the WSJ.

Also I was thrilled to see my name on Lily’s very selective list of people to still follow on LinkedIn. Thanks, Lily!

Who is allowed to fail?

Who is allowed to fail? Who isn’t?

These questions are always so revealing. Lose the lion’s share of $45B one day, return to investing another.

“We took the steps that were necessary to fight another day,” Aschenbrenner told investors in a letter on Friday. “But our fund must always be structured such that we can take a loss and fight another day. I will make it my mission to ensure that we learn the necessary lessons from this experience.”

This stuff pisses me off.

Around the internet

I was interviewed on Charlie Cantrell’s How Would You Like to Live? podcast — we met doing improv! I don’t often get the chance to talk about how I would like to die and what I would like my last meal to be! In this fun and wide-ranging conversation that touches on both the personal and the professional, we also cover lonely CEOs, what being ethical means, using gremlin voices to help shape your career, and much more. Apple | Spotify

People sure hate Meta glasses

This post was a big hit

I also saw The Odyssey which I am sorry to say I thought a bit turgid. With Emily Wilson on her controversial critique. Though I did love some of the monsters.

And, I came very close to a teen bear in the woods (though failed to get pics), plus many wild turkeys and deer. On Monday my brother and his enormous clan of small children (two) arrive!

Here’s the street where I live;

Have a fantastic weekend!

Alison XX

The Trouble with TIME’s 100 Most Sustainable Businesses

Beyond Good and Bad

What might we do instead?

The myth that corporations can be sorted into good and bad, sustainable and unsustainable, forms the basis of most responsible business coverage. The consequence is a flattened, oversimplified discussion that creates far more problems than it solves.

The idea that a good business can be defined and measured is, of course, alluring. And, it makes intuitive sense. The public is fed up with corporate greed, grift, poor treatment of workers, and environmental irresponsibility. And, everyone is desperate for an example of a business that is unimpeachable, one we can all trust and believe in. I am asked to cite examples of companies who are getting it right in almost every conversation and interview, and I still don’t have a good answer.

The conversation also reflects a widespread tendency to personify corporations, and treat them as entities with a single brain and character. Whether it is Coca-Cola versus Pepsi or Target versus Walmart, we are all inclined to oversimplify these vast operations into a coherent personality, often linked to the profile and preferences of the CEO. For example, think of how the battle for market share and public trust that is currently raging between OpenAI and Anthropic has been reduced to a conversation about the respective characters of Amodei and Altman.

So, the urge to rate, rank, and judge is certainly logical. However, in practice these ideas do enormous harm. They stymie the vast majority of meaningful action, prevent us from learning what does and doesn’t work, drive oversimplified and dangerous narratives, and encourage corporate leaders to treat ethics as a matter of PR statements, branding upside, and avoiding “reputational risk.” This is particularly problematic now that reputational risk is ever more of a funhouse mirror.

This all brings me to TIME’s annual list of the 100 “most sustainable companies in the world”, which came out last week. The article and accompanying rankings are a perfect illustration of several of the most dangerous myths in responsible business.

Let’s look more closely.

The Trouble with TIME’s 100 Most Sustainable Businesses

The article accompanying the TIME survey is well-intentioned. It starts with a valid perspective: that corporations have mostly pivoted to cost-cutting, that the US is pushing back on environmental regulation, and that the Iran conflict is driving an energy crisis. This all adds up, TIME suggests, to an era of “pragmatism”. What TIME does not address is how these diverse political, regulatory and commercial pressures play out in different markets. This, in turn, implies different disclosure and performance strategies in the US, Asia and Europe.

Then, the article argues, in one confused stream of consciousness, that climate change and biodiversity loss present commercial challenges to business, that Europe and Asia are still incentivizing policies that support the green economy (meaning America is not), that having a core business focused on electrification automatically qualifies you as a leader, and that being a luxury brand gives you an advantage, because customers will pay more for a green products so they can “afford to be the cleanest of the cleanest.”

It is not clear what TIME is seeking to argue here, but some potential conclusions might be that your country of origin and operating context significantly determine the direction of your efforts, and that your overall business model is either good or bad, and that both are more important than any good faith effort to reduce your externalities. Whether there is a business case for being “sustainable” is left unclear, as the article simultaneously suggests that biodiversity loss automatically shows up on the bottom line, and that sustainability is a costly investment that results in you needing to charge a premium.

Having alluded to all the ways in which comparisons across geographies and business models are pointless and incoherent, and that all ratings are by definition oversimplified and inappropriate, TIME then goes on to present its ratings, which perpetuate all these problems.

TIME’s methodology is described at a high level, so let’s start there. The company has worked with a well-known data firm, Statista, to gather data. Both organizations should know better:

This is already problematic, as something is either comprehensive or a selection, and it is not at all clear how the list was created.

Then, there is a “rigorous 4-step methodology to identify the top 750 companies, evaluated on more than 20 key data points.” If only it were that simple, TIME.

The first step is “exclusion of non-sustainable industries like fossil fuels or deforestation” which effectively seems to mean companies with large carbon footprints (deforestation is not a business model but a consequence, so this is already a weird word choice, if nothing else). You are excluded from the rankings if you are a major carbon emitter, even, theoretically, if you are doing your utmost to transform your business model. You are also excluded if you are responsible for an “environmental catastrophe,” which is an indicator of mismanagement and bad governance, rather than your business model.

TIME throws in that it also “considered significant scandals or controversies related to sustainability,” though does not disclose what it did. Possibly a negative press screen? There is no real mention of governance or social factors. It seems that if your business model involves treating workers poorly, getting customers addicted to your products, procuring a lot of fossil fuels, or paying bribes, that’s totally fine.

The second step is inclusion on “reputable” lists from other standard setters, mostly voluntary initiatives whose key purpose is just that: reputational upside. Climate disclosure seems overweighted, and participating in campaigns such as the UNFCC Race to Zero gets you points. Companies that might have made ethical and defensible decisions not to participate lose out, and this all elevates consumer-facing companies, by definition. MSCI ratings are included here too, oddly. This is the sole nod to materiality in the entire exercise.

The third step is all disclosure, basically whether you published a 2024 ESG report in line with standards (GRI, SASB, TCFD) and whether your report was externally assured. Great for the Big Four and big companies, less good for companies who are trying hard but have resource constraints. There seems to be zero consideration of the actual performance these companies reported, at least from what I can see. A few years ago Bloomberg published an investigation showing that the quantity of disclosure was far more important to getting a good MSCI rating than the quality, and well, we sure do seem to be doubling down on that.

The last step is the most bewildering of all, “environmental and social stewardship.” I am not clear whether TIME has suddenly reverted to calling ESG reports “CSR reports,” contradicting the third step right above it, or whether they are now looking at philanthropy. Anyway, the researchers allegedly investigated environmental metrics (including emissions intensity, which is itself questionable, as emissions might still be rising if the company is growing). Even weirder, “Social metrics covered aspects like gender diversity on the board of directors and in leadership, gender pay gap, work safety, and employee turnover.” None of this tells us much about worker treatment, supply chain oversight, executive pay, or anything difficult, controversial or really meaningful, plus, the focus on gender metrics is politically tone deaf in the United States right now.

You might ask why I am spending so much time on this. Surely it is just harmless clickbait? Yes, a bit incoherent and shallow, but what’s the problem? Because this kind of rankings exercise isn’t just unhelpful, but actually harmful.

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A team of two journalists in a small trade publication critiqued eBay’s treatment of sellers, and got a full-fledged harassment campaign from the company in return, including, (you cannot make this up), mailing the journalists live insects, a bloody pig mask, and a funeral wreath, surveilling them, posting advertisements inv…

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I described thinking as a “luxury good” to Fortune a while ago, but it keeps resurfacing in new articles, including this week. CEOs all declare a love for reading, and many like to hang out with prominent intellectuals. Equally, some are “completely out of their depth on things like literature, philosophy and understanding th…

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Toni McKee is a corporate communications specialist and author of Not Waiting Around: How Business Leaders and Gen Z Can Co-Create a Brighter Future – at Work and Beyond. An American abroad drawing on threads from the US, UK, and Nordics, she writes about leadership, democracy, and communications on her Substack, Snowball Content.

In the spirit of finding concrete solutions to the genuine issues we confront on a daily basis, I’d like to open up this question to paid subscribers for your collective brilliance: what examples in the world, whether big or small, are you seeing of cross-generational collaboration, funding, and actual, structural support?

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When You Can’t Afford the City You Grew Up In

by Toni McKee, author of Not Waiting Around and Substack’s Snowball Content

I sat stewing in a sweaty mix of pride and concern at my daughter’s high school graduation. Pride over everything my daughter had overcome to arrive at this point, and concern about the future she was inheriting. Resigned to the back row of a stifling, overcrowded auditorium in an affluent community north of Copenhagen – of which we don’t belong despite my daughter attending its high school – I was hyper-aware of the increasing privilege that surrounded us, and how that privilege would infringe on my daughter’s own opportunities.

I am an American immigrant in Denmark. I moved to Copenhagen in 2002 on the back of 9/11 and a few other life-changing events. My daughter was born in 2006. Denmark has been a good place to raise her and her brother. Its social welfare system offers universal access to child care, decent public education and healthcare. And it’s safe compared to the U.S. I have never had to worry about my kids getting gunned down at school, for example.

Even here, the gap is widening

But something’s changed in the economy in recent years. Denmark is still one of the more equal societies in the OECD, but income inequality is rising, driven by capital income, business ownership and asset appreciation, especially housing. Like other western capitals, Copenhagen is in the midst of a severe housing crisis. Housing prices have risen 40% since my daughter was born, and rents are climbing too, up 7.1% from Q1 2022 to Q1 2025.

The reasons behind the housing crisis are fairly well understood by Danish economists: rising urban demand from immigration, longer lifespans, more single-person households, remote work, and apartments increasingly treated as investment assets. The latter is where my ire takes hold. Those who already own apartments are earning so much off the appreciation that they are able to buy up more apartments—keeping everyone else out.

For young people, that means entry to home ownership, or even the rental market, is now dependent on parental wealth. Those whose parents can help are on one track; those whose parents can’t are on another, regardless of how hard either of them works or what they earn. My daughter would love to move out and share a place with a friend, but they simply can’t find an apartment they can afford.

The ladder my generation climbed

After a week of traditional graduation festivities, including each class riding around town on a “student wagon,” blasting music and crashing each kid’s home for 15 minutes of drunken mayhem, I found myself thinking about my own graduation and the choices I had.

Green Bay in 1992 was a much simpler setting. I moved out immediately into a cheap downtown apartment and ran a car. Waitressing a few nights a week at Red Lobster covered my rent, car payment, food, and everything else I needed to get through university, albeit with a fair amount of debt. My parents contributed nothing to my education or living expenses, and that wasn’t unusual. My generation’s script said: be independent, work hard, and the ladder will hold your weight.

That script has changed, and not only for young people in the U.S. – even in the Nordic countries, renowned for their equalizing social welfare systems. It’s no wonder young people everywhere are refusing to grind for a ladder that leads nowhere unless their parents can afford to fund the first few rungs.

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Higher Ground Substack features in Bloomberg today!!! My students now consider corporate hypocrisy considerably worse than having the “wrong” opinion in the first place.

I spoke to Beth Kowitt about this, because law firm Sullivan & Cromwell LLP previously drew a line about not taking on work in relation to the Carroll case, and…

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The Partisan Valence of Societal Issues

The Forced Labor Paradox

What Got Cut

What’s Left

The History

The Activist’s Dilemma

The Partisan Valence of Societal Issues

There is only one reason I still occasionally log in to Twitter. Forgive me, but I adore an anonymous account called (she is right here on Substack too, though posts rarely). She has coined the term “Alice Fact.” This is an interesting piece of hard data on a significant issue. But, because it cannot be weaponized for partisan advantage by either Republicans or Democrats, it gets almost no coverage. For example, billions of dollars allocated for SNAP benefits go unspent because eligible individuals cannot navigate the bureaucratic friction and don’t sign up. Republicans don’t want to highlight this because it implies the need for more aggressive government intervention, whereas Democrats ignore it because it shows that spending bills alone aren’t enough to make government effective. Therefore, the information hangs in a sort of dead zone, and the issue never gets addressed. One of the underlying arguments here is that much of politics exists to provide symbolic reassurance rather than actual problem-solving. Relatedly, one aspect of power is winning traction and seizing the narrative on an important issue. Another is the ability to keep the issue out of sight entirely.

Another category of societal issue is one that ought to be equally important to everyone, but for various reasons have become either right- or left-coded. The obvious example here is what to do about climate change. A near-universal scientific consensus exists on climate change, and at this point, a strong majority of the public follows this consensus. However, from a policy, investment, and social perspective, there is much less agreement. The public debate over how to address climate change is still largely buried in questions of political advantage, values, and ideology. If you strip out the vested interests of the oil and gas industry, it is somewhat mysterious why Republicans, who are more rural and often passionate environmentalists, have often resisted climate action, while urban, affluent Democrats are mostly in the opposite camp (of course environmentalism and climate action aren’t exactly the same, but they are related). One manifestation is the idea of “climate justice,” which suggests that any meaningful climate action must be inextricably linked to a politically progressive, social justice agenda. The history and controversy here is considerable, but I recommend Andrew Hoffman’s 2012 piece on climate science as culture war for more background.

Most interesting is a third set of issues. These issues are agreed upon by both the right and the left as important, but how they are framed and prioritized is diametrically opposed. Genuine ideological convergence is often described using the vague term “horseshoe theory.” Much more common is coalitional convergence on a policy outcome, but with no shared underlying reasoning (see Bruce Yandle's Bootleggers and Baptists for more on this). Think of how the healthy eating and anti-vaccine movements have brought together liberal Californian yoga teachers and Republican trad wives, for example. Or, how conservatives including Josh Hawley, Matt Gaetz, and JD Vance agreed with the FTC’s Lina Khan that Meta and Google should be broken up. Or, the way that anti-pornography feminism of Andrea Dworkin got energy from the religious right in the 1980s. Pat Buchanan's nationalist-sovereigntist right and organized labor's protectionist left both opposed NAFTA and the WTO in the 1990s. Koch brothers-funded fiscal and evangelical conservatives have been able to join forces with progressive racial-justice reformers on reducing incarceration.

The key dilemma for activists in any context, but particularly the hyper-polarized environment of America in the 2020s, is whether to support and enforce any action or government intervention, even if you find it ideologically repellent and practically problematic, or whether to maintain conceptual clarity and purity, even at the expense of action. This is a far harder question than it looks, because controlling the narrative can set the groundwork for future direction.

All of this brings us to forced labor in the second Trump term. Forced labor has passed through all three of the above categories over the last 25 years. Let’s dive into the detail, because the implications are fascinating.

The Forced Labor Paradox

The obvious throughline is already familiar to you. Trump hired Musk to run DOGE, who dismantled USAID. The New Yorker cites an estimate that this has caused at least 700,000 unnecessary deaths. The Trump administration has also pursued corporations aggressively over their DEI programs, and is doing its best to destroy the renewable energy transition. The United States has stopped paying the United Nations, and prominently quit the UN Human Rights Council. Plus, human rights are under attack in all sorts of other ways in America, from the ICE anti-immigration campaigns, to efforts to undermine voting rights, to legal pursuit of journalists and newspapers who write critical stories. Notwithstanding the very real chilling effects of these policies, this has all been very well covered. Woke is dead.

The story that is not much discussed is what has survived, what is still being funded, and on what basis. On the one hand, the picture is even grimmer than the simple framing that everything got cut, because the mechanisms meant to drive accountability have been gutted, and much meaningful action is stalled. On the other hand, enforcement energy on forced labor, trafficking, and adjacent issues has not completely vanished. It is just that the work is no longer shaped around human rights, but around the administration’s priorities: trade nationalism with a strong anti-China angle, border enforcement, faith-based family values, and law-and-order-driven crackdowns on sex trafficking.

First we’ll go into the facts and then explore their implications.

What Got Cut

The State Department has an Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, often known as the TIP Office. According to The New Republic, staffing was cut by two-thirds in 2025, with the decisive blow landing the week of July 18: “The cuts reduced the office to about 35 people—a third of its staffing levels from seven months ago, thanks to Rubio’s plan and Elon Musk’s deferred resignation program. Those who were not laid off were informed that they would be reassigned and given a pay cut, according to Mother Jones.” A spokesman noted that offices were “duplicative” or had “strayed from their original purpose.”

This was noted in the media, but primarily because the Epstein files were trending at the same time. So, progressive and liberal publications zeroed in on the juxtaposition of Trump calling the Epstein case a Democratic hoax, while at the same time cutting government capacity to fight trafficking.

The TIP office had no Senate-confirmed director for the first 16 months of Trump’s term. On May 11, 2026, Trump finally nominated Barbara Thornhill, a North Carolina business executive and Los Angeles-based philanthropist, to direct it. Her Senate confirmation was contentious, with Democrats arguing that efforts had already been hollowed out.

The annual 2025 Trafficking in Persons Report was released September 29 of that year. This was three months late, the first time that's happened in the report's 25-year history, without the usual Secretary-level rollout. However, as you can see here, the data and the detail appears robust.

The State Department’s Program to End Modern Slavery (PEMS) issued its last FY2025 solicitation (~$22M available) under Biden in December 2024, continuing a congressionally mandated $25M/year stream running since 2016 ($200M obligated cumulatively). Funds, including money already marked for disbursement, were subsequently “diverted or frozen without explanation,” leaving nonprofit grantees with no money and no timetable. There has been no FY2026 PEMS solicitation, at least that I could find.

A December 2025 Congressional letter to then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and Rodney Scott, signed by representatives including Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL), James McGovern (D-MA), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Jerrold Nadler (R-NY), and Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC), states that Secretary Rubio cut roughly 80% of staff from State's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL)—a State Department bureau, alongside TIP, whose work feeds the department's single seat on the Forced Labor Enforcement Task Force.

DHS ended the Deferred Action for Labor Enforcement (DALE) program in early 2025. This was a tool labor-trafficking survivors specifically relied on for protection against employers retaliating by calling ICE on them.

What’s Left

What complicates this story is that not everything has been gutted and cut. Some notable strands of trafficking/forced-labor work are funded at the same or higher levels than under Biden. That said, the cultural valence of these efforts is quite distinct.

First up is action that would have been cut if progressive activists had not taken legal action. The DOJ/Office for Victims of Crime continues issuing human-trafficking task-force and victim-services grants on its normal statutory cycle. This office has awarded roughly $45 million, across its victim-services and task-force programs. However, this comes with conditions: applicants had to certify under False Claims Act penalty that they don’t “promote DEI,” and agree to cooperate with immigration enforcement, to receive TVPA-authorized funding. Non-profit Freedom Network USA sued over both conditions, and a federal court granted a temporary restraining order on February 24, 2026, blocking them; DOJ is complying “unless and until” the order is lifted. In other words, the money flowed only because a court intervened.

From there on in, it gets even more complicated. One overarching development is that the center of gravity for “forced labor policy” has been effectively shifted to DHS/Commerce, where it is framed as part of trade enforcement, whereas at the State Department it was seen as part of the picture on diplomacy and human rights.

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Hi from beautiful Woodstock, where I am entrenched for most of the rest of the summer!

I got to speak this week with the inimitable Lily Zheng, Fairness, Access, Inclusion and Representation Strategist and author of several books, including the latest, Fixing Fairness: 4 Tenets to Transform Diversity Backlash into Prog…

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Match Fixing

The Player Pipeline

The Fish Rots from the Head

Sports Washing

Hitting the Limits

The World Cup has been unexpectedly joyous, until this week. America was looking more appealing to international visitors than we might have any right to expect.

But now, the central story of 2026 has reared its head, and we can’t look away. Corruption. A source of pragmatic advantage, a way to play the ossified system, a reality we must operate within, a thing that is not up to me to solve. Until one day, when we find that the rules of the game have been shredded irrevocably. In football, we have already reached that point.

I’m sure you didn’t miss the story; it is covered in a million op-eds. A United States striker, Folarin Balogun, was given a red card, meaning he had to miss one match, a referee judgment call widely seen as too harsh. Before the US team was due to play again, Trump called FIFA president Gianni Infantino three times, while Rudy Giuliani’s child, who is running the World Cup for America, launched legal challenges in the background. Ultimately, the red card disappeared, and Balogun was free to play on Monday night. The US lost to Belgium anyway, in a 4-1 defeat. Cue endless global glee and chants of “overturn this.” The match apparently set a new viewership record, because the prospect of schadenfreude gets attention. Everyone who complained gets to prove their point, but the damage is done. This morality tale feels like it plays on an endless loop on a range of topics.

Of course, Trump’s blithe ignorance is a recurring theme. Trump discovered just last week that red cards in football are a thing, openly admitted he was completely new to the concept, and figured all he needed to do was call his people. Trump’s opponents point out the red card cancellation is unprecedented, while his defenders point out that Article 27 has already been used to allow Ronaldo to play for Portugal. The debate immediately falls into a familiar groove.

It is also quite perfect that the match was against Belgium, a small European country indelibly associated with rules and bureaucracy. The resistance of UEFA, European football associations and European leaders recalls any number of conversations about the future of NATO, Greenland, and tariffs. As usual, America is seen as ripping up protocol, norms and rules, with the “I dare you to stop me” posture Trump takes on everything. Meanwhile, Europeans froth over institutional credibility, and the rest of the world stays on the sidelines, looking for advantage. Somehow, these debates never seem to bolster the European position as much as making its values look anachronistic, while Trump is positioned as “audacious” (this is literally the word the WSJ used in the opening paragraphs of its article on the topic).

The story also plays into the pervasive narrative that Trump has the power to screw up everything, even football. His intervention was terrible for the American team and players, and there has been much discussion about whether it influenced the outcome (probably not, Belgium was always the much better team). This discussion casts Trump as an omnipotent, unstoppable force, rather than what he actually is: an aged human poster child for the degradation of leadership.

Even former FIFA president Sepp Blatter has re-emerged to argue Trump’s phone call is problematic, making absurd arguments about not corrupting the beautiful game (this is someone you might imagine would have drifted to self-inflicted obscurity, but in fact keeps giving interviews). His statement is worth quoting in full:

Red cards are not overturned by political phone calls. They are overturned by rules, evidence and independent bodies... If a U.S. President intervenes with the FIFA President — and a player is suddenly cleared before a World Cup knockout match — the question is unavoidable: Quo vadis, FIFA? Football must never become a playground for political power.

Hahaha, right! You may recall Blatter’s name from the time when the DOJ raided FIFA’s offices in 2015, back when things like that seemed to matter. Actually, straight-up bribery and envelopes of cash now seem weirdly cute and innocent, compared to the kleptocratic maneuvering that dominates every news cycle. Remember when we used to think George W Bush’s Iraq invasion was the height of evil? Now, he seems like such a sweet, harmless old man.

Ultimately, the coverage has followed the same narrative arc as every other news story. Trump is destructive, but dynamic and agentic. The people who are always angry are angry. The consequences have manifested in satisfying ways. The structural degradation proceeds nonetheless, against a backdrop of muttering about norms and governance.

So, let’s take a look at the state of corruption in football. Here, Trump is something of a dead canary. He provides no fresh evidence of institutional drift. What he does illustrate is that everyone with a powerful stake in football believes you can exploit the fans, the players, and the game itself for your own financial advantage endlessly, and it won’t matter, because the end customer has no alternative.

This story has been unfolding for 50 years, with no clear endpoint. But this week illustrates that the greed and destruction does eventually hit a wall. That wall is whether the fans can still watch and enjoy the game, and believe that talent and skill matter. Shred that, and you have nothing left.

Corruption in football starts at the player pipeline and match level, and builds from there. We will first look at the basics of procuring players and running matches, and then move on to how the whole machine is governed, because that’s at the root of the latest crisis.

Money Laundering

Buying and selling football players is a money launderer’s dream. Player valuations are an opaque judgment call, the money moves via offshore investments via shell companies, and the sector’s legal oversight is, according to the famously understated European Commission, “inadequate.”

Financial fair play (FFP) rules were introduced by UEFA in 2011, but have mainly been circumvented by disguising owner transfers as commercial sponsorships, and have been challenged in court as circumventing trade. They have also been slowly diluted, and inconsistently enforced.

All this money flowing around goes through the hands of agents, who represent players and clubs, work across borders, and are handsomely paid. They can relatively easily work on both sides of a transaction (indeed, this is technically banned but ubiquitous) and earn higher fees in the process. FIFA tried to cap agent fees in 2023, but the attempt was subsequently ruled a breach of competition law by a UK court.

In the 2025/26 reporting period, Premier League clubs paid a record £460 million in agent fees. This was a 13% increase from the previous year and more than double what was paid five years earlier. Since 2019, Premier League clubs have paid a cumulative £1.9 billion to agents. Chelsea alone has paid approximately £200 million in agent fees over three years, topping the table for the third consecutive year.

Match Fixing

Match-fixing is another perennial problem, little discussed.

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This might be the perfect headline. It’s also an insightful article from Bloomberg. Well worth reading for the clarity of its argument. The main point, on which reams more could be written: AI requires an entire organizational rethink, not just cheerleading and tokenmaxxing.

For an AI agent to tru…

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I am back in New York, after a month on the road visiting Mexico City (a talk, teaching, a bit of holiday), London, Barcelona, and Copenhagen. This week has been another hectic week running around. Today I am going to my house in Woodstock, NY, for several weeks of writing. I am taking over as course lead for Professional Responsi…

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Today, I am delighted to share two more reflections. These students, Yuki Fang and Yijao Guo, have something in common, in that they both grew up in China, but…

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Post-cringe: I guess this means something is so cringe it comes back out the other side and is sort of cool?

Anyway, The New York Times (gift link) has declared LinkedIn is post-cringe. It points to more brands getting involved, more influencers, more “authentic” content, more videos of people jogging, and so on.

Post-cr…

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The Rotting Foundations

The Wobbly New Developments

One Bright Spot

Let’s face it. Corporate governance is ever more of a shitshow. Certainly, it is also a clusterfuck, which emphasizes failed coordination. And it is a shitstorm, a term that emphasizes a volume of problems. But shitshow seems the best technical definition. A shitshow is a public spectacle with a farcical quality. We are watching the collapse of any standards or principles, in real time and in full view of the public. In 2026, key protagonists are making sure that these failures are rammed down our throats.

SpaceX, Ugh

One grotesque event (out of several from last week) makes this clear: the SpaceX IPO. An obvious jumping-off point is Elon Musk’s repellent personality and opinions, and his apparently appalling mental health. I don’t want to spend too much time here, so let’s quote Edward Luce in the Financial Times. The piece is well worth reading in full, and notes: “I have no idea whether Musk is an engineering genius or just a savvy and lucky venture capitalist. The scientific world is divided on that question. I do know that he is a monstrous human being.”

Another obvious starting point is that SpaceX’s business model rests on probably fanciful notions of reaching Mars and putting data centers into orbit, and that the company’s calculation of a $26.5 trillion addressable AI market is impossible to verify. A recent New York Times analysis has found that historically, Musk delivered on only 19% of his commitments, and that his rate of success has declined over time, even as he made more promises. OK then.

Since these are huge topics in their own right and not the focus here, let’s turn to the governance questions. These are glaring. The IPO itself is predicated on various whopping conflicts of interest, including Musk’s ambiguous former role at DOGE, and the $300 million or so (at least) he spent getting Trump elected. Musk also sold xAI to SpaceX back in February, in the largest merger in history. The transaction is too complex to be worth getting into, but Musk was on both sides; he created two new Nevada entities to facilitate, and it was designed to defer scrutiny and give new public investors no choice in this or anything else.

On top of this, Musk essentially can’t be removed, and can’t be sued. The IPO includes various provisions that effectively leave Elon Musk in complete control and facing no accountability. As Reuters put it, only Elon Musk can fire Elon Musk. Lucien Bebchuk and Kobi Kastiel dug into this further, pointing out that the dual-class structure with perpetual control means Musk can sell shares in the future, reduce his equity stake and give up economic ownership, without giving up any control. He is Chair of the Board, CEO, and CTO (while also running Tesla, Neuralink, and the Boring Company, breeding many children, and fomenting racist violence via X). He has the authority to appoint the majority of the board of directors. He can pass the company to his heirs without needing anyone's approval, and there is no requirement that he devote his full attention to it. Oh, and shareholders can’t bring class action lawsuits, have to submit to individual arbitration, with no juries. The SEC greenlit this structure, along party lines.

What no reputational risk? Perhaps concerns will mount slowly. It is already too late.

This is all very bad. Matt Levine argues that if you think so too, you just don’t have to buy shares, but realistically, many of us are exposed to index funds, so avoiding SpaceX will take considerable effort. It is true that Elizabeth Warren, bless her, is making a fuss, and that all the above has been covered in detail by responsible journalists in obscure corners of the op-ed page by some publications. I read quality news coverage of the IPO so you don’t have to, and the vast majority of it focused on the buying frenzy, with critical coverage limited to debate over whether the stock is overvalued. There have been a few cool visualizations of the unimaginable scale of a trillion dollars.

OK, enough about Elon Musk. It would be nice to think this is all just an unusually prominent exception. It isn’t. The dual class structure is quite common, as is the combined CEO/Chair role. Political interference with regulatory bodies is on the rise, as are conflicts of interest. This is not just one anomalous grotesquely rich lunatic on the rampage. It is inspiration for a new governance playbook.

In America at least, meaningful corporate governance, and specifically board oversight, is ever more of a myth. Take Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Dario Amodei: are they really accountable to their boards? All evidence suggests not.

The Financial Times thinks we are in a “post-governance era.”

Corporate governance is such a dry and cautious field. Mentioning the words puts most people to sleep. It can seem populated by people who like to suggest that everything is so rarefied and esoteric that only they have a valid opinion. But right now, an overwhelming number of new challenges are being piled onto rotting, structurally unsound foundations. Board oversight has been drifting for some time. These weaknesses are getting more alarming every day. We have a glaring leadership crisis. And, we are doubling down on what used to work at precisely the wrong moment.

The Rotting Foundations

Traditional definitions of corporate governance focus on the tension between shareholders (ownership) and management (control), grounded in agency theory. Shareholders have little direct power; they elect board members and auditors, who are charged with ensuring that the leadership and management team do not undermine shareholder interests. The relationship between the board and the management team is understood as adversarial: Just as compliance polices the organization, the board polices senior management.

This might all make sense from a legal and structural perspective, but socially and empirically, much less so. The basic challenge is depressingly obvious: Board directors are paid north of US$300K for at best several days’ work per year and are usually handpicked by the CEO. Many studies demonstrate that board members tend to have similar backgrounds, political affiliations, and even religious beliefs.

In a detailed study in 2015, J. Robert Brown Jr. concluded that substantive qualifications, while of some relevance, are secondary to the board members being reliable—from the point of view of the CEO. Commented Brown: “While executive experience and other types of expertise are not irrelevant, directors are selected primarily because of their willingness to support the policies of incumbent management.”

Brown also argues that most boards do not fulfill a meaningful advisory function, at least in large public companies. Here, that overwhelming need for board members to be reliable weighs heavily against any imperative that they be informed and involved in a company’s work. Boards ensure legal compliance and boundaries for management, but rarely participate in strategic planning (itself an amorphous concept). In his Capitalisn’t podcast, Professor Luigi Zingales commented from his own experience that if information is sensitive, it will typically arrive in a deluge an hour before the board meets, leaving directors little time to review it (this is at least something AI might be able to help with).

Understanding the need for reliability greatly explains why so much board oversight of ethics and responsibility issues is ineffective. Another issue is that boards have historically been dominated by people with a narrow financial skill set, rather than the breadth that today’s companies actually need.

The results of this status quo are everywhere to see, and they certainly don’t encompass meaningful policing. In parallel, the focus in Sarbanes-Oxley and Dodd-Frank on director independence, financial expertise, and related areas has largely failed to enhance board effectiveness. The challenges rest on human idiosyncracies and group dynamics not, ultimately, legal contracts and processes.

Second, while it is true that shareholder rights are under threat in the US, the distinction between ownership and management, long held as the fundamental tension, has generally been resolved—through heavy stock-based incentives for executives. That aligns the interests of managers and shareholders, removing the agency issues, but creating a whole host of new ones.

Another issue in the US, in particular, is that CEOs and board chairs are frequently the very same person. Prominent examples include Jamie Dimon at JP Morgan, Mark Zuckerberg at Meta, Lachlan Murdoch at Fox, Brian Roberts at Comcast, and until very recently, Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway and Reed Hastings at Netflix. This list is actually representative: this study finds that ‘CEO duality’ is relatively low in some industries that take governance seriously, such as healthcare, but is dominant in the largest companies by market cap.

Harvard Law Corporate Governance Blog notes:

Across revenue cohorts, CEO duality remains most common among the largest companies, with the $25 billion–49.9 billion and $50 billion+ revenue groups in the mid-40% to near-50% range by 2025. The most notable shift occurs in the $5 billion–9.9 billion cohort, which declines markedly over the 2020-2025 period, while other revenue bands change more modestly and exhibit intermittent year-to-year movement.

The companies that have CEO/Chairman structures describe the rationale as board-management alignment and strategic execution, because of course they do. The real issue looks more like a hero-driven, individualistic vision of how value is created how leadership works. This has been stubbornly resistant to challenge.

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Are you bored, unmotivated, and cynical?

A new term just dropped. You are RUSTING OUT.

The urge to coin new phrases to describe common experiences is everywhere, and it is super desperate and grating.

I am also almost certain that this article is AI-generated.

Here is the second paragraph of this piece:

These aren’t pr…

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