Transforming Business and Academia for the Public Good with Anita McGahan

Most business leaders overlook a crucial truth: organizations hold the power not just to generate profit, but to shape a more just, sustainable, and human-centered future. 

Professor Anita McGahan shares how aligning organizational purpose with shared human values can unlock innovation that benefits society at large, not just shareholders.

In this thought-provoking episode, Anita challenges the dominant profit-driven mindset, revealing how immense societal challenges—inequality, resource distribution, environmental degradation—are intimately connected to how organizations are structured and driven. You'll discover her insights on the deep purpose behind business, the importance of trust, and how paradigm shifts in organizational forms can foster shared prosperity and human dignity.We break down:

• Why business schools must embrace purpose-led education and leadership.
• How organizations can serve as vessels for societal well-being, beyond mere profit.
• The role of trust and hermeneutic generosity in bridging divides and fostering collaboration.
• Practical frameworks for reimagining organizational purpose aligned with shared human values.
• Anita’s personal journey from immigrant roots to global thought leader shaping organizational and societal change.

The stakes are clear: a world divided by inequality, mistrust, and environmental crises needs new leadership models focused on shared purpose. If we ignore this shift, we risk perpetuating systems that sustain injustice and fragmentation. But embracing purpose as a guiding principle opens pathways to innovation, equity, and resilience—making organizations vital platforms for global flourishing.

Perfect for leaders, educators, and changemakers committed to transforming business into a force for good. This episode leaves you with a new lens on how purpose-driven organizations can lead us toward a future where shared prosperity isn't a dream but reality.

Anita McGahan is a renowned scholar of strategy and innovation at the University of Toronto, known for her work on organizational purpose and societal impact, shaping the global conversation on business and human well-being.Join us to see how trust, purpose, and a hermeneutic of generosity can redefine leadership in the 21st century—and why it’s urgent we act now.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

This is reality proves possibility, an exploration of human ingenuity. This is Reality Proofs Possibility, and I am Michael Pearson. I'm honored to be here today with Professor Anita McGann, who is one of the world's leading scholars of strategy, organizations, and innovation in the public interest. Anita, thank you so much for joining. Just want to give you a give a little bit of a more polished introduction to you before I go to the first question. But you are the university professor at the University of Toronto, where you hold the George E. Connell Chair and Organization Society at the Rothman School of Management. And you're also appointed at the Monk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. And you have cross-appointments in medicine, public health, and really like that shows the breadth of the importance of your work across sectors in many ways and how organizations and markets can be designed to address some of the world's most pressing challenges. You've written on industry change, sustainable competitive advantage, and the creation of new fields. And you've helped shape the global conversation about role in business and advancing human and societal well-being. You've been a past president, or you've been the president of the Academy of Management, the premier institution of academic leaders, thinkers, professors, professionals in the space of management in the world. And for reality-proofs possibility, you have a special important voice because your work has been challenging us and the global audience beyond to think beyond the narrow ideas of business success. Your questions help us ask how can enterprise become a vehicle for the public good? How can strategies serve human dignity, institutional transformation, and global flourishing? And how can we build organizations that are not only capable of competing, but contributing and collaborating? So, Anita, I thank you for being here. Your work reminds us that business can be more than an engine of efficiency or profit. It can become a platform for innovation, justice, health, and shared prosperity. So it's a great honor to have you here with me on reality proofs possibility. Thank you. And my first question is really reality proves possibility. We can do better than this. What's your reaction?

SPEAKER_01 2:41

Well, first of all, Michael, thank you so much for that kind introduction and and for emphasizing uh you know the things you emphasized. I I feel I feel like the more seasoned I get, the older I get, the less I feel I really know. So it's so nice of you to call me a leader, but I I really do feel like a student of of these topics rather than uh, you know, expert on them. But thank you, thank you, thank you for the kind introduction. Reality meets possibility. What does this provoke in me? You and I have been friends for a while now, you know, and and and have had many conversations, and you've been a great friend to me in in crucial moments in my life, and I'm so grateful for that. You know, there's a there's a bunch of levels at which reality proves possibility kind of matters to me. Maybe the deepest level is that I think that we have we've a little bit lost touch with fundamental values that almost all persons share in things like peaceability and security and human actualization and connection with each other and meaning and human dignity and those ideas, and our shared purpose. Now, you've had many wonderful guests, including, for example, Rebecca Henderson talking about organizational purpose. I think there's a level of purpose that stands between those those values and um even organizational purpose, which is um our our shared uh uh uh sort of motivation for change, for for social for change. And most of that motivation, I think, comes from tensions between values that that are hard to reconcile. So, for example, sometimes it is difficult to maintain peace and peaceability as we think about creating inclusive access to uh the world's natural resources and the ways those are distributed across the globe are not always aligned with shared access. And we are fighting and even having a war and wars over uh the distribution of rights to access to the world's minerals and and other important resources. So the impetus for purpose comes from trade-offs between shared values, and then organizations get crafted as tools for trying to accomplish purpose. And those the organizations' purpose, which is so well articulated in many of the areas where you're most active, the Humanistic Management Association, all the work you're done in MSR division of the Academy of Management, all that kind of conversation about how do uh how do groups of us get together to create organizations that accomplish some of these, some of the change we need to enact really a social or human purpose that progresses us toward accomplishing our shared needs. And then what's the right organizational form to do that? Should it be business? Should it be public sector? Should it be third sector? What's the right organizational form to accomplish that? And then what are the implications of that for our goals and for pathways to accomplishing that purpose? And then how do we travel that in ways that are consistent ultimately with our most important values? And you know, I think we're kind of alignment in uh a deep sense at this at the of that kind of pyramid of understandings. So we are fighting about all sorts of stuff, we're at odds with each other, we we we can't communicate effectively because we we have a little bit lost sight of our shared humanity, our shared, you know, commitment to things, to really foundational justice, equality, inclusion, peaceability, uh, prosperity, you know, the sustainability of the planet and so on. I've talked for too long, Michael. Please forgive me.

SPEAKER_00 6:55

No, no, it's perfect. And I think uh, I mean, you have so many accolades in your career, and you have been so um successful, and you may not see this as you shake your head, but in many ways, I mean you have given voice to to these conversations also through the academy and also in other ways, and I think we want to go there in a way uh in a moment to see like what sort of have been your impact levers that you have been playing with, sometimes in the background, sometimes in the foreground. But can you share a little bit your journey? What do you see right now at this stage? So the formative pieces, the formative inquiries that you've been engaged with that got you to be where you are now.

SPEAKER_01 7:41

And I I think you may be asking me about my professional journey, or are you thinking a lot about it?

SPEAKER_00 7:47

And it's connected, right? Because ultimately the personal transforms into the Sure. So anything that you see there from a personal perspective, challenge, quarrel, or inquiry or early interest, I think it'd be very interesting to hear what you consider sort of those formative, crucible moments.

SPEAKER_01 8:07

So I have to share with our listeners, Michael, that you're sitting in New York City, which is my hometown. My parents are uh first-generation Americans. Their parents uh were born mostly in Ireland and were part of the diaspora that came to New York City um mostly in the 19th century, uh, before the big potato famine. A paternal grandfather was uh uh uh immigrated in 1921 as his father sought to um to uh escape the war in Belfast. I only learned quite a you know a bit about some of these uh experiences recently. It's so funny. My life partner, who as you know is Professor Sarah Kaplan, is she's part of a diaspora that left some of the same areas of Great Britain in the 1700s, and she actually knows more about her ancestry than I do because many of my ancestors left, left Great Britain, left Ireland in under distress. It was not a well-documented, well-organized uh immigration. And in particular, my great-grandfather, when my my father's father's father came to Philadelphia in the early part of the 20th century and then decided to move his family to New York City instead of Philadelphia because they were all involved in shipbuilding and mechanical trades. And from that story of moving my my parents and grandparents moving into the Irish diaspora in New York City and the prominent role of industry, in this case, my my grandfather, for example, worked as a machinist in the newspapers in New York City. My I have many, many relatives in the Catholic Church, uh church and then clergy in New York City, because that's what they were trained to do from their heritage in Ireland. From there, we moved on this kind of amazingly classical immigrant story that's been documented by scholars such as Zekernandez at Wharton, first generation, second generation, into finance in New York City and ultimately into business schools. And I was the first in my family to go to business school. My parents, my parents were the first in their families to go to college. I went to business school, my brothers went to business school, now their children are going to business school and now running companies and being kind of leaders. And it's in some ways a classic American story of a non-American heritage. And I was enormously blessed by that heritage. My parents were amazing. They were very young when I was born, hardly into their 20s. They cared tons about acting with dignity and education and community. They were super, super nice and super attentive people that believed that if they dressed nicely and pursued education and politely asked questions and tried their best, that they would be elevated through social mobility into opportunity. And they were right. And they did a good job at that. My mother was raised by her own single mother and her aunts, nine of them living in a Bronx tenement apartment, being raised by the eldest sister of nine. And uh, my mother was part of that. And, you know, they all shared this kind of sense of, you know, mutual commitment and this idea that they could pursue opportunity. Some of the in my professional life, in my personal story, just a couple of, let me just mention a couple of things that have been formative for me. And you tell me, Michael, what's of greatest interest to your audience. I had a humanistic undergraduate education. I um was very fortunate to get some scholarships. Um was my parents were completely committed to a non-parochial education. They wanted us in the public schools, really encouraged me. They they wanted me to, my brothers and I were all, I wouldn't say required, but pretty much required to get a humanistic undergraduate education. I had amazing mentors that cared about me a lot, that I really trusted, that helped me navigate going to graduate school and figure out what that means. I got, I was very lucky to be born at a time when women were more, we're making our way into leadership positions in a range of domains, including in business. And there was, I had some mentors who really wanted me to be successful uh as they advocated for that. And then in my career, also um, I I also uh had the benefit of uh I gotta let me see if I can try to say this succinctly. I was like Harvard Business School um kind of deep mind, and then climbed out of that as that system both failed me a little bit and was failing to meet the needs really of um of my generation and the generations that came behind me. It was meeting other needs, but it wasn't meeting some of the needs of very profound needs of my generation. And then I have been since then unbelievably supported by my scholarly friends who share um commitment to good science and to um uh a humanely embedded uh scientific progress that um that I think is critical to the relevance of social scholarship uh uh in the future. And then uh I also was fortunate, as you know, to uh to to have uh the support of our scholarly community of of business school professors in electing me into leadership on a platform that business education needed to be broadened and modernized and amplified to reflect some of our shared values for purpose. And I've just been fortunate to enjoy, to mostly really enjoy the whole journey.

SPEAKER_00 14:18

Well, that's wonderful, and that's touching and it's moving me, and I'm having getting goosebumps just because you're sharing from such a deep commitment, and I think also just the the legacy that you're referencing in many ways is almost like uh an obligation that I think you're sort of taking on, right? And it's like, okay.

SPEAKER_01 14:37

Maybe it's I don't know, I feel lucky.

SPEAKER_00 14:40

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, yeah, I mean, from what I'm hearing you say, is like, okay, you understand the power of a model of social mobility that works with decency, that works with hard work, contribution, respect, and dedication. And it sort of rewards that over luster, over, let's say, other kind of domineering, domination-oriented behaviors. I'm curious in what way you would sort of see some of the crucible moments for yourself, because you've been a superstar, I think, in many ways, like where you had mentors and you had people see you and had people elevate you, and that's fantastic. And I would like to hear from you a little bit what what do you want to share about that, and what what was sort of made the biggest impact on you, and what what did you take away that maybe you can share with others that are following your footsteps, following other people's, following maybe their own path, but want to learn like how how did you do it, or how how did somebody of your stature do it without aggrandizing? But I I think and you you did your PhD very young, very quickly, very I think with with some of the most famous people.

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SPEAKER_01 15:57

I had

(Cont.) Transforming Business and Academia for the Public Good with Anita McGahan

SPEAKER_01 15:59

yeah, so yeah, I I wasn't I wasn't super young, actually. I I entered the PhD program when I was 28. I got I graduated when I was 30, so I did get my job.

SPEAKER_02 16:09

It was very short.

SPEAKER_01 16:10

Yeah, it was short. Um there's an interesting story about that, which is that Dick Caves, who's my thesis advisor, who of course um also advised Michael Porter and Punk Gamuat and others. We talked about Rebecca, it was just amazing scholars that were out of that business economics community in the late 1980s at Harvard. At the time when I was a PhD candidate, the Harvard Economics Department, which is where that program was rooted, still very much in traditions of economics that have even only in the past 10 years been deeply questioned as to gender equity issues and issues of um of response to voice. And I'll tell you a story in case it's of use, because it illustrates a couple of things that might be useful to your listeners. One of them is when I was a second-year PhD candidate, I, and this was very much with Dick Hayes' encouragement, submitted a couple of seminar papers to journals that got RRs. And back then, RRs were not as hard to get as they are now. The journals that he had me submit to were journals that were being either newly formed or there were calls for papers from his friends. And you know how as a senior scholar, sometimes you get opportunities to publish, and they're not really something you're interested in, but you give them to your doctoral students. It was a little bit like that. Okay. So I had published two papers or something like that in my second year. I ended up taking my comprehensive exams and got a grade of C, C on my comprehensive exams on February 16th, 1990. And I went into Dick's office and I said, Oh my God, I'm so embarrassed. I didn't do as well as I wanted. And I'm, I, I, I'll take them again. I I know this is a terrible reflection on our program, and I'm really, really sorry. And he said to me, Dick was very much like a Ben Franklin kind of personality. He said to me, Um, give me a little, give me a couple days. I want to look into this. And it turned out he came back to me and said that one of my three blue books had fallen off the computer, and so I got a C based on two of three blue books worth of comments. And once they read the third blue book, I got an A. Okay, so the blue book had fallen, fallen behind the computer. And I was, I can't tell you how relieved I was. And then I think almost in that same meeting, this is February of 1990, he said to me, Anita, I think you've done three essays and the requirement is three published papers. I think you should graduate. And I remember leaving his office and saying, I don't want to graduate, I still have two years of funding and I want to learn more. And then I went back and I said, Did you say I could graduate? And he said, Yes, and I think you should. And so I did. I graduated. And that's how I got to graduate in two years. About, I don't know, seven or eight years ago. I'm gonna get the timing wrong here. Dick, I got a word that Dick cave, so now we're talking, you know, fast forward here, like 30 years, right? I got a call that Dick was sick. He had fallen. And I rose to Cambridge from Toronto. I got on an airplane, and uh he had fallen, he was in a wheelchair, he was quite elderly, an amazing art collector, by the way. Just a fantastic uh story, friends, young friends with like Jasper Johns and had all these like anyway. So we're sitting in the midst of these paintings on the walls, and in his living room, and he said to me, you know, Anita, they didn't drop your they didn't drop your thing behind the behind the uh copier. They they they just didn't want you to get an A. And I thought all those years I I had thought I had never occurred to me that that is what might have happened. And so when I look back on why I graduated in two years, Michael, it really wasn't because I was fully developed. It was because someone who really cared about me did not feel like I was going to get an opportunity to develop as much as I might might be able to develop in that environment. He he cared more about me than about the project of admitting women into economics. Not that he didn't care about that. He did. He did. He was an incredible feminist, but so much a feminist that he made me into a sort of minimal celebrity for graduating from Harvard within two years as a response to um what he saw as unfair behavior. And I didn't even know that that was what was happening. Okay. And my life has been like that, Michael. Okay, it really has been like that. And part of that is also because I'm LGBTQ, you know, not just a woman, but also this intersectional minorities, where people have looked at me and they've, you know, I think Dake the reason that he really related to me, there were some deep reasons that he really related to me. Let me just put it that way, okay? And um he he wanted me to to not have to use my energy and my commitment to an intellectual life. He didn't want me to have to use that to fight for a right to be in the profession. He wanted me to be be supported by other people who really could elevate me and help me do that, right? And for him, that meant turning me over. Over to HBS, and which was where I come from from my MBA. Now, I do not do not begrudge in any way what happened when I went through at HBS, but I did not, I did not have the same experience of support there that I had immense support from John MacArthur, who was 1,000% um looking out for me in ways that I did not know. Even at the University of Toronto, I see all these senior people who helped me in ways that I at the time didn't know, including Merrick Gertler, the former president of the University of Toronto, who got me these cross appointments that you've that you so kindly described. Jenny Mansbridge, who is an eminent political scientist, who is my undergraduate professor, who I'm sure I'm going to have dinner with at least three times this summer. She introduced me to incredible opportunities that were so highly aligned and sort of marshaled me along. I am sure that I don't even know the half of the ways that these people helped me. I just trusted them and they were trustworthy.

SPEAKER_00 23:10

Wow. Wow. Wow. I mean, in some way, as you say it, you were lucky and it is joyful. At the same time, these kind of barriers that are so invisible that you didn't even see, even though you experienced them and your mentor saw them or looked into them. I mean, it's it's uh I mean Rebecca would be another person.

SPEAKER_01 23:32

Yeah. I mean, she was a little bit ahead of me, not tons ahead of me. I know that she said things and did things that ultimately created opportunities for me. And you know, there's another piece of this also, Michael, which I I feel you and I share. I love your thoughts on this, which is I also feel super lucky to have been an educator, not just a researcher. There are thousands and thousands and thousands of students who have brought immense, immensely rich experiences into our classrooms. And in it in Toronto, we have a lot of students that come from different traditions, like from Islamic or Muslim backgrounds, who want a North American education but cannot easily get into the United States. We have lots of students that come from just a wide range of linguistics or cultural frameworks that are seeking to assimilate. You know, it's it's it's been an enormous joy to discover and talk through our shared goals for trying to create human actualization and prosperity and you know, great personal experiences. When I was a business school student at HBS in the 1980s, our kind of prevailing ethos as MBA candidates was to try to become financially independent of our parents, right? And and to be, I mean, you can understand like a lot of us, uh, there was quite a few uh students there that were from rich families, but many students like me, you know, had we're the we're the most recent generation of a generation of people that struggled to, you know, for subsistence. And I remember graduating and feeling like, okay, I'm never gonna have to worry about food again, you know. My brothers coming to my graduation and saying, we want to go to business school because we don't want to worry about having food again either, you know. I don't mean to say that as a a um, you know, in any way to kind of cultivate some sort of, I don't know, support that I now need. But now I have students in my classroom that are coming to the NBA program at University of Toronto because they don't want to worry about subsistence anymore. And they've got gigantic families in places like Iran or Brazil or South America, you know, other parts of South America or Southeast Asia that they want to migrate and bring to Canada. And their goals in coming to the Rotman School are to create that possibility. And I can relate to that and feel enormously connected to them as a result of that understanding.

SPEAKER_00 26:15

Yeah, well. And uh I mean it's yeah, pardon me.

SPEAKER_01 26:22

I was just gonna say the organizations of the corporation is a tool. It's not the end and of itself, it's just a vehicle for trying to accomplish uh shared prosperity in a way that is accessible.

SPEAKER_00 26:36

And what I'm hearing, so we're using Bachminster Fuller's phrase of creating a world that works for everyone, um, in a sense that that that's basically a tool, right? It business can be a tool for that, shared prosperity, whatever you want to call it, well-being, flourishing, all of these things. And I think you mentioned uh before that society somehow has has seemed to have lost that sort of let's say guiding, shared, unifying purpose around just an assumption that, yeah, okay, you can go to business school, you can go to medical school, you can go to this. And the idea is that you're contributing in a way while not suffering, right? While not having to suffer or worry about somehow meeting your own fundamental needs. And right now, I I don't know how you see the world developing, evolving, or maybe where your energies are right now, because I think with health and with other focal points that you have taken on, we can say there's lots of opportunity in a different way. And I think in the 80s and and all of that, that opportunity presented itself slightly differently. Now we have other opportunities, and I think oftentimes our privilege as educators is the opportunity to educate always exists. The question is, what for? And what are we bringing to the table as, or what are we what are we getting, developing in people that's already there so that there is more of the capacity that they need to flourish themselves for society for others? So I'm just curious, what do you see what where is your energy right now in terms of pursuing that that endeavor?

SPEAKER_01 28:20

So I am scheduled to retire as a professor at the University of Toronto next month. But I've already, and Sarah would tell you this with some trepidation, I've already recreated my job uh 17 times over, I think, probably doing different things. What I what I want to do is fewer things with more focus, fewer higher leverage things. So let me tell you about three of them, and then again, we can talk about whatever's of greatest interest to you, Michael. So one of them is I'm going to be the vice chair, I'm currently the vice chair, and I will be continuing to contribute to an interdisciplinary college at the University of Toronto called Massey College, which brings in graduate students from all different disciplines, from medicine and engineering to journalism, music, medieval studies, business, of course, across the entire university. University of Toronto is quite a strong graduate community. So we have uh graduate students, and it's it's an interdisciplinary college along the lines that I was a part of as an undergrad at Northwestern that Jenny Mansbridge was affiliated with in a senior fellow role, like I'm affiliated now with Massey. And what we're doing is trying to uh figure out ways to talk to each other across disciplinary boundaries, of course, but also across all the cultural boundaries that I just alluded to as relevant at University of Toronto. Students from Muslim backgrounds, from Islamic backgrounds, Jewish students, students from, you know, other religious backgrounds, including Christianity, but also predominantly including Eastern religions. Okay. And everybody living in the same space, trying to in uh to have a dialogue. Now, we often think about purpose, and purpose is of course directed toward change. What exactly do we want to change? Where exactly do we want what are we trying to craft change to enact? Like what are the what are the outcomes of change that we want? My own view is that much of that is around amplifying shared val, shared um, you know, uh shared uh uh uh ideas, shared principles, shared um um shared actualization of things like I was talking about at the beginning, things like peacefulness and being able to be in the present moment and not suffering, and some sort of sense of equanimity and some sense of civility and warmth and compassion and community. So we're trying to create that and trying to learn how to do that as a microcosm of a cultural framework that reflects the global diversity that arises in places like New York City and Toronto and around the world. So that's one thing. The second thing I'm doing, and you've been such a joyful contributor to this, Michael. Thank you, is a project called Private Innovation in the Public Interest through the Byrne Center for Social Change at Northeastern, where I will be a senior research scientist in Boston again. This is run by our old friend Beth Novak, who ran an opening governance uh research network that I was a part of with the MacArthur Foundation for 14 years or something like that. So old friends who offer each other what I call a hermeneutic of generosity. That means that when we don't understand each other, we still try to trust each other and figure out what why we don't understand each other. Hermeneutic of generosity is about giving each other the benefit of the doubt and trying to figure out how we can get ourselves aligned. And a lot of the work of the Burns Center and private innovation of the public interest is engaging with AI as a tool for having those kinds of conversations. So that's the second thing. And then the third thing is I'm doing a lot of work with police departments and fire departments and other public service agencies at the city level. I'm teaching a um a course in Toronto to police chiefs who are interested in leadership about these ideas. And I tell you, there's no greater commitment to understanding the stakes on reconstituting civil and community than in emergency service providers, including physicians. I've worked, I think I've co-authored with 11 physicians or something like that. And I'm working increasingly with um police leaders, fire leaders. Policing is now really changing. It's moving off the streets and into surveillance and into digitization in a greater to a much greater extent. And many police chiefs are awig to the potential for a loss of human connection in communities that can occur as a result of that. I also have a long-standing commitment to the arts, which uh I remember sitting on my father's shoulders at the New York City Ballet. I myself went to the New York, I got a, when I was a uh high school student, went to Juilliard and and and did a bunch of stuff in the arts. And I'm very um interested in what we can do to cultivate a commitment to the arts as a way of of creating kind of a really nuanced appreciation for our share, our shared experiences as humans, our shared humanity.

SPEAKER_00 33:51

Wow, that's wonderful. That's that's great. And so are you gonna retire or are you just a retirement to get some work done? I think that's the that's the privilege, and uh that's the that's what I mean. You you have a calling, right? And and I think in many ways it's not a job, it's not a um career in that sense, it's just something like you can't necessarily give up because it's part of your fabric in many ways that I think you want to keep contributing in in many ways and shapes and forms that you can, and that's that's that's really inspiring. And and uh I'm um I'm curious, what do you see if there was one thing that the world needs right now from business schools?

SPEAKER_01 34:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 34:36

Or from the community at, let's say, the Academy of Management, what would it be? I I just want to remind people that the Moonshots initiative and and the initiative of like just thinking outside of the traditional confines of the Academy, that was really led and facilitated by you and your presidency and in many ways opening up conversations. What is the role of the Academy of Management and beyond to society? Is there such a an obligation? We see that questioning in society at large, and I think there's still no good answer. What do you think? What do you see? Like if you were to give one thing, let's say two, that we as Academy.

SPEAKER_01 35:15

Yeah. So first of all, um thank you so much for this question. You we we have something like 20% of undergrads and 25% of graduate students around the world enrolled in business schools, and and it is by far and away the largest uh area of study of students. So it is huge, a huge opportunity if we can shape the business school uh curriculum. But I would say today, and thank you for crediting me with accomplishments. I feel like every day I'm just trying to get stuff like just deal with what's immediately before me, but somehow it's led um to this these accolades that you've described, which I feel like I don't deserve, to be honest, but here we go. Um, you know, date, some of the things that our generation has accomplished are moving away from the uh crafting the function of business as profit maximization to thinking about the business of purpose, uh the business of business in society as a tool for accomplishing organizational purpose that is fueled by the pursuit of profit. In other words, the corporate form is designed to be motivated by the pursuit of profit to accomplishing something, but that thing that it accomplishes has to be more important than the pursuit of profit that gets distributed to a group of already billionaires. Okay. So there's a lot of work to do to try to find new organizational forms that are designed for this century that can enable the pursuit of a broader set of goals than only the enrichment of a few people. Okay. Um, the by the way, the enrichment of a few people I find really dreary as a motivation. I do not see that as interesting or really compelling or something that I want to devote my life to, certainly. I'm and and that's always been true, and that really comes from my parents. What I'm really interested in is how to how can corporations allow people to be in the zone, to be working with each other in highly, highly generative teams, creative, warm, compassionate, constructive teams that are organized to do something that's bigger than just enrichment of a few people. And how is technology enabling that? And where does that come from? And what is the technology really being driven by super, super cool questions? We have the enormous advantage of a legacy of science. Science is, of course, oriented toward evidence-based reasoning and truthfulness, but it's also we have a tremendous constructive hermeneutic of generosity, procedures for allowing each other to be incorrect, to build on each other. We have this culture in science of the accumulation of insight over time. No one of us is expected to finish the entire enterprise of constructing the truth. So that is an incredible resource for us as an educational and scholarly community of academics, which is to build on those traditions of, you know, I thought, I think I was wrong three years ago when I said something, or I can't quite see what you've done, Michael, that squares up against with what the caves did or with what somebody else did. How do we, how do we talk about working together to try to develop a deeper truth without crushing each other or you know, destroying each other uh as ill-intentioned? Okay, so we have a tremendous momentum there and and creating moving beyond purpose and change as our only motivation. And this is very related to some of your work, Michael, on sustainable environmental frameworks, which is what do we really need to change? The profit motive as an engine for innovation tended to drive more and more exploitation of the resources of the planet toward consumption. I think we all agree, at least not all, maybe not all of us, but many of us agree that that needs to get interrogated. My students now don't really seem to care about consumption so much as they care about the fulfillment of a lot of these other possibilities, like a compassionate life and a life full of warmth and mutual care, something to do with um a more nuanced understanding of the depth of human experience and uh the enablement through techno technological uh adopt technology adoption of more meaningful work and stuff like that. How do we how do we um you know equip the next generation of students um in in a deeply personal way to work together to accomplish these aims requires thinking about more than only purpose. It requires about uh thinking about more than only change for change's sake. It requires thinking about really um, you know, how what are the pathways? Uh what what are the pathways and the goals and the purposes that lead us to places where we want to live in the future, uh uh in a in a very broad sense. So I don't know. I I have enormous faith in our students. I just want to create space for them to be them.

SPEAKER_00 41:06

Hmm I mean, wow, yeah. That's basically education, allowing the space for them to develop and let out what there is and maybe encourage. And I think you have done that in in different ways and also novel formats in teaching some of these. Well, some of that. I I'd like to know and learn actually how you were able to do some of that and and put that in place because it seems like a high touch, a high-touch sort of arrangement, but the same way as you're describing it, it could be a very scalable, very scalable opportunity for everybody. Like, okay, how do we generate the spaces for people to self-actualize, develop, be guided, be in the space of inquiry and self-development. Um not at the end of their quote unquote professional career, but actually already at the beginning.

SPEAKER_01 42:01

That's what I'm trying to do with the podcast a little bit is you know, my podcast is talking with my friends really about what they're finding in their work and what their research programs are about, what they've learned, where they were wrong, where they were right, what they think is important. And the sum really adds up to more than the parts in any individual scholar's publications. You know, each one of us has to be so narrow and thoughtful about the claims we make in print. There's not a lot of space for us to talk about the broader understandings that we're developing out of serial sets of projects, right? So part of the educational, um the educational ambition that I have is to allow that knowledge to come forward, right? And that's what Pi Squared is about, private innovation and the public interest, which I I hope uh some of you may be motivated to listen to, especially Michael's forthcoming episode. There's that. Then there's also at the college, there's the nuts and bolts, you know, of sitting at a table with people that come from completely different cultural traditions, some of which are in conflict in the world, not in the college, but out there, and trying to figure out what do we share in terms of our, we all want human prosperity for future generations. We all want warmth. We all want a sense of of kind of mutual commitment, of community safety, of you know, a sustainable model for almost everybody finds excess consumption meaningless and debilitating. You know, we're what needs to then change in terms of the discernment of particular purposes, like for example, you know, overcoming s the institutional structures that have given rise to some of the problems that are being equal access to different kinds of resources. Or the centralization of wealth. What kinds of purposes can we sustain a commitment to over time to try to break the block, the things that are blocking progress? Sometimes you almost feel like you have to just deconstruct a lot of stuff that's just got become its own, it's uh weighing us down.

SPEAKER_00 44:18

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So people say it's unlearning, removing transformational learning, removing giving up certain uh quote-unquote.

SPEAKER_02 44:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 44:27

Yeah, no, that's that's wonderful. Well, do you want to speak maybe before we before I give you the uh the one of the questions uh that Marcel Proust asked his friend uh to conclude? W what what is it that that moves you right now? What is it that you want to involve other people in that you want other people to know that maybe there is a shared commitment, a higher purpose in the work that you want to offer?

SPEAKER_01 44:56

You know, Michael, I think we just need to offer each other a hermeneutic of generosity. You know, I I you and I have been friends for so long, and every single time I turn around, you're doing something amazing. You're you're doing all these new initiatives, not just this podcast, but the Humanistic Management Association. You come from a group at Gabelli, Business School at Fordham, that has long amplified and elevated management spirituality and religion. Of course, that tradition at Fordham of, you know, really talking about shared values. Of course, you know, this um uh this doesn't involve a lack of criticism, right? They came from a tradition of criticizing institutions because they they they inevitably have to be siloed, and those silos create borders that, you know, uh that need to sometimes come down. So the institutions are not the end game. They're just part of a process of trying to actualize important shared aims. And if we give each other hermeneutics of generosity across borders, we can do that much more easily than if we just try to run into stone walls over and over again and hope that sometimes they will fall down. You know, being generous to each other, giving each other the benefit of the doubt, for me feels like a fabric that can allow us to cut through some of these these.

SPEAKER_00 46:22

Wonderful. And that that's a cultural shift in many ways. Uh and and and I know that you will join us at the Academy of Management Pre-conference and after, and we're gonna have more opportunity and conversations around those issues and how we establish this hermeneutic of generosity and and what works and and and and what are some of the pathways to collaboration. I think that's really what the time calls for. It's like, yeah, we're talking competition, competition, competition, and it's like, okay, at this point, the game may be collaboration, and how do we structure it so that we have, and I think that what you're describing, that generosity, that approach to engaging by not dominating, but by allowing for the uh the learning, the mutual learning around some higher purpose. I think that's really sort of what times call for, and and I'm excited to to hear more from you on that. So thank you so much for for being here, for your generosity, for your leadership. Doesn't go unnoticed.

SPEAKER_01 47:28

I just I was at the Alberta Institutions Conference last June, and Sarah actually introduced me and she told these institution scholars, who are amazing, that when I was president of the academy, I was given a death threat. I was I had a death threat, and I took the guy that made the death threat out for drinks and lunch or something. I learned that he was really, really struggling, you know, he's personally and professionally, and we become friends. Didn't it's this idea of trying to see behind what someone says to understand why they're so upset or what's motivating them, you know, and not letting kind of institutionalized ways of responding to each other overwhelm us, right?

SPEAKER_00 48:17

Wow. Wow, wow, wow, wow.

SPEAKER_01 48:20

No, I mean it the guy was really suffering. You know?

SPEAKER_00 48:26

Well, there is so much suffering going on that we can't even see and sense that we're not giving space to. And so therefore, it actually channels its energy probably into all this destructive and self-destructive activity that we're witnessing right now. And for me, I say that this is probably a lack of dignity of being seen and heard and being treated as a human being that sort of allows people to or forces people to lash out in the in the most well ultimately self-destructive, but really destructive to all of our ways of of being and behaving. So wow, thank you so much for for sharing and for that courage.

SPEAKER_01 49:06

And for yeah, I mean I mean, if you take it down a notch, it doesn't even feel like courage. It just feels like responding to this person as a person, right?

SPEAKER_00 49:15

Exactly. But that takes courage because it's easier to see each other as whatever something else, right? And that's I think part of the part of the educational opportunity is like how do we still see each other not as stakeholders or as this or that, but it's ultimately humans and it's not voters and it's not consumers, and it's not woman, man, or whatever it is that we sort of build up as sort of quasi-helpful categories of for distinction, but really like how do we not lose sight of that shared humanity that you mentioned? Which I think is is sort of the solution to many of the issues that allow us that generosity then to emerge, right?

SPEAKER_01 49:54

And so And it and it turns out to be incredibly rewarding and not nearly as requiring not it's not nearly as demanding as you know taking your family and getting on a leaky boat and trying to cross the Atlantic, right?

SPEAKER_02 50:07

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 50:08

Or tromping through the jungle in Colombia and South, you know, the Central American court or you know, trying to escape the the the persecution, political persecution. It's it's it just takes a little bit of focus and effort. It's not hard. So thank you, Michael, for being so amazing.

SPEAKER_00 50:30

Well, thank you. Thank you, thank you. So now I almost was already the the uh crescendo, but I I do want to end with sort of a side note on other questions. And I thank you again for just being here as a as a human, as a mensch. Yeah, any number from one to thirty-five. Fifteen. Fifteen. Okay, so it's a little scary. What or who is the greatest love of your life?

SPEAKER_01 50:54

Well, I was talking about Sarah, who is an organizational theorist who retired last year, even though she's a little bit younger than me. And I finally found out, Michael, what Sarah's really bad at, which is retirement. She's written a book. She's writing a book on uh designing products for inclusion. And I think it's called Products for the People right now is the working title. She cares so deeply about the communities in which she's involved, to the point where sometimes she needs a little bit of downtime because just processing uh the interactions she has is so amazing. But ultimately, she is incredibly effective at leading complex, inclusive conversations about how to change the world to accomplish the kind of prosperity and humanity that we've been discussing. And I just admire that. So every single day I feel like I, you know, benefit joyfully from seeing those accomplishments.

SPEAKER_00 51:56

Beautiful. Well, greetings to Sarah. Thank you so much for being here, for making yourself available and to be continued.

SPEAKER_01 52:05

I can't wait. Thank you, Michael.