Earlier this year, time constraints led me to pull the plug on publishing Sunday Conversations, at least for the time being. While these constraints haven’t gotten any less constraining, I had to make an exception to speak with my friend Alison Taylor.
Alison is a Clinical Associate Professor at the NYU Stern School of Business and former Executive Director of Ethical Systems. She is the author of Higher Ground: How Business Can Do the Right Thing in a Turbulent World, which the Financial Times named one of the best business books of 2024. You can read and listen to our conversation about Higher Ground here:
Over the past few years, Alison has cultivated a remarkably engaged and refreshingly human community of interesting people sharing interesting thoughts on LinkedIn. Fortunately for me, since I have not been on LinkedIn in a long time, Alison is now bringing this community to an email inbox near you with the launch of her Substack, Higher Ground.
I always learn a lot from Alison. She is one of those people whose perspective, no matter the topic or issue, is thoughtful, insightful, and routinely prescient. (This is why I have asked her, on numerous occasions, basically to predict the future.)
In this conversation, we cover a lot of ground, including:
the state of corporate responsibility and sustainability;
the impact (so far) of AI on the creative and consulting industries;
the possibility that Gen Z will resist the phoniness and fakery that defines the digital age;
the challenge of strengthening one’s attention muscles in said digital age;
the trials and tribulations of building and sustaining a sense of community on platforms like LinkedIn and Substack;
the uncomfortable overlap between elite corporate world-savers and the Democratic Party;
the head-scratching shortage of companies willing to, as Alison puts it, “center human dignity and respect and treat people properly”; and,
the hope-restoring power of connecting with people in person.
We even discuss the ethical leadership of—I can’t believe I’m writing this—JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon.
Speaking with Alison lifted my spirits at a moment when I needed it. I’m grateful for her willingness to surmount her own time constraints to record this conversation. It was delightful.1
This is an audio-only episode (time constraints, etc.). To hear this delightful conversation in full, click or tap ▶️ above, or search for “Reframe Your Inbox” wherever you get your podcasts. For those who would prefer to read rather than listen, Substack’s auto-generated transcripts tend to be uncomfortably accurate.
Show notes, a.k.a. some interesting books and articles referenced in this conversation:
We talk about Musa al-Gharbi’s phenomenal 2024 book, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite. I interviewed Musa for The.Ink last year.
We also discuss Alex McCann’s viral essay, “The death of the corporate job.”
And the final exchange refers to some of the ideas and questions I began exploring in an essay published here in January.
“Delight,” including all of its derivations, is my word of the year. I suspect that a life spent experiencing and appreciating moments of delight is probably a life well-lived. Last year’s word was “grace.” Still relevant.
