Several hours into a 6-hour flight to Vancouver, I finally finished Winners Take All by Anand Giridharadas.
I put the book down, pondered a bit, then opened laptop to find another distraction — I’d downloaded the movie Bombshell before the flight and had been meaning to watch it (the film chronicling the experiences of several women at Fox News who set out to expose CEO Roger Ailes for sexual harassment).
At one point, Charlize Theron in a pitch-perfect performance as Fox News correspondent Megyn Kelly faces the ire of her husband for pulling punches in a tough interview with then Presidential Nominee Donald Trump about his string of insulting comments about her.
“You absolved him,” he accused her.
“I need access to him,” she flipped back.
“But at what price?” he answered.
“The price of our apartment and my salary that pays our bills!” she shouted.
It was a movie moment that seemed to perfectly encapsulate the main theme Giridharadas explores throughout Winners Take All — that we live in an age dominated by economistic reasoning, where profitability leads to complicity or worse. And when it comes to actually speaking out against injustice and a bad system, the economically-powerful people who benefit from that system are paralyzed because it would go against their interests.
Giridharadas argues throughout the book, that moneyed corporations and powerful business elites — both the culprits and the benefactors of injustice — no matter how much money they donate, how many social programs they create, will never truly ‘do good’ for society as long as they’re doing so within the framework of a system that perpetuates lucrative growth, wealth and progress for themselves (and shuts others out).
In short, Giridharadas argues that well-behaved capitalism (what he calls a “win-win” approach to doing good) is tantamount to fraud. And the idea of “changing the world” has been hijacked by billionaires and corporations whose efforts to “do good” are second only to their desire to maintain a system that expands inequality, degrades the environment and exploits society.
Giridharadas’ conclusion is that in order to achieve true environmental and social prosperity — systems and institutional change is the only path.
Given our curriculum, you might assume sustainable practices or transformational principles could be a possible balm to Giridharadas’ criticisms, but no one is safe. Even B Corps are in the crosshairs.
Giridharadas acknowledges the good work B Corp has accomplished, but he doesn’t shy away from suggesting this “poster child” for the business world is merely a case study that doesn’t go far enough. It’s “method for social change,” he argues, only makes the world a better place in line with corporate values, simply cultivating examples of a different way, rather than tackling the real hard stuff — systemic work.
Andrew Kassoy, B Corp’s Co-Founder, also seems to wrestle with this, wondering aloud in an interview with Giridharadas if B Corp is capable of pushing the concept far enough:
“The thorniest questions, and the ones that seemed to anguish Kassoy, involved whether to stick to the [corporate world] mantra of ‘make good easier’, or whether instead to seek to make those who commit harm pay a higher price — which meant changing the system of business for everyone, fighting in the arena of politics and law rather than the market, and elevating the stopping of bad business over the encouragement of good business…”We’re not going to change everybody. We’re not changing human greed. Businesses act badly…’ Kassoy saw now, more clearly than he did at the company’s founding, that solving the problems of inequality, greed and pollution would require more than making good easier.”
I found it particularly interesting that this push-pull — between the hope that businesses can make good, and the idea that capitalism itself might be a cause of the problems we’re seeking to solve — was bubbling below the surface even during our first course module.
In his keynote to our class, Bob Willard said he believed “businesses have to solve [the problem], the government can’t solve it.” Later, MaRS’s Richard Blundell was quick to assert the opposite in his session with us — pointing out that only Government and policy could potentially mean the true difference.
I must say I loved this book. Its conclusion that society should help people through shared democratic institutions on behalf of all in the context of equality is easy to nod along to (and perhaps even put the idea in my head that I might want to get into politics someday).
But it also left me with questions.
For one, whose responsibility IS the public common? And on what level (community, versus country versus world, especially considering climate change)?
Our political institutions are not infallible. They’re made up of “laws, courts, elected officials, assumptions of agencies and rights, police, constitutions, regulations, taxes, shared infrastructure… and a million little pieces upholding our society that we own together,” but inherent to each of these is a story — a story we tell about ourselves.
That story requires the collective bargain of belief. What happens in society if belief in these societal stories fail? What if we don’t believe in our institutions?
The cracks begin to emerge in those institutions’ ability to gain consensus on the progress we need to make.
We’re living in a time of such an extreme overload of information and “stories,” I’m worried our ability to share a foundational faith in the common ones propping up our institutions today is shaky at best. I hope we find a way back to the conditions necessary to make those institutions better.
Until we do, I see corporations continuing to rush into the gaps with ‘win-win’ solutions that perhaps don’t go far enough.
Because even when an investment bank launches a program to help the poor, or when a fossil fuel company launches a tree-planting campaign — these gestures might look like a modest bit of good, but they do nothing about the larger system. And the true victims of the injustice perpetrated by these corporations and business elites don’t really win.
Like the ending of Bombshell, which seems to mark a feel-good story of David and Goliath — the women of Fox succeeding in ousting Roger Ailes and winning their suit against him — except when you find out the network, the system, ultimately paid out the perpetrators more than the actual victims.
