Elizabeth Oldfield speaks to co–chair of COOK and co–founder of B Corp UK James Perry. 27/04/2022
James is co–chair and co–founder of COOK, the very fancy and very delicious frozen food company. He is also co–founder and board member of the B Corp, co–chairman of B Lab UK and a founding partner of Snowball, which is a multi–asset impact investment manager. He has also been deputy chairman of the social Stock Exchange. Wherever people have been thinking about how business and capital can be used for positive social purpose, you will find James.
He speaks about his three sacred values of original goodness, interdependence and autonomy, feeling politically homeless, and why he thinks it’s possible for business to do good in the world.
You can read a full transcript here:
Elizabeth
Hello, and welcome to The Sacred. My name is Elizabeth Oldfield, and this is a podcast about our deepest values, the things that are sacred to us, and how we can get better at building understanding and empathy across the very many divides, which increasingly seem to define our common life. How can we engage better with people who might be different from us or disagree with us, whether that’s professionally, politically, philosophically or religiously? Every episode I speak to someone who has some kind of public voice or platform and try to get to know them on a deeper level beyond the small talk, adversarial debate, or positioning and political posturing that defines so much of our public conversations.
As always, because a non–needy podcast host is no podcast host at all, we would love if you would leave us a review, you can do as you’re listening, as you’re walking along, on the loo, wherever you like, a rating on your podcast app always helps. And perhaps the deepest joy we get is when someone gets in touch and says that they’ve used an episode of the podcast to spark or nurture a deeper conversation with someone they know. So feel free to send an episode of the podcast that you think someone might be interested in and say, This made me think about this, and see where you end up. I do read all the emails and tweets, I really love it when guests get in touch. There’s been also quite a few great guest suggestions coming in. So please do keep those coming.
In this episode, I spoke to James Perry. James is co–chair and co–founder of Cook, the very fancy and very delicious frozen food company. He is also co–founder and board member of the B Corp, co–chairman of B Lab UK and in the episode you can hear a lot more about what B Corporations are and what they’re trying to do. He is also a founding partner of Snowball, which is a multi–asset impact investment manager. Yep, I’m not entirely clear what that is either. And he has also been deputy chairman of the social Stock Exchange. Basically wherever people have been thinking about how business and capital can be used for positive social purpose, you will find James.
We spoke about his three sacred values: original goodness, interdependence and autonomy. He had the clearest and most thought out list of sacred values of anyone I’ve spoken to. We also spoke about him feeling politically homeless, the role of faith, and why he thinks it’s possible for business to do good in the world. As usual, there are some reflections from me on that end of the episode. And meanwhile, I really hope you enjoy listening.
James, I’m going to ask you what you hold sacred. It is not your classic conversation opener. And really, you can go wherever you like with it but, broadly, what I mean by it is deep principle of value that if someone offered you money to give up, you would feel insulted. So you can bracket out your family, you can reject the premise of the question, you can take it where you like, but you’ve had a bit of time, what is sacred to you?
James
Well, one of my values actually I wouldn’t take money is that I wouldn’t take money to give it up. Because the third, the third of my sacred values is autonomy. But the first one is original goodness. The second one is interdependence. And the third one is autonomy.
Elizabeth
Amazing, I love headings. Unpack those for me.
James
Well, the first one, original goodness, I think people often look at others with a sort of spirit of judgement. And they ascribe some sort of malign intent to them. And one of my sacred values is that people are good. Underneath, there is a sort of original goodness in us all. Sometimes you have to dig quite deep and work quite hard to find it. But I believe it’s there. And in some ways that kind of inspires this idea that light and darkness are a kind of choice, you know, you can sort of profit and benefit in the short term from making choices that you kind of know you probably shouldn’t be making. But longer term, you know, you’re better off by choosing the light, and I think original goodness helps you to sort of lean into that goodness rather than layering on other stuff.
Elizabeth
Thank you. I’m sure we’re gonna feel that thread coming through more. Interdependence?
James
Well, you know, I see that we’ve had one political idea over the last 50 years, which is individualism, and it’s kind of infiltrated both left and right. So the right see it as, you know, the, the sort of highest purpose is to maximise your own financial interests, profit–maximising, Alpha investment, all of the rest of it. And the left I think have sort of reduced people to sort of units of production and units of welfare and want to have wanted to build these giant sort of bureaucratic machines to process people. I actually don’t believe that we are individuals, I don’t believe that we exist outside of a context. And that context is our community, our families, our relationships, but also the planet and the ecosystems where we live. So I believe in interdependence, and that means that you sort of approach the world in a completely different way to approaching it as an individualist, which is kind of how our political economy has recently evolved.
Elizabeth
Just define alpha investing?
James
Alpha investing is profit maximising. So I put out capital and to some extent, well to all extent, the social and environmental consequences of that are not my problem, because I’m only interested in maximising the financial interests
Elizabeth
Got it. And your third sacred value…
James
Is autonomy. Because I’m a difficult fellow, and I don’t like to take orthodoxies without challenging them. And freedom to think, freedom to challenge and freedom to pursue an alternative path, is sacred to me.
Elizabeth
Where do you find yourself politically? Do you feel homeless? Or is there a tribe that holds those three things together enough?
James
Well, I think that ultimately, it comes back to this point about interdependence versus individualism. I think that all of the political establishment has fallen into the trap of individualism. So for example, you know, Margaret Thatcher disseminated neoliberal economics in the UK, Ronald Reagan did it in the US, Mikhail Gorbachev kind of embraced it also. It’s not gone challenged by the left. So Tony Blair, and Gordon Brown, they never challenged neoliberal economics, they never challenged the idea that the purpose of the economy is to maximise the financial interests of shareholders, which was an enormous error. But what it means is that for somebody who’s an interdependent, I don’t really have anyone who speaks to me, in the kind of conventional political realm. I think it’s changing pretty fast. But what’s interesting is it’s changing pretty fast on both left and right, so I find people I identify with, and really, yeah, and really kind of follow on both the left and the right.
Elizabeth
Helpful. Right, we’ve set the stage for some really meaty ideas, we want to wind back a little bit to get a sense of some ways how you got to those, how you got to where you are, what has formed you. So tell me a bit about your childhood, and maybe adolescence, and in particular, any big ideas that were around, political, religious, philosophical, whatever, paint us a picture?
James
I suppose the two things that are worth saying is – the first one is that my father had a sort of, not quite, midlife crisis, but he decided he didn’t wanna be a teacher anymore when he was about 37. And I was about 10. And he left the school where he was a teacher, and he became unemployed for about – for some years. And so we had that backdrop to our sort of quite formative teenage years of a certain amount of struggle. And he ended up going into business and starting his own small business. So kind of being raised in a small business environment with somebody who wasn’t necessarily a natural business person was definitely one formative experience. And the other was my parents had a Christian faith, which I think when I was younger could be fairly characterised as conservative, evangelical, and possibly rather closed minded. And they underwent their own kind of liberalisation I suppose, whereby they embraced mystery and uncertainty and didn’t confuse certainty with faith, which I think possibly they had done in my early life. So I experienced as I was growing up as a formative experience, their own progression from A to B, which I think was very formative.
Elizabeth
And you watched your dad build a small business. And it sounds like it wasn’t straightforwardly joyful, but it planted a seed of interest in business yourself.
James
Yeah, I think possibly the sort of slightly supercilious and obnoxious teenager was watching them thinking, Hmm, I kind of like the idea of business, but I definitely want to figure out how to do it properly.
Elizabeth
And so you went to study it, or did you do something else first?
James
So just backing up a second, my mum and dad started this business and one of their ideas was they thought that in business you had like a choice, you could either use business as a mechanism to express your values, or you could use it as a sort of profit maximising machine. They definitely chose the former. And they had this, famously, they needed to make cakes, and they persuaded a friend of theirs who was a cook to leave her job to make cakes with them. And she had been a cook at a drug rehabilitation centre. So the condition for her leaving was that she could employ the former residents of the Rehabilitation Centre she’d been working at. And they agreed. So the recruitment strategy for this fledgling business was to recruit exclusively recovering heroin addicts, which turned out to be a catastrophic recruitment policy. But what it did was embed this idea that you can use business as a force for good, which I think landed quite deeply with me. And then when I went off to train at Cadbury, which obviously was a great Quaker business rooted in values, rooted in the temperance movement, I experienced during the 1990s, a programme imaginatively entitled ‘managing for shareholder value’, which was the systematic extraction of anything that was gonna get in the way of maximising profits in the short term. The heart of the business was ripped out, and sort of, in front of my eyes. And that was a super formative experience as well, because I saw that as you know, vandalism. I thought, you know, shoving more chocolate down people’s throats more quickly can’t just be a good idea. But that was obviously, money…
Elizabeth
Wasn’t an inspiring vision that you want to spend the rest of your life doing! So you left Cadbury’s.
James
That’s right and, and joined my mom and dad’s business. But really kind of with half an eye on my – my older brother had started a business which was called ‘Cakes and casseroles’, which was – the idea being home cooked food sold to families, for people who are good cooks but don’t have the time necessarily to cook from scratch for themselves. So we kind of cooked from scratch for them. And that was the idea. And he’d started that business. I joined my mom and dad because it was also in catering and in food production. So actually, my brother was buying cakes from – Sorry, was buying cakes from the business that I took over from my mom and dad, but he wasn’t paying for them. So we had a sort of like, essentially, we had a kind of conversation around, like, what’s his future of his business? Which, you know, he’s an inspiring person. He’s an incredible entrepreneur. He’s got so much potential. Whereas with my mom and dad’s business, which was a bit of a kind of bit more, a bit less exciting.
Elizabeth
Can I just pause here and ask are you that older or the younger brother?
James
I’m the younger brother.
Elizabeth
But your older brother wasn’t paying you. So you had to have a brotherly…brotherly undercurrents in their seemingly very business conversation?
James
He was doing exactly what he should have been doing, which was managing his balance sheet and making the calculation that he could afford to get away without paying us and he was quite correct, actually. He’s a very, very, very, very talented person and an incredible entrepreneur and he’d started this business and I thought, well, that’s got fantastic potential. The business I’d inherited was – well not inherited, but I was running – was, you know, fabulous, but definitely didn’t have the legs that Ed and his business had. So essentially, it made sense for both Ed and for me that we sort of merged those businesses together and then went forward together. So then we sort of rebranded ‘Cakes and casseroles’ as Cook. And, you know, 20 years later, we’re still doing it. And we now have, you know, nearly 2000 people working for the company. But the point in some ways with respect to the formation and the formative idea is that Cook needed venture capital. And so we spoke to venture capital funds back in the early 2000s. And came up against the same point that I’d experienced at Cadbury’s, which is, the purpose of business is to maximise profits for shareholders, you become a profit machine. That’s the only role you have in society, which we disagreed with. So we never took the venture capital. And that sort of propelled us into a whole different journey and path.
Elizabeth
I want to hear more about that. But I want to just pull apart a thread about the way business plays out in public conversations and the wider kind of cultural role of business. And it’s a bit of a sort of history of ideas, archaeology bit, because previously, your experience at the Cadbury’s Quaker businesses, and family banks and lots of other businesses, in fact, saw their role in society, in our common life, more broadly than just for shareholder value, but am I right in thinking sometime in the 70s and 80s, a particular story began to be told and began to be told more convincingly and gather allies that narrowed this view of business and you can call it a kind of neoliberal move, you can trace it to a kind of set of think tanks and a kind of economic score. How much do you think that move was about sort of winning the public conversation? And how much was it really just a much more private thing about power and government and backroom lobbying?
James
It comes back to original goodness, actually, because I don’t think there’s some conspiracy of evil sort of moustache twirling capitalists who have rigged the system or anything like that. What actually happened was, you know, back in the 1950s, and 60s, company bosses, you know, managers were, to some extent, in the perception of the shareholders, not operating the company’s in the interests of its shareholders, because what they were doing was using them more as like chattels, you know, so the company would give money to the Managing Director’s wife’s favourite charity kind of thing. And it was felt that these companies were being run to some extent to the benefit of that of their own management, which was not, you know, right. And therefore, there’s this sort of movement to sort of assert shareholder power. And that coincided with this theory, I suppose, that said, look, as wealth is created, everybody benefits. As the tide comes in all the boats rise, wealth is created, taxes are paid, prosperity follows, there’s a trickle–down effect, the state is able to then pay for public services and all the rest of it. And the prosperity engine is business. And so therefore, business must single mindedly focus on its role of generating wealth. And government will look after everything else, you know, businesses will pay their taxes, governments will create regulations which will manage any of the sort of negative consequences of that. And to be honest, like, you know, people demonise Milton Friedman, I don’t like demonising anybody. But he came up with a theory that kind of made sense as an academic looking at the data that he was looking at. Unfortunately, we are now looking at a different very different set of data to what Milton Friedman was looking at in the 1960s and 70s. Because we now know what the consequences of unfettered profit maximisation are. And what we’ve learned is some of the core assumptions of that theory, for example, taxes will be paid. Well, taxes are too often not paid by the most wealthy. Companies don’t like paying taxes. So they domicile themselves in places which mean they don’t need to. Companies don’t like regulations which get in the way of maximising profits. So they fix the lobby, or they just domiciled themselves in somewhere that doesn’t have any rules. And what happens is that you have this kind of divine right of capital, because government isn’t able to play its role, where capital starts to operate like a plague of locusts on people and planet. And what then happens is you look at the kind of the great acceleration and earth system trends and over the last 50 years, this has led to completely mind–blowingly catastrophic, social and environmental destruction. And I think that what’s happening is that data now is getting so urgent and clear that even you know the the followers of the theory are realising that the theory doesn’t work anymore. But we’re really at the kind of tipping point with respect to that.
Elizabeth
Yeah, you just did exactly what I was about to ask you to do, which is put the best version of the argument because my experience of talking to people from a range of different political and economic positions is, very rarely does anyone set out with a big idea to change the world thinking that it will cause harm, you know, they set out because there is a sense in which it is the best way to set up society and will equal more freedom, you know, more prosperity for a wider range of people, those who hold to that more classic kind of Friedman and economic position, I think is very much where they’d come from. So it’s really helpful to hear you refuse to demonise that school. When you set about building Cook, and you weren’t going to take venture capital for the reasons that we’ve talked about, and you have this experience at Cadbury’s, what did that in concrete terms mean, for the kind of business that you built? And what was some of the, I guess, the challenges with that?
James
Well, initially, we were exclusively focused on getting a business that was going to be able to thrive commercially, you know, like so. And I do think a lot of, you know, social enterprise, or socially hearted business forgets the business bit at the outset. So they build this beautiful thing that doesn’t make money, which actually can’t then grow and persist. So we were super focused on just getting this business to work. And that, frankly, took most of the 2000s. And then we got hit by the financial crisis, which very nearly did for us, we came out of it, but only just, and so really, we sort of sat back down. But once we came out of that financial crisis, and sort of 2010/2011, we were getting back on our feet. And we were starting to see that we were eating red meat as a business, we were going to get really strong. And commercially, things were sort of set. And then we sat down, Ed and I and said, like, let’s just remind ourselves why we’re doing this. And, you know, the first thing we did was talk about our values, basically have a big conversation within the company about values, and what values do we stand for. But equally we were aware that we had this different idea of business, but we were in danger of being among a minority of one. And we sort of felt like maybe we’re mad, you know, if the whole world is telling us that this is what business is for, and we don’t agree, then maybe the problem’s with us. And so we sort of went out to find others who had the same sort of insight, I suppose. And we were very fortunate, I was very fortunate, because that was that was my gig. And I found myself in San Francisco in 2010, at an event called SOCAP, which stands for social capital markets. And it was all of these kind of misfits who sort of washed up in San Francisco at a conference saying hang on a sec, this is wrong. And they were all talking about their ideas for alternatives. And at that event, one of the people talking about their ideas for alternatives was one of the founders of the B Corp movement. And I just heard this person speak and I just thought bingo, you know, Eurica, you’ve cracked it. Because what they done was they had taken an alternative idea to, you know, neoliberal economics. And they’d effectively bottled it and formularized it and been able to offer it to people like us to, to sort of become, it’s like an identity. So we adopted that identity. And really, that gave us a massive impetus for change.
Elizabeth
And you’ve been part of the leadership of B corps in the UK and really rolling out this alternative. For complete lay people, explain what a B Corp is and how it challenges the kind of economic logic you’ve been talking about.
James
So the default company is operated legally for the benefit of its shareholders. And that is enshrined in company article memorandum and articles of association but also in Section 172 of the Companies Act. And without getting too geeky, what a B Corp does is it changes, it reinvents business, it reinvents the company, because it says that rather than being operated to benefit its shareholders, it becomes operated to benefit the planet, communities, workers and shareholders, but those four constituencies rank alongside each other, so no one has primacy over the other. And the role of the company directors is to balance the interests of those four different stakeholder groups. And then what the certified B Corp community does is it says, well, in order to work out whether or not you’re doing that, you need a sort of quality system and a measurement system to help you think through whether you’re doing that for those four different constituencies. So it has the assessment, which you take, it helps you to think about what actions you should be taking, and then it effectively gives you a sort of– it rates you. And if you achieve a certain level of performance, you can certify as a B Corp, you have to change your legal articles, and you have to reach a certain level of performance.
Elizabeth
How significant do you think it’s been in changing the public understanding of what business is for?
James
Well, it’s interesting. I mean, the answer to that question is, I don’t know. Because attribution is terribly difficult. But you know, when I look back to 2010 when we were having these conversations, you’d walk into a bank or a business, and people would look at you like you were mad, like, what’s this person even talking about? Like haven’t you got the memo? Like, that’s just the wrong answer. I used to go around sort of proselytising this in very hostile, hostile places. But what happened was, the audience started to change in terms of its approach. It, you know, initially, they were sort of like, someone would invite us and everyone would look at the person who invited us saying why have you invited these crazy people, you’re fired. And then sort of three or four years later, we’d go to these places, and they sort of start – they were listening, you know, and, and then we started getting invited to places and there’d be people sort of sitting on the edge of their seats saying, you tell me more and explain this. And there’s a completely different energy to it. And what’s essentially– I think that that coincides with what’s happened in the sort of the last decade is the evidence has become so overwhelming of the unthinkable, heartbreaking destructiveness of our current economic system, that the people at the top of it, having basically lived in denial for so sufficiently long, no longer can, you know, and their kids are asking them questions they can’t answer. Things like Extinction Rebellion have really landed that point. And they’re going hang on a sec, I think we might have a problem here. And actually, the stuff that we’re talking about is a lot less hostile to them possibly, than, you know, the kind of total revolution, smash it all up brigade.
Elizabeth
Have you flirted with the total revolution? Why is this the answer and not full socialism? I’ve spoken to Ash Sarkar on the podcast, she’s all for fully automated luxury communism. And I do think there is a serious move amongst younger generations towards more radical Marxist positions.
James
I try to walk a tightrope between what’s pragmatic and achievable, versus what’s necessary, so I go to some people and they look at me, like, I’m a completely insane radical for what I’m suggesting. And I go to other people, and they think I’m the worst sort of middle aged white man force of conservatism. And it’s weird. And, but that kind of tells me I’m probably in roughly the right place. And, look, I think that I am really super suspicious of anarchy and chaos, because I think that it leads to and really big dislocations and fundamental you know, fragmentation change, because I think that it tends – the people that suffer most are the least powerful in that scenario. So broadly, if there’s a possibility to rapidly evolve, rather than turn completely upside down, I’m on that side. I do think the evolution needs to be rapid and I think it needs to be pretty muscular. So for example, with the climate collapse – this is me speaking personally, ‘B lab’ wouldn’t, you know, and none of the organization’s I represent would necessarily say this, but they might, I don’t know – but speaking personally, when I look at the climate collapse, I think this is the humankind’s greatest ever engineering challenge and it’s a massive engineering challenge as well as a cultural, spiritual challenge. The greatest engineering machines we have on planet Earth are the oil companies, essentially, they are all the engineers, and they aren’t to be trusted. Because they are governed by shareholder value, ultimately, what do we do about the urgency that we’re facing? Personally, I would find some way to sort of – on a global scale, nationalise all of those engineering machines and deploy them for the benefit of the energy transition. That’s super rad. Like, that’s super radical. Right. But I just look at the problem and think I can’t think of a better way to look at the engineering side of that problem. You know, so I have elements of radicalism in me. But broadly, I don’t think that the market based system of enterprise is worth fundamentally preventing.
Elizabeth
So talk to me, you’ve mentioned the kind of spiritual challenge, what role does faith continue to play, or the heritage of your parents faith play, in your thinking now, if any?
James
Well, I have a faith which informs my whole life and approach to everything. I distinguish faith from religion. I tend to see religion as something that man usually, or certainly humans, have invented as a sort of power system to put around God, I think that faith is something different. So I’m sort of – I do attend a church, but I feel quite de–churched, if you know what I mean, in my heart. So I think that, you know, I was listening to some of your other contributors on the podcast, and like them, I think, often it comes to being able to take yourself out of your context, and elevate your consciousness and raise your eyes and focus on something bigger than your own situation. And that could be God. It could be something like our planets, you know, like, it’s just about having that sort of meta context to think about stuff, which is terrifically helpful, and does lead to different outcomes.
Elizabeth
I am I think, unusual amongst self–described Christians, although there’s always challenges with that language, in feeling relatively…positive is the wrong word, in that I think there are huge challenges for institutions, but I certainly feel tuned into an enormous spiritual openness. And I think part of what’s driving it is exactly this pressure, this sense of the trajectory that we are on is not working. And Vanessa Zoltan, who is this kind of atheist chaplain and podcaster, talked about leaving her NGO and education work to go to Divinity School, even as an atheist Jew, because she was like, the injustices baked into the system are a soul problem. And so I feel the openness and the energy for an ethical, more human, particularly more equal way of living from the younger generation coming through, but what I don’t know is where are the places and the communities and the practices that people can connect with, to do the kind of deep spiritual work that will need to go alongside an engineering problem, right, that we have been raised to be expected to live in a certain way and for business to do a certain thing. And now we need that to change. Do you see the need I’m talking about and are you hopeful or do you have predictions about where people might get those needs met?
James
I think that what you’re reaching into is the kind of like, the kind of the heart of the issue, which is change. We need to change ourselves from within, we can’t expect this to be done for us. I think we have four superpowers. The first one is our talent, which is like where we work. The second one is our spending, you know, and that shapes the world where we spend. The third one is our saving, which is, like, our pensions or whatever. And the fourth one is our vote. And I kind of think that we need to mobilise them all, but particularly actually the first three, so you know, am I working for one of these, whatever it might be, that businesses, for example, that are part of the problem? And if so, can I not take my talent elsewhere? You know, how am I consuming? Am I buying, you know, single use plastic bottles and feeding the monster? You know, where am I bought, like, talent is also my time. So it’s not just where I work. It’s also where are my eyeballs, am I spending lots of time on Instagram and Tik Tok and the rest of it, feeding the advertisers, you know, or actually am I taking my eyeballs elsewhere. So we just need to take responsibility for how we show up in the world in a much more holistic and complete way. I think there’s loads of ways to do that. And the minute we do that, then we will find that we have quite a lot of power, but we might need to organise in new ways to bring that about.
Elizabeth
I worked at the BBC and then I worked at a charity. I don’t have a lot of sense of the kind of internal workings of business. So my main posture is as a consumer, and also someone who receives a huge amount of advertising. And when we think about the public conversation, advertising is like this white noise. And one of the key messages that has changed in the last few years is this sense of businesses wanting to tell us that they are making this change, that they are being responsible, that they are reducing their carbon, that they are adopting more progressive social mores, or whatever is the thing they think is going to make us want to buy the things. How do we attentively and mindfully listen? Because frankly, I think there’s quite a lot of bull and there’s a quite a lot of greenwashing or cynical feeding of the preexisting model with a kind of faint dusting of the kind of change we need to get to. Am I being too cynical? And how do we navigate that?
James
So you’re not being too cynical. They, you know, there’s the old adage, people are our most important asset, when in fact, what they meant is money is our most important asset. And money is the most important asset for these companies unless they’ve changed their governance. So, you know, I think it’s really worthwhile to look at governance – like what’s it for? Like, what’s its why? Why is it in business? Facebook, for example, is in business to make as much money as it possibly can for its Wall Street investors. You are raw material on their site, your eyeballs are all they’re really interested in. And they will do whatever they have to do in order to keep your eyeballs gripped to their site. Now actually, it turns out that the most effective way to do that is to serve you loads of fake news and get you enraged. And so that’s what they did. And will that ever change because they’ve signed up to some, I don’t know, better social manipulation guidelines or something? Of course it won’t. It will change if they’re not maximising profits from their users, you know, and that’s what you can trust and I wouldn’t believe anything other than that. It’s all blah, blah, blah, because – don’t forget they’ve got an enormous amount of power, I mean, one of the biggest publishing platforms in the world, they’re one of the richest companies in the world. And their job is manipulation, right? They intermediate all human relationships. And they have a vested interest in manipulating those relationships to retain eyeballs. So, you know, they don’t want you to, for goodness sake, they don’t want you to meet in person, because it means you’re not on their app. So I don’t know, I just think we need to be pretty realistic about it.
Elizabeth
And when we’re thinking about the role business plays in public conversations, there’s the advertising. But then I was trying to think of – who are the voices of business in public that I know about, you know, you kind of have the cultural voices, these are the voices on education, the big spheres of society don’t have exactly spokespeople. But as I’m thinking, as someone who used to book the Moral Maze, if I wanted someone to come speak about this thing, I’d get this person or this person, usually they’re quite big personalities. But with the exception of perhaps Alan Sugar, and a small number of others, it feels to me that business leaders have, in lots of ways, perhaps deliberately, tried to keep below the radar of public conversations…Groups that speak on behalf of all businesses, but very bland, almost only thrust into that conversation when they have to be, but I get the impression a lot of the actual conversations happen much more directly with government around legislation. Am I narrating that in a way that you recognize? Would it help if people like you, other business leaders, tried to be more public and personal about the impact of what they’re doing?
James
Yeah, business leaders have been completely absent from the public, cultural space. You know, someone like Alan Sugar is an entertainer, you know, and the BBC have been complicit in allowing this kind of grotesque idea of business to be pretty much the only one that they give air time to. And that’s been massively corrosive. You know, this idea of kind of, for example, workplace bullying, and toxic behaviour, as being the norm in business is just unbearably unhelpful. And the BBC as a public service broadcaster should be ashamed of itself. I’m hugely in favour of the BBC, as an idea, but I think they’ve really let business down by enabling that, but I get it, it’s entertainment. And in fact, to be fair to the BBC, they don’t even programme it as business programming now, they programme it as entertainment, which is kind of what it is. So whatever. But to the sort of deeper point, you know, when business is charged with maximising profits for shareholders, the last thing they want is too much scrutiny or cultural energy. And that because it’s not a cultural point, they just, it’s much easier for them to get their heads down, everything they need to influence they can influence in the lobby, so they spend a huge amount of money on, you know, corporate affairs professionals whose job it is to influence public policy. They spend a huge amount of money on corporate relations and investor relations professionals to sort of manage their reputation effectively. But they’re only doing that with very targeted constituencies, ie, the investor community, the financial services industry, they’re not interested in anything else. And whenever they have shown an interest, it’s gone really badly for them. I don’t know if you saw ‘Back to the floor’, which I thought was a terrific idea. But quite quickly, corporate bosses realised it was just a really bad idea. And they stopped doing it. And the final point is actually as this breaks down, as we realise that government is incapable of regulating business in a way that discharges its responsibilities, business leaders are starting to internalise those responsibilities and taking them inside their businesses. So like, for example, Cook or the B Corp movement, you know, so we’re buying exclusive really renewable energy, not because the regulator has told us to but because it’s the right thing to do, even though it costs us money. So what then happens is the business community – because of the failure of government – are becoming politicised and are actually starting to to think about these things in ways that this sort of old model didn’t require them to. They didn’t need to think about any of this stuff. It was the job of policymakers. We’re all starting to think about it. And that is going to lead to a much more interesting cultural voice for business I think.
Elizabeth
James, a final question on what have you learned about what helps make conversations across different or in really deep disagreement easier, better, more productive – whether you’re talking to the kind of dinosaur who thinks that business doing anything other than profit making would be a disaster, or you’re talking to a Marxist that thinks all business is evil and cannot possibly do any good in the world – what helps?
James
Well, I think three things actually, which are, in fact, coincidentally, the same as my sacred values. The first one is original goodness. So believing that whoever it is you’re talking to is okay, and not sort of the devil incarnate. The second one is interdependence, which is a recognition that, you know, I can’t have everything my own way. Because actually, we have to find a way to cohabit because we rely on each other, we need each other. And the third one is autonomy, which is let’s try to work wherever we can avoid imposing ourselves on other people, because that really upsets people. The more that we can respect one another’s autonomy, the better. And I suppose within all of that, there’s this kind of higher focus. I think the best way to bring people together is to elevate to that place where we are all aligned. Ultimately, we’re all hurtling through space on the great Spaceship Earth. And we won’t be here in 100 years times, it’ll be the time of others. And, you know, those sorts of slightly bigger framings can be terribly helpful, I think for letting us just lay down our very parochial personal stuff
Elizabeth
James Perry, thank you so much for speaking to me on the secret. It’s a pleasure.
James
Thanks for having me.
Elizabeth
So James kicked off the episode with three sacred values. And often this question really throws people because it’s not your standard question. And I get the impression that it lingers in people’s minds for a long time as they work out what’s sacred to them. But James obviously had really thought about this. And has really tried to shape his life around it in quite explicit ways. I wonder if it’s actually, that as a leader of a business, you’re continually being asked to write value statements. And he has both done that in business settings and done it for himself personally. But they were really clear that original goodness, interdependence and autonomy. As I was listening, I actually realise there’s quite a strong tension between interdependence and autonomy. And I wish we’d spoken more about that. I can really feel the mix of that in James, the way it does leave him politically homeless, that he is both an idealist and extremely pragmatic, that he wants us to acknowledge how much we’re connected to each other. And also he just wants to be left alone. And I wonder how navigating that tension, and maybe we all have tensions between things that are deep to us.
I was reminded again, as I am almost every episode, how much our parents shape us. I mean, I find it frankly terrifying as a parent, the responsibility, the way that the choices that we make now will show up so clearly in our children’s biographies and the choices that our parents made show up in our own stories. I can imagine James being really quite annoying as a teenager, trying to teach his mom and dad about business. I also really valued his honesty that actually for 10 years, they were just focused on making a profit, and then they were just focused on survival. And that, you know, that realistic sense that businesses that don’t make money can’t survive. That was refreshing to me, because I feel like a lot of the social enterprise and the business for social purpose space tries to gloss over that fact. And maybe it’s just helpful to be a bit more straightforward about it. And it also reminded me that running a business that does good in the world is incredibly difficult. Because running a business that survives is incredibly difficult. And when you add the extra layer, maybe it’s not an extra layer, when you try and stay true to an earlier sense of what the purpose of business was, it is just incredibly demanding, and requires a huge amount of business leaders a huge amount of commitment, and time and energy and character. And it makes me think, how could the rest of us support them and encourage them and cheer them on and maybe challenge them in that, given the disproportionate power of business in the world? I increasingly feel mildly despairing about the ability of government to tackle the complex problems that are facing us. And maybe it is business, business with a conscience, business formed by people of character, that can actually get their hands on some of these problems. But also, maybe it isn’t. And I think that question will linger.
Really helpful challenge in there about consumers, that we have superpowers, that we will have the ability to choose who we work for, that we have an ability to choose where our pensions are, and where our savings are. And it’s so annoying every time I ring up my pension and pensions people and try and hack my way through to where my money actually is, and what is it doing. And still, after 10 years of impact investment and real changes in the sector, how little they have thought about what it might mean for me not to want my money in a range of industries beyond just you know, not in weapons, that their ethical framework is so narrow.
And then I was struck again, by how much of these questions are just soul work. They’re about the kind of people we are and the kind of communities that we’re in that help us keep making hard choices. I guess for business leaders choosing to get their energy from carbon neutral places, even if it’s more expensive, requires a strength of character and commitment. And I find theology so helpful here and religious thinking so helpful here. And I’d love if we could be more straightforward about talking about the role of spirituality in helping business do good in the world. And be a bit less allergic to that.
I’m also left with the sense that I often am about just how complex and overwhelming the world is. There’s so many industries that I know nothing about, so many systems that no one I know, knows anything about, and yet are shaping our lives in such deeply formative ways. And the tension between really wanting to go local and small and serve a common good at a human scale, you know, loving my neighbour, literally my neighbour. And then this sense of not being able to abdicate responsibility for the global, complex, interrelated world. And what does it mean for those of us called to those systems to be doing good there, and what does it take for us to do that in ways that are resilient and hopeful and honest. Much to chew on, I would love to hear from you. Thanks for listening.
Interested by this? Share it on social media. Join our monthly e–newsletter to keep up to date with our latest research and events. And check out our Friends Programme to find out how you can help our work.
