Resources

• Chris Marquis' book: The Profiteers: How Business Privatizes Profits and Socializes Costs
• Wall Street Journal: New EU Sustainability Reporting Rules: How Impacted US Companies Can Prepare
• World Economic Forum: What is Regenerative Agriculture?
• Regenerative Organic Alliance: Regenerative Organic Certified standard
• Tablas Creek Vineyard: the world's first Regenerative Organic winery
• The Future of the Responsible Company: What We've Learned from Patagonia's First 50 Years, a book by Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard and in-house philosopher Vincent Stanley.
• The Grove Collaborative: An online marketplace of 200+ brands “committed to reducing and offsetting plastic waste, establishing strict ingredients standards, and crafting our own planet-first products to lead the way”
• HBS case studies on regenerative agriculture: "Indigo Agriculture: Harnessing Nature" and "Arla Foods: Data-Driven Decarbonization"
• EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD): guidance from the EU, EY, entered force January 2023
• European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS) is the reporting approach CSRD requires companies to use; guidance fromUNEP,PwC,KPMG

Host & Guest

Climate Rising Host: Professor Mike Toffel, Faculty Chair, Business & Environment Initiative (LinkedIn)

Guest: Chris Marquis, Professor at the University of Cambridge Judge Business School (LinkedIn)

Transcript

Editor's Note: The following was prepared by a machine algorithm, and may not perfectly reflect the audio file of the interview.

Mike Toffel:

Chris, thanks so much for joining us here on Climate Rising.

Chris Marquis:

Mike, it's really wonderful to be with you.

Mike Toffel:

Now, Chris, we were colleagues for many years here at HBS, I think until 2015, when you then went on to Cornell and now you're at Cambridge. You have a new book out called The Profiteers, which has a meaty substance on climate. And so I just want to begin before we talk about the book just to get a bit of an understanding of how your research agenda has evolved over the past decade and what your interests are now.

Chris Marquis:

Sure. 10, 15 years ago, these issues of business and society and sustainability were talked about in terms of CSR, corporate social responsibility. And if you look at the things that I was studying, things like, environmental reporting, which you and I have a paper on. I did a paper on that in China as well. Environmental infractions, I did a paper on. Engagement in community NGOs. Those are all ESG or sustainability topics now. From 2010 to 2020, I spent about three and a half years in China, actually about a year and a half of that was actually based out of the Harvard Shanghai office, studied a lot of Chinese companies, sustainability, reporting, environmental programs, which I wrote up in a lot of different case studies and some empirical research as well.

Mike Toffel:

Being in the UK, but being an American and having now spent many years back and forth to China, I think , of all the people I know who are academics working in this space, you have the most international flexibility in your career and are privy to conversations in different cultures, different regulatory systems. Do you have some broad takeaways as to how the conversation is unfolding differently on business and climate and sustainability in these domains?

Chris Marquis:

Sure, comparing the EU and UK to the US, in the European context, it is just so much more front and central. So my university, Cambridge, where I am now, it's surprising to me just how focused on climate the university is as far as trying to foster faculty research. Actually, a lot of my work now is much more on climate, where I have a lot of engagement interaction with people in the engineering department, working on innovations in the space, computer science, working on computer modeling of climate. So I think that sort of focus is much more pervasive. And in the UK as well, I mean, a lot of companies and Cambridge in particular, have various policies around climate that I think are even more far reaching than in the US. So for instance, the college that I work with, if you actually are getting funded for your travel through the college, you have to actually have some accounting for the carbon that actually the different travel choices would take and how you actually chose the travel choice you did and how that impacts carbon emissions. And I think companies too, a lot of the companies that I work with at Cambridge in executive education are coming to Cambridge for the sustainability and climate topics. And you mentioned regulation. And one reason why I think is that there's been a huge push in the EU around a number of regulations. And those are about to be implemented right now. And companies are really struggling with: how do we respond to this in not a reactive way, but a strategic way. And so that is a big deal too.

Mike Toffel:

Yeah, super. So you have a new book coming out right now in summer of 2024, and it's called The Profiteers. So this is not your first book. You're an academic who's written lots of journal articles, lots of case studies, and also books, sort of a triple threat. So let's talk about this book, The Profiteers. What's the gist? What led you to write this book and give us a sketch?

Chris Marquis:

Thank you. So the focus of the book is encapsulated pretty well in the subtitle, how business privatizes profits and socializes costs. So the stepping off point and the focal point really for the book is the idea of externalities. So these are like social or environmental costs that companies create, but actually don't actually pay for. They're incurred by someone else. Companies have air pollution, they typically throughout history have not had to pay for. However, there are a lot of variety of costs related to health effects, like respiratory problems of local communities. Climate change is a big issue. Another one I cover in the book are on plastics. So obviously it's a cheap material . The other more environmentally friendly materials are more expensive. So that is the cost the companies take and then we pay by having plastic trash thrown a lot of different places, microplastics enter human body in a variety of ways. I read once that we have about a credit card's worth of plastic in our system. So this is an externality. So those are a few examples. One of the reasons why I wanted to write the book, is that those ones I just mentioned are rather obvious, but actually this idea of externalities is pretty pervasive in how companies really base their profits because they're focused very short term. So things like inequality, even discrimination are things where companies can actually continue to benefit in some ways from those societal issues and it's the broader public that end up paying. And not only are they more pervasive, but also they're not just neutral economics or accounting concepts. Actually, companies work diligently to manage our expectations of what we as the general public should be paying versus them.

Mike Toffel:

Yeah, so we're going to definitely get into that. You provide some interesting examples in the book. So externalities, just to come back to that, environmental externalities is discussed in the first course of an environmental economics program. And externalities, broadly speaking, are probably taught in the first microeconomics course that economists take. Now, that's a particular population. And so the examples you give of pollution, you think about pollution in riverways or other types of air pollutants like the soot that you see coming out of smokestacks, those are long understood to be externalities, maybe not by that name by non-economists, but you brought in this concept, at least to my way of understanding it, to also think about, for example, economic inequality as a form of externalities. Can you speak a little bit about these social aspects?

Chris Marquis:

Right, there's some research that shows that actually, with increases in the Gini coefficient after a certain level, this is a measure of income inequality in societies, aggregate GDP is lowered. And this is because, as inequality increases, the poor are poorer, the rich are paying less for common goods. And so, things like health effects and other issues that are born by the poor end up creating a drag on the overall economic activity in a region or a country. So, that's one example. I think two more generally, in the global north, we live very privileged lives and actually a lot of the privilege of our lives is actually based off of things which are out of sight, out of mind: the human rights and other issues in supply chains, which are externalities that are created to our benefit really, but actually have deep spillover issues in other countries and societies. So I think that we need to be thinking more global on these issues.

Mike Toffel:

Yeah, super interesting. It's sort of the opposite of the Henry Ford approach of saying we want to pay our workers enough so that they can buy our products. Here, you're saying when people are not paying living wages or enough to sustain an economy, that that drags down the economy. So that's the externality between the behavior, sometimes through their suppliers. Interesting. So let’s talk a little bit about misinformation or redirection, and you use this phrase of corporate gaslighting. Gaslighting is certainly the word of the decade, it seems. But I don't think I've ever heard it put together with corporate. I'm sure that's going to make a lot of people happy and a lot of other people not so happy.

Chris Marquis:

Right, well that is actually something I've tried to accomplish a little bit more with this book than I have with my previous ones is be a little bit more spiky or provocative. So yeah, so gaslighting in 2022, it was the Merriam -Webster dictionary word of the year.

Mike Toffel:

The actual word of the year. Let's just say what gaslighting is, because I don't think everyone knows it's from a play and from a movie, and that's where it became popular. So just tell us the back story.

Chris Marquis:

So Gaslighting comes about through, like you mentioned, a play and then very popularized, there was a movie. It's a black and white movie, 40s or 50s. And it was about a man who I think his wife had some inheritance and he was trying to convince her she was crazy by flickering the gas lights in the home. So it's this idea that an abuser is trying to undermine the reality and the view of the abused. And so that's why I use this term with connection to corporate because a lot of these externalities that I mentioned, the companies are trying to actually putthe reality of the responsibility onto arguably the victims which would be us. So Coke and Pepsi and a lot of the packaging companies are trying to make us think that it's our responsibility, we should recycle. There are court cases on this now that show that , the idea of having this resin code in the bottom of plastic items inside the chasing arrows, the Plastic Industry Association knew that none of this was ever going to be recycled or recyclable, but they thought if we have a number there, people will think that it will be actually something to be recycled. And then they won't be putting pressure through governments or others onto them to actually take responsibility for the waste that they're creating in the world. So that's one example.

Mike Toffel:

So a more charitable explanation of why we have these chasing arrows with numbers and so little of it gets recycled is that there was a hope that if you could label items, then an infrastructure for recovery and recycling would arise, and it just, the economics haven't turned out that way. But you're suggesting this was like nefarious from the beginning.

Chris Marquis:

Probably there was a hope from some actors that that would happen, but actually at least part of it as well is an effort to try to deflect responsibility. But instead of actually dedicating themselves to really eliminating plastic and finding new distribution materials or methods, Coke, Pepsi, and Dr. Pepper, and they're all talking about how we're competitors, but we're working together on recycling, which I think is a blatant greenwashing in some ways where they're just trying to say they're doing these positive things, but they don't work.

Mike Toffel:

Interesting. Yeah, of course, I mean, we all began this effort with glass and not just recycled glass, but recovered glass, which you then washed off at the bottlers and then refilled them. Milk bottles, same thing. Then we had aluminum, which is a highly recoverable and recycled material. And then plastics is a fossil fuel derivative, which people sometimes think about and sometimes don't.

Chris Marquis:

Of course.

Mike Toffel:

So other examples of gas lighting?

Chris Marquis:

Sure. So, I mentioned this National Packaging Association, one issue is astroturfing, neutral or seemingly grassroots organizations that actually are greenwashing, selective disclosure is one which some of our joint work actually provided inspiration for this book. I'm pretty hard on this concept of stakeholder capitalism that has really taken off as seeing a solution to some of the short -term, shareholder -first issues that have led to a lot of our environmental and social issues. But I think that the idea of stakeholder capitalism suggests a focus on certain positives that good employee practices or good consumer practices, which I think are obviously important, but those actually are selective positives, which may or may not have anything to do with the core business model of the company and in many ways, maybe act to selectively deflect attention from some of the more underlying negative effects. So another one with the whole controversy around scope 3 emissions and supply chains. Companies are very effective at saying, well, it's not really my responsibility. It's my suppliers.

Mike Toffel:

So let me just interject. Scope 3, we're talking about carbon emissions that are not associated with your on-site releases or of your purchased energy. It's sort of the everything else. And whether it's upstream or downstream, you're talking about, I think, upstream, which refers to the supply chain.

Chris Marquis:

Talking about upstream, yeah. So, yeah, thank you for interjecting that. Scope 3 obviously is from the Greenhouse Gas Protocol and it's related, but I think about it in a more general term in regards to how companies are thinking about their entire value chain, not just about carbon emissions, but also about how they engage with their suppliers around materials, around human rights. And then also how they think about their products after they leave the factory gate, which, this discussion of recycling and the idea that companies should really have no responsibility for the damage their products create after someone buys them. And so there's a number of examples I talk about in the book from Amazon where, and it's not that far of a supply chain. I mean, if a third party seller uses their platform for selling something, they actually pretty easily evade that responsibility, which legally they're allowed to do. And it relates, obviously, as well to misinformation issues on other platforms. And we have this Section 230 in the book, which really shields platform companies from much responsibility.

Mike Toffel:

So Amazon's doing some work toward electrifying their fleet. They're doing some work to try and aggregate shipments. They give you now a discount . I think they would say, look, we're taking all these actions. But it sounds to me like you think in a way maybe those are distractions from the real work they should be doing.

Chris Marquis:

For a company like Amazon, and they were early instigator of the climate pledge in 2040. If you look at actually what is included in their net zero calculation, it's actually a very small amount of their footprint. I think it's like Amazon branded products, which is like a minuscule amount of actually what is sold on their platform.

Mike Toffel:

So, another example of corporate gaslighting that you discuss in the book has to do with the whole notion of carbon foot printing, which we were just describing. So, can you tell us the backstory of that?

Chris Marquis:

Sure. So yeah, individuals carbon footprints. I think, again, these are things that are very valuable to know about and do. I actually, one of my classes, I have my students calculate their own carbon footprint and we talk about it. So it's not that actually the idea of carbon footprinting is bad per se, but it actually was popularized very, very much by BP in advertisement and a variety of other campaigns. It is very convenient for one of the largest fossil fuel companies in the world, instead of actually questioning their own practices and trying to maybe shift their production or not take massive profits, which they've been doing recently, but actually convince consumers that we all should be responsible for our own carbon footprint. Exxon is another example where there's a lot of recent investigative reporting through court cases and others around misinformation around climate change and lobbying more generally. And so these are all, I think, a variety of tactics that the fossil fuel industry has used for decades to avoid their own responsibility and make either there's not damage, government shouldn't actually be stepping in with a much stronger set of policies, or individuals shouldn't be pushing companies to actually to limit their use.

Mike Toffel:

So let's talk about the solutions to these types of problems, right? And I think there's maybe two that you describe in the book. One is a more holistic accounting of what are all these externalities, and you provide some examples. And then what do we do once we figure out what is the magnitude of those externalities? Is it a private sector social movement that you think is the right approach or government policies need to step in and close those externalities, sort of the carbon tax, but on these other issues as well. So first, let's talk about the accounting part.

Chris Marquis:

Sure. So, and I think it relates a little bit to the accounting, but I think first I want to just take a step back and even before accounting, it's just understanding that these exist. The book is called The Profiteers: How Business Privatizes Profit and Socializes Cost, which is a critical framing of the issue. But actually, my inspiration and what led me to write the book is engagement and research and case studies on companies that were thinking about this in a deep way and how they could actually address their externalities through responsible and in most cases private action. One example of that is a company called Grove Collaborative, which produces healthcare, beauty products, and also is a marketplace for other sustainably companies like Dr. Bronner's, Seventh Generation, etcetera. And when I interviewed the CEO, Stuart Landsberg, then CEO, he's now the board chair, what he said to me is that, our entire social environmental mission is focused on plastic because plastic is our biggest externality. And that was the first time I'd heard a business executive talk about externalities, actually. This actually set them on significant amounts of discovery and innovation within their company. Things like how can we reformulate our products so they can be packaged in containers, like paper, as opposed to actually something where a liquid, where you need something like plastic or aluminum or glass. reformulate how we communicate to consumers so they can understand this difference? How can we actually change our business processes in our company? They actually instituted a tax on plastic within their company so that actually the P&L would be affected the more and more the managers were using it. So this is an example where I think like, wow, that is actually a company that's taking on an issue that's at the core of their business and a lot of other businesses. And this is the kind of thing where I think if a company like Pepsi or Coke would be thinking the same way, or if Amazon would be thinking the same way, there would be a lot more substantial sets of work. So that's in some ways one private example where a company is thinking about, here's our externalities and how can we actually address them.

Mike Toffel:

Right, so it sounds a little bit reminiscent to my ear about materiality assessments, where the charge there is to try and get companies to think about what are the most important sustainability issues in their business line and focus on the ones that are most important.

Chris Marquis:

Sure, definitely, . And I think, though, that... it goes beyond the assessment and that it's actually, our corporate mission is to eliminate this one particular issue that is at the core of that industry.

Mike Toffel:

Yeah, it seems like it includes a commitment to actually act on the things that are most material, not just be aware of it. So then let's turn to the action. So imagine you have now that you have a commitment, you have some accounting, broadens the accounting than certainly the scopes because we're talking about the social aspects as well. So then I imagine you could try persuasion. You could try education. You can try persuasion through various pressure points, whether they be investors or activist groups or consumer awareness, and of course the government may have a role as well. So where do you put your chips on these different potential mechanisms?

Chris Marquis:

Sure, so I think it's all of the above in many ways. In many ways, the one sentence version of my theory of change, so to speak, is that businesses and private action, provides a tremendous amount of innovation, proving the business model. But, you know, voluntary action and persuasion is not going go very far, and given the state of the world, so to speak, it's going be just scratch the surface. So really, I think policy is where we need to go with this. I think that it's so important to get models down and details right and have innovation on the topic, but then actually the state can come in and provide some more, coercive means. And I think this is starting to happen in the EU, which is another reason why I've been learning a lot over here in the UK, even though the UK sadly is not part of the EU anymore. But there's a lot of work on this topic in the EU that a lot of my students, my executive students in particular, are really engaging with and struggling with .

Mike Toffel:

Yeah, so some of the EU policies that I'm aware of in this broad domain have to do with reporting and required sustainability reporting, the EU European Sustainability Reporting Standards, and also corporate sustainability due diligence. EU, the UK has a similar, at least bill if not actual law, on requiring due diligence for at least some products and their externalities. I'm not quite sure what happens once you do that due diligence if you're supposed to just be aware of it or if it actually in any way precludes your use of those materials. But to talk more about these or other policies.

Chris Marquis:

Yeah, sure. So you mentioned materiality assessments earlier. A lot of time materiality has been thought of as just financial materiality. Double materiality, and I think this is totally the appropriate way for government to be thinking, includes impact materiality. So what is the material effect on society and the environment. And so I think that the fact that these EU frameworks, the ESRS, or also it came about from the CSRD, which is Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, which is, so those acronyms sometimes are used synonymously. But anyways, so this actually requires companies to have, it has this double materiality standard, which I think is really, really important. Directors, will be legally liable for this reporting like they would be for financial reports. So if companies are trying to greenwash or report things, misrepresent things, they can be sued again, this is not just voluntary land. This actually has some teeth in it. And I think the thing that is the biggest issue globally is in many ways the scope of applicability. So, first of all, this is not just going be EU firms that are subject to this. So as it gets rolled out, if you are a non -EU company that has an EU subsidiary, you will be required to report on the group level. So Nike, as an example, obviously has an EU subsidiary, the EU subsidiary will be required to report, on its global corporation. California actually is also implementing a variety of standards. So I think these issues will really reshape the conversation around what companies are accountable for. And I should also mention that Scope 3 is included as well. And for instance, I was in Malaysia not that long ago and I was giving some talks to various industry groups and there was a trade minister that heard that I was going be in town and summoned me to his office. He had heard about B corporations which is subject of my prior book, and he wanted to actually talk about how to help the Malaysian SMEs -- small and medium enterprises, which is a huge segment of the Malaysian economy -- actually upgrade and upskill on environmental ESG, environmental social governance aspects and performance. The reason being is that with the ESRS coming online in 2025 on 2024 results, it's actually right now where companies are going to be needing to gather data and report. And because companies will be looking to their supply chain partners, what his idea was that this could be very strategic for Malaysia as a country in order to, if they can, really upgrade their suppliers, this puts them at advantage over other countries, in the global supply chain. So I think the spillover effects of this to non-EU firms and to supply chains, I think, is a big deal. So I'm very optimistic about these legal changes.

Mike Toffel:

Fascinating. We'll have to keep an eye on these developments. I didn't realize the breadth of these policies. Very interesting. I want to shift gears a little bit. One of the topics in your book that I think will be interesting to our listeners is about regenerative agriculture and more broadly the regenerative business model. And so why don't we start with regenerative agriculture and then we can broaden it out. Now I know a little bit about regenerative agriculture. I've done a case on Indigo Ag here in the Boston area. We've taught that to our MBA students and the regenerative part of that story was that they're trying to help farmers figure out how to enact regenerative practices and there's a variety of things that entails -- we can get back to that in a minute -- in order to put more carbon or sequester carbon into the soils. And even if that costs a bit more, why would they do it? Well, maybe they can sell carbon credits by bringing atmospheric carbon and storing them into the soil. So that's sort of the business model idea of Indigo Ag. And there's other companies, certainly, that you describe in your book that are themselves, not just trying to convince others to do it, but are themselves doing it. So tell us a little bit about how did you get interested in regenerative ag and what are some examples of what's going on in this space?

Chris Marquis:

Sure, it's great to hear that you wrote that case, I'll have to look it up. But I think that one of the things that I learned through writing this process of the book is, and it sounds sort of silly, but what a big deal agriculture is. It's in the global north in the USA, fades into the background. I mean, I went to college at Notre Dame, which is in Indiana. And so I would sometimes drive through, drive on these highways and through the Midwest and you pass all these fields of corn basically or some other.

Mike Toffel:

Yeah, soy, .

Chris Marquis:

You know, I never really think about the scope or size of agriculture and industry wise in the US, I think it's only about 5 % of GDP. It's not something that we think a ton about. I mean, I don't know how many HBS students are interested in agriculture. So you asked me how I became interested in it. I think through talking, as I've been interviewing and looking for entrepreneurs that are doing innovative, exciting things in the space, this topic kept coming up. So a couple companies that I talked to that really have a passion around this. Patagonia is one, I'll table Patagonia for a second because they're always the example, you know, for everything. Dr. Bronner's is a company, they produce and sell a variety of soaps and shampoos, et cetera, very naturally produced. They are so passionate about regenerative agriculture that they actually worked with a number of other companies and NGOs and farming communities to create a standard on regenerative agriculture called the Regenerative Organic Standard from the Regenerative Organic Association, which they worked to create. One important thing they mentioned to me is the importance of organic in there, because actually a number of products that are billed as regenerative use non –organic chemical processes and they can still call themselves, regenerative.

Mike Toffel:

Interesting. And we've talked about it at a high level. Regenerative practices include things like leaving fields fallow or using cover crops and not tilling it or scraping up the soil, which releases carbon into the atmosphere and instead drilling the seeds into the soil. Those are some examples that I'm familiar with.

Chris Marquis:

Right. Right, yeah, exactly. And I think another thing too is thaving a more multi -use piece of land. So, one of the companies that I ended up interviewing and talking to is a winery, Tablas Creek Winery. it's one of the few agricultural commodities where people actually go and say, okay, I want to actually experience this and look at it and and drink it. And the vintner who runs their site said, you know, a regenerative winery does not look like people imagine wineries to look like because usually wineries are like mono crop. But actually to do things regeneratively, you need to actually have a mixed use of the land and have animals.

Mike Toffel:

Got it. Yeah, there's a famous quote, I can't remember who said it, that talked about farms that used to have animals and crops in an integrated manner. And of course, the animals provide fertilizer for the crops. And with specialization, we've separated them and created now two problems, because now you figure out what do we have to do with all the manure and then also all the manufactured fertilizer you now need to purchase.

Chris Marquis:

Exactly and this regenerative organic association, their certification has three pillars. And one of which has to do with animals. Another has to do with labor. And then the third actually is the organic crop processes. But it's like people did before industrial agriculture, basically it's a much more holistic consideration of the land as opposed to specializing things and separating them, which is in some ways unnatural.

Mike Toffel:

So taking this idea of regenerative business models beyond agriculture, what does that look like?

Chris Marquis:

Right. Sure, so this is something I also try to think about and develop because companies talk about this. And there's not been, to my knowledge, a lot of systematic thinking about it. And I will actually use Patagonia here as an example, because they're really the ones that really got me thinking about this in a broader and deeper way too. So I've done lots of interviews and discussions with key Patagonia staff around their different sort of sustainability, ownership and other initiatives. And one of the people I've talked to is [Vincent ] Stanley, who you might be familiar with, the chief philosopher, has co-written some of the books with Yvon Chouinard that are very, very famous. And he said to me that actually a huge aha in their business came when they started Patagonia Provisions. And Patagonia Provisions still is a pretty small segment of their sales, but is their food, and beer line. And what they realized actually when they started engaging in agriculture is that through these regenerative practices, they could actually repair and restore the underlying natural system. Not just maintain or mitigate harm, which is frequently thought of around sustainability, but it can actually repair and restore. And he said, for a long time, we had this in our mission statement, do as little harm as possible. He said that was really crazy in some ways. They should actually really be thinking about how to organize their entire production, how to restore and repair. And so this led to a lot of rethinking around their entire value chain. And the idea of becoming sort of regenerative organization overall. And so, things like cotton, which now there's a beginning or a number of companies are working on regenerative agriculture cotton. And so, this is areas where they're not just putting solar panels on their rooftop to try to lessen their carbon emissions, but actually rethinking their entire value chain. I think this is something that with increased attention on supply chains through Scope 3, thinking and some of these EU regulations, I think that companies are going to be much more under pressure to be thinking in these broader ways than previously.

Mike Toffel:

Yeah, I mean, it seems like this marries the notion of circular economy with also this idea of not stopping at do less harm. Which I think of as if a ship is sinking, do less harm means, well, we'll just sink more slowly. But in fact, regenerative means like, no, no, no, let's do more than sink more slowly. Let's not even just stop the sinking. Let's actually right the ship.

Chris Marquis:

There's two layers, I think there is this not just mitigate harm aspect to it or just really use less or extend life. But as well, I think it also considers the societal systems too. So, thinking about labor and communities that are involved in production and how actually companies can be net positives in those locations, not just actually extract.

Mike Toffel:

Right, right. So, let's look ahead. What's next on your research plate? Another book in mind? Or is it going back to journals?

Chris Marquis:

Well, I've continued to publish journal articles too along the way. But I think that one of the things I really want to think more about is around theories of business in many ways. You know, so many of the entrepreneurs that I run into, isn't just social impact entrepreneurs. Most people don'tget into starting a business with a passion just to accumulate the biggest pile of cash as possible or to deliver higher profits for their shareholders. They get into it because they have a passion and belief in trying to do something in the world. And I think that so many of our ideas of companies are from very narrow sets of like publicly traded organizations. And so I'm going to be trying to do some writing and thinking and analyses around purpose of firms and how that affects, how they operate both internally, but then also engaging with society.

Mike Toffel:

Great, sounds really interesting. So you talk to so many different practitioners in the development of your books and also in your other types of scholarly research and in case writing. And I'm sure you, like I, working with MBA students, get questions about where are the opportunities in your view? And so what type of advice do you give to your students when they're thinking about career switching or career pursuits in this general domain?

Chris Marquis:

Yeah, good question. I think a couple things. So one, agriculture actually: there's actually huge amounts of government subsidies around the world for all the wrong types of behaviors, more environmentally unsustainable behaviors. I think there's going be a reversal, and I think it's going to be an area where there's going to be a lot more innovation around some of these regenerative practices. One of the companies I did a lot of work with is indoor farming company, which has this amazing technical infrastructure and innovations around growing. The other area, and it's sad, but I do think it's really important, are around issues of adaptation and resilience. I think so much of our discussion around climate is around net zero, mitigation topics. But, we're in a situation where businesses, governments are going to need to be thinking a lot more about adaptation issues. And I think that this is something where there's not a lot of research, there's not a huge amount of thinking. And I think this is also an area where there's going to be tremendous, sadly, opportunities in the future for people to be smartly thinking about it.

Mike Toffel:

Yeah, totally agree. And both of these have interesting overlays with the whole big data and data processing revolutions that we're in right now. I totally agree. So where can listeners find your book, The Profiteers?

Chris Marquis:

Right. So they can find it anywhere you buy books, obviously, Amazon, but there's a lot of good independent bookstores.

Mike Toffel:

Well, Chris, it's been so wonderful to catch up with you. Thank you so much for joining us here on Climate Rising.

Chris Marquis:

Great, thanks so much, Michael, it was really wonderful.