Discover this podcast and so much more

Podcasts are free to enjoy without a subscription. We also offer ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more for just $11.99/month.

Harvard Business School Professor Rebecca Henderson: Is Business Ethics An Oxymoron?

Harvard Business School Professor Rebecca Henderson: Is Business Ethics An Oxymoron?

FromAll Ears with Abigail Disney


Harvard Business School Professor Rebecca Henderson: Is Business Ethics An Oxymoron?

FromAll Ears with Abigail Disney

ratings:
Length:
25 minutes
Released:
Jul 23, 2020
Format:
Podcast episode

Description

This week on All Ears Abby welcomes Professor Rebecca Henderson, who teaches about innovation, corporate culture change, and ethics at Harvard Business School. Her class,  “Reimagining Capitalism”, is one of HBS’s most popular classes, and she says that the majority of her students tend to believe that capitalism is broken.  But Professor Henderson tells Abby that capitalism is a fundamentally moral enterprise, albeit one that needs to be held in delicate balance with a strong society and a democratically accountable government. They discuss the dramatic pivot point created by the charismatic economist Milton Friedman in the early 1970s. According to Professor Henderson, Friedman’s fervent free market beliefs created the moral, political, and legal arguments for abolishing ethical boundaries in business practices in the name of maximizing profits. Then, using their political clout, unchecked business leaders spend the next decades undermining protections for workers, healthcare, infrastructure and the environment. Professor Henderson urges listeners to lean into their power as consumers and voters as the engine of business cultural change.Find Professor Rebecca Henderson on Twitter: @RebeccaReCapEPISODE LINKSReimagining Capitalism In A World On Fire (Rebecca Henderson)“The Business Case For Saving Democracy: Why Free Markets Need Free Politics” (Rebecca Henderson)“A Friedman doctrine‐- The Social Responsibility Of Business Is to Increase Its Profits” (New York Times, 9/13/70)“The Powell Memo: A Call-to-Arms for Corporations” (Moyers On Democracy)
Released:
Jul 23, 2020
Format:
Podcast episode

Titles in the series (53)

Abigail has a new documentary, The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales, in which she examines the inequality crisis through the lens of the company her grandfather helped found, The Walt Disney Company. In the film, she asks how it is possible that so many workers at Disneyland, aka “the happiest place on earth,” can’t afford life's basic necessities, even when they work full time. For the fourth season of All Ears, Abigail poses that question to people who are doing the most Disney thing of all–using their imaginations–in this case to rethink capitalism. She talks with business leaders, union organizers, and economists to learn how they would fix our broken economy.