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Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I'm Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning.
Ralph Nader's 1965 book Unsafe at Any Speed, about automakers' failure to protect consumers and the environment, cemented his reputation as an adversary of American business. So it may surprise the business world that Nader's newest book, The Rebellious CEO, celebrates 12 executives who, in his words, "did it right."
Most of the book's subjects are founders, which gave them the ideological freedom and financial leverage to structure their companies to prioritize employees, environment, and customer experience, along with profits. But Nader believes all CEOs, including non-founders and those sitting atop large global companies, have the power to ensure companies are run ethically. We recently spoke about the book, stakeholder capitalism, and third-party presidential candidates. Edited excerpts follow:
Modern CEO: Why did you want to write a book about CEOs?
Ralph Nader: Over the years I've learned a lot about how the CEOs of giant corporations behave, and they usually justify everything they do by saying, "We're just meeting market demand." I once did a paper on all the ways [corporations] manipulate the markets. Monopolization manipulates free markets. Deceptive advertising manipulates free markets. Subsidies to big business at the expense of small business, bailouts, corporate criminal behavior . . . they distort the market and freeze innovation. People don't know that there's something better, so I thought I would pick a dozen of the CEOs that I've known and admired over the many years. As you can see from the book, they did a lot of things very well, but they always paid attention to profits.
MC: You highlight profits, which could dispel the perception that you're antibusiness or anti-capitalism.
RN: I've said this a hundred times, if not more: my work is against business crime, business looting, business coercion--like fine-print contracts--business obstructing people's access to the courts, and business making so much money that they didn't know what to do with it. That's what I'm against. It's about trying to make businesses adhere to the rule of law; to be accountable and respectful; and to prioritize health, safety, environment, climate, and labor.
MC: Your book highlights the role of the CEO. Do you think it is possible for one person to change corporate behavior?
RN: Surprisingly, yes, because of what people who write about corporate structure often decry, namely the hierarchical massive concentration of power in the executive suite. If they change policy, it can be executed very fast because they've concentrated power with the CEO and the president--often it is the same person and a "rubber stamp" board of directors. Let's utilize that. I mean, as long as they're going to have that kind of top-down command structure, let's hold them to commands that could be appropriate for the public interest and to foresee and forestall forthcoming perils--which they're not very good at--because short-term quarterly profit mania has kept them from foreseeing and forestalling.
MC: Much has been made of this notion of stakeholder capitalism. A few years ago, the Business Roundtable got 180 CEOs to sign a statement relaxing the notion of shareholder primacy. Do you think corporations have moved meaningfully in the direction of the "rebellious CEO?"
RN: It's mostly just good-sounding rhetoric. I mean, if you look at how [the Business Roundtable] defines stakeholders and compare them to [The Body Shop founder] Anita Roddick and how she defines stakeholders, it's like night and day. She basically said: Businesses are the most powerful institutions in the world. They control governments, they control markets, they control capital, labor, technology--more than anyone else. And they can't exist in communities and not be held responsible to the extent they can to improve those communities. She didn't just say workers or shareholders, [she used] the whole word communities.
MC: I'm glad you mentioned Anita. She's the only woman in the book. [The others are Vanguard's John C. Bogle; Interface's Ray Anderson; food entrepreneur Jeno Paulucci; Southwest Airlines's Herb Kelleher; Avis Car Rental's Robert Townsend; social entrepreneur Andy Shallal; American Income Life Insurance's Bernard Rapoport; Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard; Midas Muffler's Gordon B. Sherman; and environmentalist and author Paul Hawken.] You do acknowledge in your introduction that most of your subjects are white men, and that racial and gender equality has moved slowly atop the Fortune 500. But not all the subjects are Fortune 500 CEOs. Why weren't you able to make room for someone like John Rogers at Ariel Investments, who started his firm to invest in smaller companies and create generational Black wealth. Or Gloria Steinem, who founded Ms. magazine to empower women?
RN: It's because I didn't know these people. I wanted to do two things [with the subjects]. One, I had to know them and interact with them. And number two, there are companies that do good things as part of a division or an issue, but they don't have [control of] the complete culture the way these CEOs have. Unilever bought Ben & Jerry's, and if they keep Ben & Jerry's culture, that's good, but what about everything else Unilever does? So that was the criteria: The entire corporate culture had to meet these kinds of standards, and I had to know them.
MC: You've run for president many times. I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you what your thoughts are about the 2024 election and the prospect of a third party running its own candidate.
RN: I never discourage people from exercising their First Amendment rights to speak, assemble, and petition, which is what you do when you run for [president]. So, whether it's a third party, a fourth party, an independent, I never tell 'em to shut up. I can take a stand for them or against them, but I never tell 'em, "Don't run." I'm all for more voices and choices on the ballot, so that the voter has a more meaningful endeavor instead of a two-party duopoly that's, on so many things--from military foreign policy to Wall Street--pretty similar. Now, of course, all bets are off with the complete Trump takeover of the Republican party.
But I'm for more voice and choices. There are too many issues that affect people where they live, work, and raise their families that are off the table for the two parties. Stop bailing out mismanaged, large corporations; break up the big banks; [reform] the tax system. A lot of these are both conservative and liberally supported issues, which is remarkable. How could they be off the table? I mean, these are the kinds of issues you dream about when you run for office, where you can basically point to conservative and liberal families [and know] what they want changed and reformed.
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A refreshed look at leadership from the desk of CEO and chief content officer Stephanie Mehta
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