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Higher Ground: How Business Can Do the Right Thing in a Turbulent World
By: Alison Taylor (Harvard Business Review Press, 2025)
Back in 2003, I published the first of four books on why building environmental, social, and ethical good directly into products, services, processes, and even mindsets is a profit strategy. In all four books, I focus on how business bottom lines can benefit when the company does the right thing.
So I understand where the author is coming from in a book that could have been subtitled “How to Avoid Getting Your Company Targeted by Activists.” Self-defense and self-interest reflect the cynicism we find in much of the business culture. They may not reflect our true internal attitudes, but are a way to open those cynical executives to new mindsets. While I chose to look at encouraging aspirational goals by looking through the lens of self-interest, she focuses more on risk avoidance.
I was a quarter of the way through before I had that epiphany, and then I could start enjoying the book and not just being irked by it. She goes deeper and with more intensity into that mindset than I ever did. She also has decades of in-the-trenches project work for major corporations, and that’s completely outside my practice that focuses mostly on solopreneurs, microbusinesses, and community organizations. My knowledge of the world of multinational corporations is mostly research-based; hers is hands-on. So she chooses to target scared, worried executives at mid- to large-sized companies.
The book is based not only on her own experience but on numerous interviews and familiarity with many other books. And there’s a lot here: I took 11 pages of notes, versus 3-6 in most of the books I review.
Her superpower seems to be juggling conflicting needs in a world where being silent can get you in at least as much trouble as making a policy stand (p. 129)—and she’s not afraid to be contrarian. As one prominent example, in the worlds of solopreneurs and microbusinesses, activists, and community organizations where I do most of my work, transparency is almost always seen as a virtue. But Taylor makes a compelling case that opaqueness, in some situations, is a better option, because people will take the time to huddle and work out differences—while in a fully transparent model, they might just shout at each other from metaphorical opposite streetcorners, open up unsolvable cans of worms, reduce trust, and get buried in criticism because they haven’t done enough (pp. 141-149).
She also criticizes the all-too-common box-checking approach to ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance: a common framework for looking at social progress), noting that diagnostic instruments applied company-wide create resentment from people whose duties aren’t even relevant to what’s being measured, yet have to take time away from productive work for the assessment (p. 199). She also perceives that far too many compliance officers think all they have to do is track down and fire the “bad apples”—but without addressing the systemic flaws that allowed those bad apples to go bad, new ones will reappear. As she puts it, that “conveniently absolves leaders of personal responsibility for wrongdoing on their watch (pp. 161-162). And she shocked me by citing research showing that narcissistic CEOs tend to score surprisingly well on ESG (p. 178).
She wants to get the discussion unsiloed, so that, for instance, sustainability people are actively problem solving alongside risk management and compliance people. And that might help when over-eager managers change things around without first interviewing those who will be directly affected. She recommends going beyond that and creating a culture where employees feel confident speaking up and don’t fear reprisals (p. 213)—as well as ensuring that your own house is in order before you tackle the world’s big problems (p. 220).
Taylor plants her flag on strategy (pp. 83-85)—and grounds that strategy in centering human rights 106-118) rather than changeable political issues.
Ultimately, as I did a decade earlier, she validates the idea of building companies on the basis of their values and purpose, both of which are addressed all the way through.
There’s a lot more. This well-written, well-indexed, and thoroughly footnoted book may shift your perspective. It’s a good complement to my own 10thth book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, which is now available as a freebie in PDF format (reply to this newsletter with the subject, “GMHW PDF, please”).
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