Aoifinn Devitt: This podcast series is kindly sponsored by Evanston Capital. For over 20 years, Evanston Capital has had a key focus in identifying early-stage investment managers it believes are capable of generating long-term value-added returns in complex, innovative strategy areas. The series is also sponsored by Alvine Capital. Alvine Capital is a specialist investment manager and placement boutique with a particular focus on alternative assets, a significant presence in London and Stockholm.
Alison Taylor: It looks as if a certain sector of society that has less power is willing to stand up, and a certain sector of society that has a lot of power is not willing to stand up.
Aoifinn Devitt: I’m Aoifinn Devitt, and welcome to the 50 Faces Podcast, a podcast committed to revealing the richness and diversity of the world of investment by focusing on its people and their stories. I’m joined today by Alison Taylor, who’s clinical professor at the New York Stern School of Business. Her LinkedIn profile describes her as having lots of other hats and even more opinions. She’s author of Higher Ground: How Business Can Do the Right Thing in a Turbulent World, and has a successful Substack, as well as being a member of multiple governance-oriented boards, such as the Financial Times Moral Money Advisory Board, as well as holding senior advisor roles at KKR and Unilever, among others. Welcome, Alison. Thanks for joining me today.
Alison Taylor: Ethan, it’s such a pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for having me.
Aoifinn Devitt: Well, let’s start with a little bit about your background because I’ve only got to know you through your LinkedIn profile, the growing one, and I’d love to know a little bit about how you entered into this field.
Alison Taylor: Oh gosh. I mean, without going on and on about my career, we can skip over my 20s. I was then, I was an investigator, like a corruption investigator, due diligence, political risk, bribery, fraud, corruption, first in the Middle East and Africa, and then in the Americas for a company called Control Risks. If you do that job, you find out that the facts don’t matter nearly as much as leadership and culture. So, then I started asking a lot of questions about leadership and culture, which took me into organizational psychology and then into a role in sustainability. And then I moved to Stern right before the pandemic, initially to run a think tank for Jonathan Haidt, the famous social psychologist who’s just written The Anxious Generation. Did that, taught as an adjunct, and then became a full-time professor at the beginning of 2023. So I’m not a career academic, and even though now I live in the classroom and spend most of my time with students, it’s incredibly important to me to be in the real world and not say pretentious academic naive things, but be wrestling with real problems as they’re happening. So I am a professor, but I’m not the kind of professor people might immediately think of, and I am out there talking to a lot of people in the real world all the time.
Aoifinn Devitt: Well, I think that’s probably why you bridge so successfully the practice and the theory, which we, we see in your writing. And just before we go into that writing and some of what exercises you at the moment, I’d love to ask about that history as a fraud investigator, because I think that probably gives you some insight into the mindset of deception, coverup, and maybe holding two beliefs at once. We had a previous guest on the podcast who talked about the fraud triangle. She was an operational due diligence specialist, and you know about the rationalization. That’s one prong of that triangle. Did that affect your mindset or your ability to look through maybe some of EFSAD?
Alison Taylor: Yeah, I mean, I think there’s so much rich material in that discipline. I think, and maybe we’ll get onto this later, I mean, we’re looking at the corporate sector at the moment in the US behaving in a certain way, while at least some members of the general public behave in a different way. So just a simple point that we are all incredibly good at rationalizing whatever it is we want to do. It makes much less sense, I think, to try to divide the world into good and bad people and honest and dishonest people, and to look at the kind of incentives, the structures, the design, the way that we might deliberately in a corporate setting narrow the field. We’re not considering these wider implications. We’ve decided they’re not anything to do with us because we’ve got to keep the business alive and got to defend value. So, I find yelling and pointing and accusing people of doing things to be quite ineffective. And to really kind of focus, I think, on how people behave in groups, which is quite predictable, is something that can give you a lot of insight and a lot of ways to act that are productive.
Aoifinn Devitt: So would you say you have any core beliefs when it comes to governance? Do you think about it in the framework and how have they evolved if so?
Alison Taylor: I mean, I feel very strongly about these topics. I feel very strongly about responsibility and human rights and sustainability and the areas in which I work and ethical behavior. I don’t think I’m a more average than ethical person, but I do believe that we should care about impact on human beings. I do believe that people want to contribute and be useful and are motivated to do so. I believe that we should treat all human beings with dignity and respect. I believe that rich people aren’t necessarily anything but lucky and don’t deserve particular, you know, respect more than any other people. So yeah, I’ve got a lot of beliefs and a lot of opinions, and I hope I know when to deploy those and when to use other arguments.
Aoifinn Devitt: Move then to Higher Ground. So could you talk about the central message of that book?
Alison Taylor: Yeah, I mean, I suppose the really short way of putting it is that in 2026, where we are today, and I think this has been true for the last several years, even saying what a good business looks like or is, is extremely difficult. We don’t have consensus. We don’t even have the language to describe that. If we try to unpack it, we run into a lot of contradictions, There’s a lot of jargon in both the worlds of ethics and sustainability in HR. There are really three separate conversations going on, one of which says focus on shareholder value and don’t break the law, one of which says we need to think about climate change and the environment and doing the right thing, one of which says we need to think about how employees think and behave. And so the book tries to bring together a lot of disparate conversations and answer that question. Like, if you were trying to be a good business right now, what would that even look like? What would you do? Where would you start? Start in this incredibly fraught, turbulent world that’s only getting more turbulent every day.
Aoifinn Devitt: And I suppose this brings up a point because obviously it has evolved. I’m sure when you started writing the book, the world looked one way in terms of what corporates were doing and the way they were speaking out and how, and maybe it has changed now. And I suppose what have you seen in terms of that vexed question as to whether a company should speak out, um, which stakeholders should they be listening to with respect to that and Where do you fall now on that question?
Alison Taylor: I mean, I’m going to answer this question from a US perspective, because I live in the US, and there’s a very extreme version of all these conversations going on. So we had a phase in the late 2010s, where ESG was going to save the world, we were moving into stakeholder capitalism, CEOs were the new societal leaders and activists. We had the Business Roundtable declaring the end of shareholder value, we had this peak of social justice and employee activism after George Floyd’s murder in 2020. And back then, I think the world seemed to be going inexorably in a certain direction. Then we got into a phase where there was quite a deliberate and structured backlash from certain elements of the political community that also reflected some public frustration. And then the conversation evolved, which was about the time I wrote the book, to be much more about companies that are caught between polarities. You’re getting yelled at by the left, you’re getting yelled at by the right. How do you manage these kind of allegations of hypocrisy? How do you stop overcommitting? How do you make your message just more than words alone? Those kind of questions. We’re still somewhat in that environment, though I think now what you see is increasingly people on the same side as each other attacking each other. So progressives are incredibly angry with Target for its reversals on DEI. The right is incredibly angry with Cracker Barrel for changing its logo. So you’ve got that kind of infighting. And now you’ve got this other layer that we’ve really seen come to the fore over the last year where you’ve also got the prospect of retaliation by the government. So American companies are in a real bind because the environment is both extremely polarized And then there is a very real threat of retaliation, public shaming, criticism, being given tariffs, favors being given to your competitors. There are real legal and reputational risks that are not made up. I think we’ve seen in this country in the last few weeks a very vivid split-screen moment where we have members of the public being extremely courageous on the streets of Minneapolis, in some cases losing their lives. Weighed against corporates being either silent or giving equivocal statements, or if you are a tech billionaire heading to the White House to watch the Melania screening. And so that’s very stark. It looks as if a certain sector of society that has less power is willing to stand up, and a certain sector of society that has a lot of power is not willing to stand up. But I think there are very complex dynamics going on. It is a bit more complicated than that. And I think we’re heading into a pretty chaotic year.
Aoifinn Devitt: Well, indeed. And it’s— I would imagine just as we speak, we’re recording this early February 2026. There has been talk of an economic strike, I think, by one of your fellow professors there at NYU, Scott Galloway. Do you think that’s an effective strategy? Do you think that that is, as he suggests, that’s something that will cause government and corporate leaders to wake up?
Alison Taylor: I mean, I think it depends on the corporation, right? I mean, I think the tech companies have huge exposure to government contracts or if not to tariffs, or if not, to various sorts of economic policy that might favor them or not favor them. So I think that’s one conversation, and many of them seem quite enthusiastic about the administration. I think then you’ve got like the retailers and the businesses that are exposed to consumer sentiment, who I think are extremely worried. You’ve got, I think, then firms on Wall Street that I think are concerned about the economy, concerned about what’s going on at the Fed may be willing to push back a little bit. I do think Trump pays attention to the markets. And then I think you’ve got a broad swathe of businesses that are just hoping not to get called out and hoping that they can keep their heads down and not be in the headlines. So I think it’s pretty industry-specific. I think everyone is looking at Minneapolis and wondering what happens if that comes closer to their own headquarters. I hope people are scenario planning. I hope people are taking concrete steps to protect the human rights of their employees. It feels like a tipping point right now just based on the fact that 12 journalists have called me in the last week asking about the Minneapolis letter, which that was not the case in 2025. I wasn’t hearing from journalists so much about possibilities for standing up or doing something different.
Aoifinn Devitt: And it’s interesting because obviously you’ve spoken also about ESG and ebbing and flowing of the sentiment around that. And I think DEI has been in the crosshairs as well. Do you see this as something that is naturally something that recedes based on the political winds? Or do you think some of the gains put in place will be reversed, say, on these fronts? Or what’s your current stance around ESG and DEI measures?
Alison Taylor: I mean, I was always pretty skeptical about ESG as an investing strategy. I do think we oversold it. I think, however, there would have been a healthy correction regardless of who got elected. So And I think there’s a need in sustainability to rethink a lot of assumptions and be much more clear and focused on legitimacy and leverage and admit when you can’t solve the problem. And I think we saw a lot of PR-based strategies and cheerleading that was very problematic. So that’s one conversation. I mean, I think that lots of sustainability leaders feeling under pressure, seeing their teams reorganized, So some of it is self-inflicted, some of it is definitely not self-inflicted. I think the conversation on DEI is even more fraught and interesting. If anything, the law actually hasn’t changed. It’s just that the government is using existing laws to— for example, Nike is being investigated at the moment for discriminating against white people, which is just ridiculous on its face. So we’ve also got problems, I think, there with the way that DEI was implemented and framed and rolled out, but If you spend any time in my classroom, students know climate change is real. Students care about responsibility and impact and care deeply about corporate hypocrisy, are very sophisticated in spotting it, very sophisticated in thinking about the underlying causes. I think we’ll lead differently, do think differently. And they are very diverse. My students are extremely diverse, and they want to be in leadership teams and organizations that look like the classrooms they’re in. That look like them and their friends. So in terms of the big macro picture, I mean, yes, I often have people ask, is climate action over? You know, are we post-ESG? Well, no. I mean, at the moment, physical reality still exists. And I think where it’s interesting, suppose you’re sourcing food, you don’t think climate change is woke because you’ve got to source food and there’s concrete risk that you’ve got to manage and that has financial consequences. So in the big picture, I’m pretty sure none of this stuff is going away. We’re in a very particular situation in the US and it’s not the case globally. So we’re also a bit of an outlier, but over the long term, I’m pretty sure we’re still heading in the same direction. It’s just gonna be a bumpy road.
Aoifinn Devitt: So interesting. When you mentioned something about authenticity, I think that is really the key. If there’s a detection of inauthenticity around some of these movements, then I think that, that is when trust is lost.
Alison Taylor: That is, my students are obsessed with authenticity. I hear the word performative once a week at least, and they’re very difficult to impress, and they’ve got a real— more than my generation— a real nose for rooting that out and seeing it. And I think one of the things that we all need to do is think about how to communicate with younger generations in a way that is— maybe the word’s authentic— but is a little bit more honest, a little bit more realistic, and meets people where they are. So In my hopeful days, I think we come out with approaches to diversity and approaches to sustainability that are more credible and more defensible and more rigorous, but we’re not there right now.
Aoifinn Devitt: We’re going to take a quick break to hear from Evanston Capital Management, one of the sponsors of this podcast series. I sat down with Adam Blitz, CEO and co-CIO at Evanston Capital Management, and I asked him whether there were some things that were commonly missed in the evaluation process when it came to hedge funds.
Speaker C: In addition to some of the implementation issues, I think just the soft side of it is just continues to be underappreciated. What’s the culture within these firms? What’s the motivation of the key people within the firm? How does that motivation change over time? How does it change if they’ve had a period of great success and they’ve just been given this big incentive fee and, and economically they’re in a very different position than maybe they’ve been their whole life, like, does that change their approach? Do they get more risk-averse? Do they start to focus their attention away from managing the portfolio, or are they just so passionate about investing, driven, competitive, this is what they love to do, that even with that success, they continue to be fully motivated to continue to achieve future success? And those soft evaluations, they’re not going to pop off the page from an exposure report.
Aoifinn Devitt: And now back to the show. And it’s interesting because I think part of authenticity is admitting not knowing what to do. And I think that that is something that it seems some of the leaders of today are unwilling to do. There seems to be a persona that is now being created around, especially some of the tech leaders, that they are all-knowing when it comes to not only tech and their field, but also politics, philosophy, ethics, any number of, um, of different disciplines. And I think that kind of conflation of talent in one field with talent in another is inauthentic. And perhaps there’s a desire not to allow cracks to appear in that persona, which actually brings me now to your Substack, because I think you’ve been really hitting a lot of nerves when it comes to your recent writing. It’s a relatively new Substack for you, but off to a roaring start by all accounts. Can you tell us a little bit about what convinced you to shift to this medium and how it’s going so far?
Alison Taylor: Oh, thank you. Yeah, it’s been 3 months. I’m really thrilled with how it’s going. I think there are a few things, like, I mean, we know each other from LinkedIn. I have a huge presence on LinkedIn, but one thing I think that happens when you have a lot of followers on LinkedIn is you start to realize that you’re just working for the algorithm. There’s stuff that you can do on there, and I’m still very present on there, but I wanted to write longer form, more thoughtful pieces for a smaller community where I get less exposure and less trolling and where I could think in a more kind of long-term way. I thought all last summer about another book proposal. I mean, frankly, 2025 was a rough year, and I didn’t want to write a book that was kind of everything sucks. But also, I think with AI and with the speed at which things are moving, it didn’t seem like the right moment to pull myself out of the fray, which you have to do if you’re going to write a book and really focus on it. So I decided to do something that would be a little bit more real time. I started think about where to do that. Substack seemed like the obvious place. It really does feel like a place where lots of very interesting writing is coming. There’s lots of very interesting conversation, and it’s given me the opportunity to explore questions and kind of really get back into writing. I did some writing since Higher Ground came out, but not that much. So now I’m really disciplining myself to write 2 pieces a week, and it’s really— I feel very motivated and energized And yeah, much, much more to come. So it’s been really exciting actually.
Aoifinn Devitt: And you get a lot of engagement there. I know you’ve got a lot of engagement on LinkedIn, which is always key. It’s not just about the clicks, about the responses. And some of the best is in your comments, some of the best dialogue and ideas sometimes because it generates so much in terms of feedback. How has the response been on Substack?
Alison Taylor: Well, you know, that’s interesting. I mean, so far not what I would like. I mean, I can tell, see from a lot of data about who’s reading it and who’s buying subscriptions. So that’s all going well, but it’s not social media like LinkedIn is. It’s been harder than I anticipated to start a conversation on Substack. So once I get a little bit more momentum, I’m gonna start organizing live events. I mean, I see other writers pulling this off on Substack. So, but I think a lot of people come there to read. And when I think about my own behavior on Substack, I read long pieces and I think they’re amazing and I may not even like or share them. So I think there’s somewhat different behavior. People are looking for more long-form writing. It’s not designed to be an engagement platform in the same way. So I think I assumed I could kind of translate my audience from LinkedIn to a smaller platform on Substack and it would be the same. It’s proving not the same. So giving all that more thought and experimenting in real time, but certainly not going anywhere on LinkedIn either. I mean, as you said, I have this amazing network, like I can post something and by the end of the day, I will have several smart comments with angles I’ve never thought of before. And that is, you know, even with the trolling and the rest of it, it’s still really, really wonderful experience.
Aoifinn Devitt: Well, I don’t see the trolling. I hope they can cleanse that before it gets to most of us. But I do see the engagement and it’s fantastic. And I think the most recent engagement just this week was around AI and some of the way AI is now replacing entry-level roles and what a misstep that was, and perhaps one that wouldn’t be realized till later when we had failed to transfer skills, that the skills to discern when AI was getting it wrong, that wasn’t simply about this level being an entry-level grunt work. It was about this level being an apprentice level to take us into the midstream. I thought that was a fascinating insight, but only one of your many fascinating insights around AI. Where is your thinking taking you currently in terms of wrestling with this as an ethical problem, as a society’s problem, as a challenge?
Alison Taylor: Well, yeah, I mean, it’s showing up in every aspect of my life. I use it myself for research, so I find the way it behaves kind of fascinating and somewhat hilarious. It’s a challenge in the classroom in terms of getting students to concentrate. It’s a challenge with grading. It presents all sorts of challenges, I think, for learning and cognition and really requires a transformation of education. And so maybe there’s some parallels there with corporate life. You know, like it’s easy to have an AI policy in your syllabus. It’s much harder to think about how you redesign, how you teach, and how people learn, and how you manage this new kind of force in technology. And I think we see somewhat of the same thing in corporations, you know, that it’s an excuse to cut costs. Lots of CEOs, very enthusiastic, feel like they can’t get left behind in the race, are sort of issuing these blanket, you’ve all got to use it, kind of encouraging people to craft their careers about, around looking like the person that understands understands AI, rather than doing the more difficult and involved work about what do roles look like, what do we actually need, what problems would AI solve, how do we think about jobs and careers with this new technology rolling out. I think it’s a little bit— another parallel I might draw is the kind of remote work discussion. You know, we had the opportunity during the pandemic, I think, to rethink how work got done, rethink roles, rethink management and leadership, think about flexibility, provide more opportunities for women. And what we instead did in a herd-like way was, you know, once the pandemic was over, all these CEOs started issuing return-to-office mandates. And so these questions are hard and they require deep thinking and they require going against the grain. And what you see instead, I think, is quite a lot of herd behavior. So we’re starting to see the consequences. We’re seeing the consequences in the labor market. It’s not good for my students. But I think we’re also seeing a lot of rumbling that these investments aren’t paying off and people are starting to ask deeper questions about why that is. And so hopefully we will get to that point of, you know, putting human beings at the center of these efforts. But that again could be a little while.
Aoifinn Devitt: I want to ask you one thing. It’s this notion of the managing of abundant intelligence, which I think seems to be the venture capital approach that we’re seeing. And we’re also seeing this with A16z. That seems to be the approach there, that this is, we’re all gonna be, as you know, managing supercomputers and this will massively enhance productivity. It seems that making this leap will require, as you said, a lot of deep thought as to how to actually restructure companies, how to maximize the use of talent. And there used to be roles like chief, well, talent officer, and that probably still exists, but chief sustainability officer and some of these roles created specifically to think about these bigger picture issues. And they’ve been eliminated in some of the recent rounds of— how do you think, when you think about responsibility and your engagement with companies, who’s going to be the person who thinks of that really big shift that these companies need to undertake? Do you see that it’s going to happen or will we just muddle through?
Alison Taylor: Honestly, I think a lot of companies are muddling through. I also think there’s a tendency in corporate life, you got a problem, get a chief, you know, chief AI officer, chief happiness officer. We had a chief medical officers in the pandemic. So this is not what this technology is like. You know, AI is often compared to nuclear and, you know, in terms of energy, in terms of how transformational it is. I think it’s more like microplastics, right? It’s in everything. You’ve got to get it in everything. You know, these tools are definitely amazing. They’re getting better and better every day. But unless you can make them useful to human beings, unless we can think about how they fit into work and roles, There’s a wonderful article, I think it was the most popular article on HBR last year, about work swap, about how you can, with AI, produce student papers or decks or reports that look, on the face of it, very plausible. But once you start to dig in, the reference is accurate. Is this factual? And so this very often, I think, ends up with senior people having to do all this work cleaning this up and figuring out where the problem is. So, it’s not in itself, I think, necessarily going to reduce work. And I think it’s a kind of, it has become a problem with people sort of outsourcing their thinking to these machines. So, you know, I’m not an AI Luddite, but I don’t see the thinking about what this is doing to culture, what this is doing to human dignity and motivation, and kind of, you know, how we think about the human and AI relationship going forward. I think we’ve kind of done what we did with social media and rushed into this without thinking about some of the consequences for our psychology. I mean, just even the way the LLMs behave with me, you know, I can imagine if I were lonely and young, I could get into a relationship with one of these things. Like, I get it. It’s powerful. It’s something that, you know, we all psychologically react to whether we like it or not.
Aoifinn Devitt: And two other issues. I mean, this is such a fascinating area. We could probably have a series of podcasts dedicated to this, but, but one of them is the recent, speaking of boundaries and the recent kind of a furore around the Maltbook and this AIs and agents and social network, et cetera. And the sense that perhaps boundaries have not been drawn between the human interface, the agent interface, and that there was, you know, whether we’ve given away too much of our personal information, not too much discretion. How do you think about that issue?
Alison Taylor: Well, it’s, I mean, sort of a fascinating discussion, you know, I mean, the anthropomorphization of those bots was sort of fascinating. There isn’t actually on Maltbook any guardrail. You can be a person on there pretending to be a bot. I thought it was sort of interesting how much of it went to kind of junky crypto sales really quickly. So, you know, I think it was, it’s the shape of things to come. Sort of fascinating on one level to see how these bots and so on behave. But I think again, you know, we, so interesting, I think even that we thought of Maltbook as a kind of Reddit for AIs. We can only think in human terms about how to, you know, where to put these things and how they’ll behave, which I think is also kind of fascinating about human psychology, if nothing else. I mean, that’s where I’m really paying attention.
Aoifinn Devitt: Well, similarly, I think on the human psychology side, you know, I’m in the wealth management arena and I think it’s well known in wealth management that we have choice paralysis. If you give too much choice in terms of an investment product, there is a seizing up. It’s an inability to choose there. And I also think with data, I see this often in presentations from consultants, a data dump would, would occur and there’s absolutely no means of navigating that data. It is paralyzing to have data dumped. And I think with AI, with abundant intelligence, there’s even more data dumped. And I think that the lack of ability to navigate that, that is going to cause paralysis. And as you said, probably lack of productivity, right?
Alison Taylor: So information asymmetry is a market failure, but that’s not always about lack of information. It can also be about too much undifferentiated information to the degree we then can’t figure out what’s real and what’s not and what’s credible. And so there we’re galloping into a pretty dystopian future, I think. But then at the same time, I don’t think adoption is going the way people hope it will. I mean, we’ll see what happens with the financial markets on these stocks in the next year, but I think it’s going to be bumpy.
Aoifinn Devitt: Well, yeah, exactly. And the last point on that is I think around getting back to your education roots because, or your current role, because the work slop and I think also just the general, the video slop, inability to distinguish what is real, will that lead us to more in-person seminars, more actual learning without these tools and even learning with muscle memory, which is, they say, a better way to actually lay down information, to master information when you’ve actually had to find it out for yourself.
Alison Taylor: I think all of that’ll happen. I mean, I think everything’ll happen at once, but you are reminding me there was a New York Times article last year thinking becoming a luxury good. It’s sort of similar to how the, the tech billionaires give their children wooden toys and don’t let them go on on social media, you can see thinking, reading, being intellectual, you know, not using these machines becoming a status symbol over time. For sure, I think a pivot back to more kind of offline, in-person, intimate events is already happening. I think my younger students are well aware of the dangers of all this and really understand that their competitive advantage over time is going to be their thinking and critical judgment and EQ. So yeah, I mean, I don’t know that I’m super happy to be living through this era, but it’s certainly fascinating.
Aoifinn Devitt: Well, it’s thanks to guides like yourself that I think we have a chance of making it through the wilderness in one piece. My last question, just before turning to a couple of personal concluding reflections: your board roles and some of the advisory roles. You work with corporates, you talk about moral money in the case of the FT, Any trends or zeitgeist to speak of there in terms of the responsiveness of corporations to the work that you do? And do you find it varies by geography? Actually, that was the other thing, given you have a global—
Alison Taylor: It varies by geography. I think, you know, the, the corporate sector in America is very nervous right now, and I’m not a particularly restrained person. I have a lot of opinions. So I think my 2026 is gonna look different than my 2025. Partly because I think the risks that many companies have been running are starting to become clear. I do think we need to also provide a path forward that’s realistic and practical and focused. I don’t want to be the person kind of being like, this is a win-win and you’re an idiot if you don’t do it. You know, I mean, I think leading companies get more scrutiny, they get more pressure, they have to think about how they reframe this, this whole conversation really, really, really carefully. So I’m in the middle of many extremely fascinating conversations on that score. And it’s been hard to miss, you know, since the events in Minneapolis of the last few weeks, so many journalists have called me that I can see that public attention is now really on these questions of corporate responsibility.
Aoifinn Devitt: I’d like to just turn to some personal reflections. In this section, I usually ask people to shout out to people who’ve had a formative role in their lives or be an inspiration. And you seem to have worked with a lot of very interesting thinkers. In this arena? Anyone in particular that you’d either suggest we read or that has— that you’d like to note has had a particular influence on you?
Alison Taylor: There is a professor in Switzerland called Guido Palazzo that wrote a book called The Dark Pattern. I absolutely love Thomas Chamorro-Presmuyck. He’s just written a book called Don’t Be Yourself about the problems with authenticity, but he wrote my favorite HBR article ever, which is called Why Did So Incompetent Men Become Leaders. And then I have a friend, Claire Gustafson. She’s a therapist, she’s a coach, she’s a former opera singer. She is an all-around wonderful human being that everybody should spend one-on-one time with, who is an enormous inspiration to me. My boss, who is the head of my— of the BSP, that’s Business and Society program at Stern, Betty Wiesenfeld, really amazing psychology researcher, amazing leader, really amazing thinker as well. So yeah, there are too many to name and I’m gonna hang up and think of about 10 more, but I’ll write a post sometime about who I read and who I pay attention to.
Aoifinn Devitt: That’s amazing. Well, I, I should have given the caveat. It’s not supposed to be an exhaustive list in case anyone does, does feel guilty on that. And just to close out, I asked you about your corporate governance, I suppose your principles and your core beliefs, but is there any creed or motto that you live by today or any words of advice that you would give to a student or to just a professional in your field that you think have stood you well?
Alison Taylor: Focus. Treat human beings with dignity and respect. Don’t make assumptions about what people think based on how they look and appear. Yeah, I could go on, but that’s enough.
Aoifinn Devitt: Well, thank you so much, Alison. They say don’t meet your heroes, but this, I think, has been a fantastic conversation because I have been inspired by your writing, by your thought leadership, and by the spark that you’re not afraid to throw a few Molotov cocktails into the, I think, our complacent world. And I think it’s, it, you shock us into, into actually having an opinion, owning an opinion, and not only an opinion, but having a refined, thoughtful, well-evidenced opinion. So I love the work you do, and I will be putting links to all of this in the show notes and, uh, keep it up. And we hope we’ll get you back on here sometime soon.
Alison Taylor: You got it. Thank you so much. It was just lovely to see you.
Aoifinn Devitt: I’m Aoifinn Devitt. Thank you for listening to the 50 Faces Podcast. If you liked what you heard and would like to tune in to hear from more inspiring investors and their personal journeys, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment advice, and all views are personal and should not be attributed to the organizations and affiliations of the host or any guest.
Aoifinn Devitt: This podcast series is kindly sponsored by Evanston Capital. For over 20 years, Evanston Capital has had a key focus in identifying early-stage investment managers it believes are capable of generating long-term value-added returns in complex, innovative strategy areas. The series is also sponsored by Alvine Capital. Alvine Capital is a specialist investment manager and placement boutique with a particular focus on alternative assets, a significant presence in London and Stockholm.
Alison Taylor: It looks as if a certain sector of society that has less power is willing to stand up, and a certain sector of society that has a lot of power is not willing to stand up.
Aoifinn Devitt: I’m Aoifinn Devitt, and welcome to the 50 Faces Podcast, a podcast committed to revealing the richness and diversity of the world of investment by focusing on its people and their stories. I’m joined today by Alison Taylor, who’s clinical professor at the New York Stern School of Business. Her LinkedIn profile describes her as having lots of other hats and even more opinions. She’s author of Higher Ground: How Business Can Do the Right Thing in a Turbulent World, and has a successful Substack, as well as being a member of multiple governance-oriented boards, such as the Financial Times Moral Money Advisory Board, as well as holding senior advisor roles at KKR and Unilever, among others. Welcome, Alison. Thanks for joining me today.
Alison Taylor: Ethan, it’s such a pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for having me.
Aoifinn Devitt: Well, let’s start with a little bit about your background because I’ve only got to know you through your LinkedIn profile, the growing one, and I’d love to know a little bit about how you entered into this field.
Alison Taylor: Oh gosh. I mean, without going on and on about my career, we can skip over my 20s. I was then, I was an investigator, like a corruption investigator, due diligence, political risk, bribery, fraud, corruption, first in the Middle East and Africa, and then in the Americas for a company called Control Risks. If you do that job, you find out that the facts don’t matter nearly as much as leadership and culture. So, then I started asking a lot of questions about leadership and culture, which took me into organizational psychology and then into a role in sustainability. And then I moved to Stern right before the pandemic, initially to run a think tank for Jonathan Haidt, the famous social psychologist who’s just written The Anxious Generation. Did that, taught as an adjunct, and then became a full-time professor at the beginning of 2023. So I’m not a career academic, and even though now I live in the classroom and spend most of my time with students, it’s incredibly important to me to be in the real world and not say pretentious academic naive things, but be wrestling with real problems as they’re happening. So I am a professor, but I’m not the kind of professor people might immediately think of, and I am out there talking to a lot of people in the real world all the time.
Aoifinn Devitt: Well, I think that’s probably why you bridge so successfully the practice and the theory, which we, we see in your writing. And just before we go into that writing and some of what exercises you at the moment, I’d love to ask about that history as a fraud investigator, because I think that probably gives you some insight into the mindset of deception, coverup, and maybe holding two beliefs at once. We had a previous guest on the podcast who talked about the fraud triangle. She was an operational due diligence specialist, and you know about the rationalization. That’s one prong of that triangle. Did that affect your mindset or your ability to look through maybe some of EFSAD?
Alison Taylor: Yeah, I mean, I think there’s so much rich material in that discipline. I think, and maybe we’ll get onto this later, I mean, we’re looking at the corporate sector at the moment in the US behaving in a certain way, while at least some members of the general public behave in a different way. So just a simple point that we are all incredibly good at rationalizing whatever it is we want to do. It makes much less sense, I think, to try to divide the world into good and bad people and honest and dishonest people, and to look at the kind of incentives, the structures, the design, the way that we might deliberately in a corporate setting narrow the field. We’re not considering these wider implications. We’ve decided they’re not anything to do with us because we’ve got to keep the business alive and got to defend value. So, I find yelling and pointing and accusing people of doing things to be quite ineffective. And to really kind of focus, I think, on how people behave in groups, which is quite predictable, is something that can give you a lot of insight and a lot of ways to act that are productive.
Aoifinn Devitt: So would you say you have any core beliefs when it comes to governance? Do you think about it in the framework and how have they evolved if so?
Alison Taylor: I mean, I feel very strongly about these topics. I feel very strongly about responsibility and human rights and sustainability and the areas in which I work and ethical behavior. I don’t think I’m a more average than ethical person, but I do believe that we should care about impact on human beings. I do believe that people want to contribute and be useful and are motivated to do so. I believe that we should treat all human beings with dignity and respect. I believe that rich people aren’t necessarily anything but lucky and don’t deserve particular, you know, respect more than any other people. So yeah, I’ve got a lot of beliefs and a lot of opinions, and I hope I know when to deploy those and when to use other arguments.
Aoifinn Devitt: Move then to Higher Ground. So could you talk about the central message of that book?
Alison Taylor: Yeah, I mean, I suppose the really short way of putting it is that in 2026, where we are today, and I think this has been true for the last several years, even saying what a good business looks like or is, is extremely difficult. We don’t have consensus. We don’t even have the language to describe that. If we try to unpack it, we run into a lot of contradictions, There’s a lot of jargon in both the worlds of ethics and sustainability in HR. There are really three separate conversations going on, one of which says focus on shareholder value and don’t break the law, one of which says we need to think about climate change and the environment and doing the right thing, one of which says we need to think about how employees think and behave. And so the book tries to bring together a lot of disparate conversations and answer that question. Like, if you were trying to be a good business right now, what would that even look like? What would you do? Where would you start? Start in this incredibly fraught, turbulent world that’s only getting more turbulent every day.
Aoifinn Devitt: And I suppose this brings up a point because obviously it has evolved. I’m sure when you started writing the book, the world looked one way in terms of what corporates were doing and the way they were speaking out and how, and maybe it has changed now. And I suppose what have you seen in terms of that vexed question as to whether a company should speak out, um, which stakeholders should they be listening to with respect to that and Where do you fall now on that question?
Alison Taylor: I mean, I’m going to answer this question from a US perspective, because I live in the US, and there’s a very extreme version of all these conversations going on. So we had a phase in the late 2010s, where ESG was going to save the world, we were moving into stakeholder capitalism, CEOs were the new societal leaders and activists. We had the Business Roundtable declaring the end of shareholder value, we had this peak of social justice and employee activism after George Floyd’s murder in 2020. And back then, I think the world seemed to be going inexorably in a certain direction. Then we got into a phase where there was quite a deliberate and structured backlash from certain elements of the political community that also reflected some public frustration. And then the conversation evolved, which was about the time I wrote the book, to be much more about companies that are caught between polarities. You’re getting yelled at by the left, you’re getting yelled at by the right. How do you manage these kind of allegations of hypocrisy? How do you stop overcommitting? How do you make your message just more than words alone? Those kind of questions. We’re still somewhat in that environment, though I think now what you see is increasingly people on the same side as each other attacking each other. So progressives are incredibly angry with Target for its reversals on DEI. The right is incredibly angry with Cracker Barrel for changing its logo. So you’ve got that kind of infighting. And now you’ve got this other layer that we’ve really seen come to the fore over the last year where you’ve also got the prospect of retaliation by the government. So American companies are in a real bind because the environment is both extremely polarized And then there is a very real threat of retaliation, public shaming, criticism, being given tariffs, favors being given to your competitors. There are real legal and reputational risks that are not made up. I think we’ve seen in this country in the last few weeks a very vivid split-screen moment where we have members of the public being extremely courageous on the streets of Minneapolis, in some cases losing their lives. Weighed against corporates being either silent or giving equivocal statements, or if you are a tech billionaire heading to the White House to watch the Melania screening. And so that’s very stark. It looks as if a certain sector of society that has less power is willing to stand up, and a certain sector of society that has a lot of power is not willing to stand up. But I think there are very complex dynamics going on. It is a bit more complicated than that. And I think we’re heading into a pretty chaotic year.
Aoifinn Devitt: Well, indeed. And it’s— I would imagine just as we speak, we’re recording this early February 2026. There has been talk of an economic strike, I think, by one of your fellow professors there at NYU, Scott Galloway. Do you think that’s an effective strategy? Do you think that that is, as he suggests, that’s something that will cause government and corporate leaders to wake up?
Alison Taylor: I mean, I think it depends on the corporation, right? I mean, I think the tech companies have huge exposure to government contracts or if not to tariffs, or if not, to various sorts of economic policy that might favor them or not favor them. So I think that’s one conversation, and many of them seem quite enthusiastic about the administration. I think then you’ve got like the retailers and the businesses that are exposed to consumer sentiment, who I think are extremely worried. You’ve got, I think, then firms on Wall Street that I think are concerned about the economy, concerned about what’s going on at the Fed may be willing to push back a little bit. I do think Trump pays attention to the markets. And then I think you’ve got a broad swathe of businesses that are just hoping not to get called out and hoping that they can keep their heads down and not be in the headlines. So I think it’s pretty industry-specific. I think everyone is looking at Minneapolis and wondering what happens if that comes closer to their own headquarters. I hope people are scenario planning. I hope people are taking concrete steps to protect the human rights of their employees. It feels like a tipping point right now just based on the fact that 12 journalists have called me in the last week asking about the Minneapolis letter, which that was not the case in 2025. I wasn’t hearing from journalists so much about possibilities for standing up or doing something different.
Aoifinn Devitt: And it’s interesting because obviously you’ve spoken also about ESG and ebbing and flowing of the sentiment around that. And I think DEI has been in the crosshairs as well. Do you see this as something that is naturally something that recedes based on the political winds? Or do you think some of the gains put in place will be reversed, say, on these fronts? Or what’s your current stance around ESG and DEI measures?
Alison Taylor: I mean, I was always pretty skeptical about ESG as an investing strategy. I do think we oversold it. I think, however, there would have been a healthy correction regardless of who got elected. So And I think there’s a need in sustainability to rethink a lot of assumptions and be much more clear and focused on legitimacy and leverage and admit when you can’t solve the problem. And I think we saw a lot of PR-based strategies and cheerleading that was very problematic. So that’s one conversation. I mean, I think that lots of sustainability leaders feeling under pressure, seeing their teams reorganized, So some of it is self-inflicted, some of it is definitely not self-inflicted. I think the conversation on DEI is even more fraught and interesting. If anything, the law actually hasn’t changed. It’s just that the government is using existing laws to— for example, Nike is being investigated at the moment for discriminating against white people, which is just ridiculous on its face. So we’ve also got problems, I think, there with the way that DEI was implemented and framed and rolled out, but If you spend any time in my classroom, students know climate change is real. Students care about responsibility and impact and care deeply about corporate hypocrisy, are very sophisticated in spotting it, very sophisticated in thinking about the underlying causes. I think we’ll lead differently, do think differently. And they are very diverse. My students are extremely diverse, and they want to be in leadership teams and organizations that look like the classrooms they’re in. That look like them and their friends. So in terms of the big macro picture, I mean, yes, I often have people ask, is climate action over? You know, are we post-ESG? Well, no. I mean, at the moment, physical reality still exists. And I think where it’s interesting, suppose you’re sourcing food, you don’t think climate change is woke because you’ve got to source food and there’s concrete risk that you’ve got to manage and that has financial consequences. So in the big picture, I’m pretty sure none of this stuff is going away. We’re in a very particular situation in the US and it’s not the case globally. So we’re also a bit of an outlier, but over the long term, I’m pretty sure we’re still heading in the same direction. It’s just gonna be a bumpy road.
Aoifinn Devitt: So interesting. When you mentioned something about authenticity, I think that is really the key. If there’s a detection of inauthenticity around some of these movements, then I think that, that is when trust is lost.
Alison Taylor: That is, my students are obsessed with authenticity. I hear the word performative once a week at least, and they’re very difficult to impress, and they’ve got a real— more than my generation— a real nose for rooting that out and seeing it. And I think one of the things that we all need to do is think about how to communicate with younger generations in a way that is— maybe the word’s authentic— but is a little bit more honest, a little bit more realistic, and meets people where they are. So In my hopeful days, I think we come out with approaches to diversity and approaches to sustainability that are more credible and more defensible and more rigorous, but we’re not there right now.
Aoifinn Devitt: We’re going to take a quick break to hear from Evanston Capital Management, one of the sponsors of this podcast series. I sat down with Adam Blitz, CEO and co-CIO at Evanston Capital Management, and I asked him whether there were some things that were commonly missed in the evaluation process when it came to hedge funds.
Speaker C: In addition to some of the implementation issues, I think just the soft side of it is just continues to be underappreciated. What’s the culture within these firms? What’s the motivation of the key people within the firm? How does that motivation change over time? How does it change if they’ve had a period of great success and they’ve just been given this big incentive fee and, and economically they’re in a very different position than maybe they’ve been their whole life, like, does that change their approach? Do they get more risk-averse? Do they start to focus their attention away from managing the portfolio, or are they just so passionate about investing, driven, competitive, this is what they love to do, that even with that success, they continue to be fully motivated to continue to achieve future success? And those soft evaluations, they’re not going to pop off the page from an exposure report.
Aoifinn Devitt: And now back to the show. And it’s interesting because I think part of authenticity is admitting not knowing what to do. And I think that that is something that it seems some of the leaders of today are unwilling to do. There seems to be a persona that is now being created around, especially some of the tech leaders, that they are all-knowing when it comes to not only tech and their field, but also politics, philosophy, ethics, any number of, um, of different disciplines. And I think that kind of conflation of talent in one field with talent in another is inauthentic. And perhaps there’s a desire not to allow cracks to appear in that persona, which actually brings me now to your Substack, because I think you’ve been really hitting a lot of nerves when it comes to your recent writing. It’s a relatively new Substack for you, but off to a roaring start by all accounts. Can you tell us a little bit about what convinced you to shift to this medium and how it’s going so far?
Alison Taylor: Oh, thank you. Yeah, it’s been 3 months. I’m really thrilled with how it’s going. I think there are a few things, like, I mean, we know each other from LinkedIn. I have a huge presence on LinkedIn, but one thing I think that happens when you have a lot of followers on LinkedIn is you start to realize that you’re just working for the algorithm. There’s stuff that you can do on there, and I’m still very present on there, but I wanted to write longer form, more thoughtful pieces for a smaller community where I get less exposure and less trolling and where I could think in a more kind of long-term way. I thought all last summer about another book proposal. I mean, frankly, 2025 was a rough year, and I didn’t want to write a book that was kind of everything sucks. But also, I think with AI and with the speed at which things are moving, it didn’t seem like the right moment to pull myself out of the fray, which you have to do if you’re going to write a book and really focus on it. So I decided to do something that would be a little bit more real time. I started think about where to do that. Substack seemed like the obvious place. It really does feel like a place where lots of very interesting writing is coming. There’s lots of very interesting conversation, and it’s given me the opportunity to explore questions and kind of really get back into writing. I did some writing since Higher Ground came out, but not that much. So now I’m really disciplining myself to write 2 pieces a week, and it’s really— I feel very motivated and energized And yeah, much, much more to come. So it’s been really exciting actually.
Aoifinn Devitt: And you get a lot of engagement there. I know you’ve got a lot of engagement on LinkedIn, which is always key. It’s not just about the clicks, about the responses. And some of the best is in your comments, some of the best dialogue and ideas sometimes because it generates so much in terms of feedback. How has the response been on Substack?
Alison Taylor: Well, you know, that’s interesting. I mean, so far not what I would like. I mean, I can tell, see from a lot of data about who’s reading it and who’s buying subscriptions. So that’s all going well, but it’s not social media like LinkedIn is. It’s been harder than I anticipated to start a conversation on Substack. So once I get a little bit more momentum, I’m gonna start organizing live events. I mean, I see other writers pulling this off on Substack. So, but I think a lot of people come there to read. And when I think about my own behavior on Substack, I read long pieces and I think they’re amazing and I may not even like or share them. So I think there’s somewhat different behavior. People are looking for more long-form writing. It’s not designed to be an engagement platform in the same way. So I think I assumed I could kind of translate my audience from LinkedIn to a smaller platform on Substack and it would be the same. It’s proving not the same. So giving all that more thought and experimenting in real time, but certainly not going anywhere on LinkedIn either. I mean, as you said, I have this amazing network, like I can post something and by the end of the day, I will have several smart comments with angles I’ve never thought of before. And that is, you know, even with the trolling and the rest of it, it’s still really, really wonderful experience.
Aoifinn Devitt: Well, I don’t see the trolling. I hope they can cleanse that before it gets to most of us. But I do see the engagement and it’s fantastic. And I think the most recent engagement just this week was around AI and some of the way AI is now replacing entry-level roles and what a misstep that was, and perhaps one that wouldn’t be realized till later when we had failed to transfer skills, that the skills to discern when AI was getting it wrong, that wasn’t simply about this level being an entry-level grunt work. It was about this level being an apprentice level to take us into the midstream. I thought that was a fascinating insight, but only one of your many fascinating insights around AI. Where is your thinking taking you currently in terms of wrestling with this as an ethical problem, as a society’s problem, as a challenge?
Alison Taylor: Well, yeah, I mean, it’s showing up in every aspect of my life. I use it myself for research, so I find the way it behaves kind of fascinating and somewhat hilarious. It’s a challenge in the classroom in terms of getting students to concentrate. It’s a challenge with grading. It presents all sorts of challenges, I think, for learning and cognition and really requires a transformation of education. And so maybe there’s some parallels there with corporate life. You know, like it’s easy to have an AI policy in your syllabus. It’s much harder to think about how you redesign, how you teach, and how people learn, and how you manage this new kind of force in technology. And I think we see somewhat of the same thing in corporations, you know, that it’s an excuse to cut costs. Lots of CEOs, very enthusiastic, feel like they can’t get left behind in the race, are sort of issuing these blanket, you’ve all got to use it, kind of encouraging people to craft their careers about, around looking like the person that understands understands AI, rather than doing the more difficult and involved work about what do roles look like, what do we actually need, what problems would AI solve, how do we think about jobs and careers with this new technology rolling out. I think it’s a little bit— another parallel I might draw is the kind of remote work discussion. You know, we had the opportunity during the pandemic, I think, to rethink how work got done, rethink roles, rethink management and leadership, think about flexibility, provide more opportunities for women. And what we instead did in a herd-like way was, you know, once the pandemic was over, all these CEOs started issuing return-to-office mandates. And so these questions are hard and they require deep thinking and they require going against the grain. And what you see instead, I think, is quite a lot of herd behavior. So we’re starting to see the consequences. We’re seeing the consequences in the labor market. It’s not good for my students. But I think we’re also seeing a lot of rumbling that these investments aren’t paying off and people are starting to ask deeper questions about why that is. And so hopefully we will get to that point of, you know, putting human beings at the center of these efforts. But that again could be a little while.
Aoifinn Devitt: I want to ask you one thing. It’s this notion of the managing of abundant intelligence, which I think seems to be the venture capital approach that we’re seeing. And we’re also seeing this with A16z. That seems to be the approach there, that this is, we’re all gonna be, as you know, managing supercomputers and this will massively enhance productivity. It seems that making this leap will require, as you said, a lot of deep thought as to how to actually restructure companies, how to maximize the use of talent. And there used to be roles like chief, well, talent officer, and that probably still exists, but chief sustainability officer and some of these roles created specifically to think about these bigger picture issues. And they’ve been eliminated in some of the recent rounds of— how do you think, when you think about responsibility and your engagement with companies, who’s going to be the person who thinks of that really big shift that these companies need to undertake? Do you see that it’s going to happen or will we just muddle through?
Alison Taylor: Honestly, I think a lot of companies are muddling through. I also think there’s a tendency in corporate life, you got a problem, get a chief, you know, chief AI officer, chief happiness officer. We had a chief medical officers in the pandemic. So this is not what this technology is like. You know, AI is often compared to nuclear and, you know, in terms of energy, in terms of how transformational it is. I think it’s more like microplastics, right? It’s in everything. You’ve got to get it in everything. You know, these tools are definitely amazing. They’re getting better and better every day. But unless you can make them useful to human beings, unless we can think about how they fit into work and roles, There’s a wonderful article, I think it was the most popular article on HBR last year, about work swap, about how you can, with AI, produce student papers or decks or reports that look, on the face of it, very plausible. But once you start to dig in, the reference is accurate. Is this factual? And so this very often, I think, ends up with senior people having to do all this work cleaning this up and figuring out where the problem is. So, it’s not in itself, I think, necessarily going to reduce work. And I think it’s a kind of, it has become a problem with people sort of outsourcing their thinking to these machines. So, you know, I’m not an AI Luddite, but I don’t see the thinking about what this is doing to culture, what this is doing to human dignity and motivation, and kind of, you know, how we think about the human and AI relationship going forward. I think we’ve kind of done what we did with social media and rushed into this without thinking about some of the consequences for our psychology. I mean, just even the way the LLMs behave with me, you know, I can imagine if I were lonely and young, I could get into a relationship with one of these things. Like, I get it. It’s powerful. It’s something that, you know, we all psychologically react to whether we like it or not.
Aoifinn Devitt: And two other issues. I mean, this is such a fascinating area. We could probably have a series of podcasts dedicated to this, but, but one of them is the recent, speaking of boundaries and the recent kind of a furore around the Maltbook and this AIs and agents and social network, et cetera. And the sense that perhaps boundaries have not been drawn between the human interface, the agent interface, and that there was, you know, whether we’ve given away too much of our personal information, not too much discretion. How do you think about that issue?
Alison Taylor: Well, it’s, I mean, sort of a fascinating discussion, you know, I mean, the anthropomorphization of those bots was sort of fascinating. There isn’t actually on Maltbook any guardrail. You can be a person on there pretending to be a bot. I thought it was sort of interesting how much of it went to kind of junky crypto sales really quickly. So, you know, I think it was, it’s the shape of things to come. Sort of fascinating on one level to see how these bots and so on behave. But I think again, you know, we, so interesting, I think even that we thought of Maltbook as a kind of Reddit for AIs. We can only think in human terms about how to, you know, where to put these things and how they’ll behave, which I think is also kind of fascinating about human psychology, if nothing else. I mean, that’s where I’m really paying attention.
Aoifinn Devitt: Well, similarly, I think on the human psychology side, you know, I’m in the wealth management arena and I think it’s well known in wealth management that we have choice paralysis. If you give too much choice in terms of an investment product, there is a seizing up. It’s an inability to choose there. And I also think with data, I see this often in presentations from consultants, a data dump would, would occur and there’s absolutely no means of navigating that data. It is paralyzing to have data dumped. And I think with AI, with abundant intelligence, there’s even more data dumped. And I think that the lack of ability to navigate that, that is going to cause paralysis. And as you said, probably lack of productivity, right?
Alison Taylor: So information asymmetry is a market failure, but that’s not always about lack of information. It can also be about too much undifferentiated information to the degree we then can’t figure out what’s real and what’s not and what’s credible. And so there we’re galloping into a pretty dystopian future, I think. But then at the same time, I don’t think adoption is going the way people hope it will. I mean, we’ll see what happens with the financial markets on these stocks in the next year, but I think it’s going to be bumpy.
Aoifinn Devitt: Well, yeah, exactly. And the last point on that is I think around getting back to your education roots because, or your current role, because the work slop and I think also just the general, the video slop, inability to distinguish what is real, will that lead us to more in-person seminars, more actual learning without these tools and even learning with muscle memory, which is, they say, a better way to actually lay down information, to master information when you’ve actually had to find it out for yourself.
Alison Taylor: I think all of that’ll happen. I mean, I think everything’ll happen at once, but you are reminding me there was a New York Times article last year thinking becoming a luxury good. It’s sort of similar to how the, the tech billionaires give their children wooden toys and don’t let them go on on social media, you can see thinking, reading, being intellectual, you know, not using these machines becoming a status symbol over time. For sure, I think a pivot back to more kind of offline, in-person, intimate events is already happening. I think my younger students are well aware of the dangers of all this and really understand that their competitive advantage over time is going to be their thinking and critical judgment and EQ. So yeah, I mean, I don’t know that I’m super happy to be living through this era, but it’s certainly fascinating.
Aoifinn Devitt: Well, it’s thanks to guides like yourself that I think we have a chance of making it through the wilderness in one piece. My last question, just before turning to a couple of personal concluding reflections: your board roles and some of the advisory roles. You work with corporates, you talk about moral money in the case of the FT, Any trends or zeitgeist to speak of there in terms of the responsiveness of corporations to the work that you do? And do you find it varies by geography? Actually, that was the other thing, given you have a global—
Alison Taylor: It varies by geography. I think, you know, the, the corporate sector in America is very nervous right now, and I’m not a particularly restrained person. I have a lot of opinions. So I think my 2026 is gonna look different than my 2025. Partly because I think the risks that many companies have been running are starting to become clear. I do think we need to also provide a path forward that’s realistic and practical and focused. I don’t want to be the person kind of being like, this is a win-win and you’re an idiot if you don’t do it. You know, I mean, I think leading companies get more scrutiny, they get more pressure, they have to think about how they reframe this, this whole conversation really, really, really carefully. So I’m in the middle of many extremely fascinating conversations on that score. And it’s been hard to miss, you know, since the events in Minneapolis of the last few weeks, so many journalists have called me that I can see that public attention is now really on these questions of corporate responsibility.
Aoifinn Devitt: I’d like to just turn to some personal reflections. In this section, I usually ask people to shout out to people who’ve had a formative role in their lives or be an inspiration. And you seem to have worked with a lot of very interesting thinkers. In this arena? Anyone in particular that you’d either suggest we read or that has— that you’d like to note has had a particular influence on you?
Alison Taylor: There is a professor in Switzerland called Guido Palazzo that wrote a book called The Dark Pattern. I absolutely love Thomas Chamorro-Presmuyck. He’s just written a book called Don’t Be Yourself about the problems with authenticity, but he wrote my favorite HBR article ever, which is called Why Did So Incompetent Men Become Leaders. And then I have a friend, Claire Gustafson. She’s a therapist, she’s a coach, she’s a former opera singer. She is an all-around wonderful human being that everybody should spend one-on-one time with, who is an enormous inspiration to me. My boss, who is the head of my— of the BSP, that’s Business and Society program at Stern, Betty Wiesenfeld, really amazing psychology researcher, amazing leader, really amazing thinker as well. So yeah, there are too many to name and I’m gonna hang up and think of about 10 more, but I’ll write a post sometime about who I read and who I pay attention to.
Aoifinn Devitt: That’s amazing. Well, I, I should have given the caveat. It’s not supposed to be an exhaustive list in case anyone does, does feel guilty on that. And just to close out, I asked you about your corporate governance, I suppose your principles and your core beliefs, but is there any creed or motto that you live by today or any words of advice that you would give to a student or to just a professional in your field that you think have stood you well?
Alison Taylor: Focus. Treat human beings with dignity and respect. Don’t make assumptions about what people think based on how they look and appear. Yeah, I could go on, but that’s enough.
Aoifinn Devitt: Well, thank you so much, Alison. They say don’t meet your heroes, but this, I think, has been a fantastic conversation because I have been inspired by your writing, by your thought leadership, and by the spark that you’re not afraid to throw a few Molotov cocktails into the, I think, our complacent world. And I think it’s, it, you shock us into, into actually having an opinion, owning an opinion, and not only an opinion, but having a refined, thoughtful, well-evidenced opinion. So I love the work you do, and I will be putting links to all of this in the show notes and, uh, keep it up. And we hope we’ll get you back on here sometime soon.
Alison Taylor: You got it. Thank you so much. It was just lovely to see you.
Aoifinn Devitt: I’m Aoifinn Devitt. Thank you for listening to the 50 Faces Podcast. If you liked what you heard and would like to tune in to hear from more inspiring investors and their personal journeys, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment advice, and all views are personal and should not be attributed to the organizations and affiliations of the host or any guest.
