Sustainable business

And I found stimulation in all that throughout my career.

So professionally, where I spend a good deal of my time is in that management consultant space, particularly focused on the topics of corporate sustainability, business and sustainable enterprise, and really how the entity of entrepreneurial activities can improve upon the state of affairs in the world in meaningful ways.

That's where I kind of have my passion.

That's where I like to spend a lot of my advisory time, helping coach, mentor organizations that are really trying to navigate all the complexity of the world and bring it into full focus in terms of how they can create better value in the world that they serve.

Outside of that, I'm a husband, I'm a father.

I do some adjunct teaching at the university level at Syracuse University, topically on sustainable enterprise for undergraduate and graduate students.

I've published four books.

I get a lot of stimulation out of my extracurricular activities.

In this episode, I speak with Denise Baden.

Denise is a professor of sustainable business at the University of Southampton.

She also writes both fiction and nonfiction.

Her latest novel is The Philosopher and the Assassin.

Questions like, you know, what's real and what's the nature of reality and how should we best understand it? And just as importantly, the deep questions of ethics, what matters and who matters? And I have an obvious bias, which you can see behind me and even on my mug, because I'm trying to develop and popularize sentientism as a really broad, pluralistic worldview.

that's committed to using evidence reason and compassion for all sentient beings so it has a sort of broad naturalistic humble open-minded critical thinking approach to understanding the world and on the ethical side it's quite open-minded and pluralistic but it does insist that every sentient being at least should matter and should matter seriously in our moral consideration but as you know i'm lucky in these conversations to talk to a dazzling variety of different people some of whom agree and some of whom don't with that worldview so it'll be really interesting to understand your philosophical journey on answering those deep questions and how it underpins the work you do today but before we get on to those questions how would you best introduce yourself for people who haven't come across your work so far

So I would say I call myself Denise Baden, Professor of Sustainable Business.

Although sometimes when I think, you know, very disenchanted with how the business world has behaved, I've gone around calling myself Professor of Unsustainable Business.

[upbeat music] Hello, and welcome to this week's Sustainable Business podcast from Innovation Forum with me, Ian Welsh.

In the second of their conversations reflecting on some of the outcomes from the recent Innovation Forum Sustainable Apparel and Textiles Conference in New York, Mubeen Chaudhry, group head of ESG and corporate communications at Pakistan-based denim manufacturer, Surya Enterprises, talks with Innovation Forum's Niamh Campbell about complicated supplier-buyer relationships.

That's coming up.

First, though, is our regular roundup of some sustainable business news.

[upbeat music] Amazon deforestation has fallen to its lowest level since 2013 according to new data from the National Institute for Space Research in Brazil.

This declining trend has been a feature since the reelection of the Brazilian president, Lula da Silva, in 2023.

Well, over the next few weeks, you'll hear several interviews about businesses and how they're trying to ensure they behave in a sustainable way about why they're changing what they're doing, how they're going to do it in the future, and the series being put together in conjunction with the firm Trilog.

They recently released their Sustainable Business Tracker.

It looks at this issue in some detail.

Nick Rockey is the MD at Trilog.

And, and I'm told never happened to me, but you know, the further up you go, actually the more kind of fill forms you need to fill in signatures are needed more often.

You have to tick boxes all the time, uh, fill in forms or get someone to do it for you.

How do you have a sustainable business tracker that's maybe about a bit more than that? Because assessing whether a company is living up to what it's saying can be a very difficult thing to do.

It's what shareholders try to do all the time.

than one.

One was the business sustainability question.

And that was my thought process.

I just want to help people.