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Season 2, Episode 11: Interview with Margaret Heffernan Discussing the Future of Business Ethics

Margaret Heffernan
November 19, 2020  |  By Cindy Moehring

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She's been seen on her Ted Talks by over 12 million, is one of the top 100 media executives by the Hollywood Reporter, and is the author of 6 books. Now, Margaret Heffernan is a Professor of Practice at the University of Bath sharing her practical experience with students.

Join Cindy Moehring as she and Margaret talk about Heffernan's journey of going from being the CEO of three different companies to teaching for a university. Moehring and Heffernan discuss how two of her books, Willful Blindness  and Uncharted give insight as to why unethical things happen in companies and how pandemic preparedness can serve as an example for how to lead successfully in the turbulent, "uncharted" future.

Podcast:

Episode Transcript:

00:00 Cindy Moehring: Hi, everybody. Welcome back for another edition of The BIS, the Business Integrity School. And in this episode, we have with us Dr. Margaret Heffernan. Hi, Margaret. How are you today?

00:10 Margaret Heffernan: Hi. I'm very well, Cindy. Very happy to be talking to you.

00:14 Cindy Moehring: Good. Me too. I'm happy to be talking with you. So Margaret has produced programs for the BBC for over 13 years, and she then moved over to the US. She's actually in London right now, where she spearheaded multimedia productions for Intuit, The Learning Company, and Standard & Poors. She was chief executive of three different companies, InforMation Corporation, ZineZone Corporation, and then iCast. She was named one of the "Top 25" by Streaming Media magazine and one of the "Top 100 Media Executives" by The Hollywood Reporter. What I also like is that Margaret is the author of six books. Her third book, which I really enjoyed was Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril. We're gonna talk about that one a bit more in our podcast today. And it was named one of the most important business books of the decade by Financial Times. Her TED Talks, which if you haven't watched them, I would encourage you to, they're wonderful.

01:08 Cindy Moehring: They've been seen by over 12 million people. Her most recent book, Uncharted: How To Map The Future, was published in 2020, and there is a particularly relevant chapter in there that we're also gonna get into today. Right now, Margaret's a Professor of Practice at the University of Bath, where she lectures on management and practice and organizations. She's also the lead faculty for the Forward Institute's Responsible Leadership Programme, and through Merryck & Co., she mentors CEOs and senior executives of major global organizations. Margaret holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Bath, and she continues to write for the Financial Times and The Huffington Post. Margaret, welcome.

01:47 Margaret Heffernan: Thank you so much.

01:49 Cindy Moehring: So let's jump in to you a little bit and help our audience just understand how did you go from being a CEO of three different companies to teaching.

02:03 Margaret Heffernan: Well, it's interesting. When I was still actually running tech companies in Boston, I did a certain amount of teaching there in entrepreneurship, which I really enjoyed. And then I started doing a little bit of teaching when I moved back here to the UK. And cheerfully, what I loved about it is I just love being in touch with young people and getting a sense of what did the world look like to them, and what did it look like to me, and how could we compare notes. And so that's really how I got into it. And the Professor of Practice as you're probably aware is a relatively new thing in the academic world, in the sense that I'm not an academic by background or training, or I have to say, inclination, but it's a recognition and I think a very smart recognition in business schools and schools of management, that is really helpful to have a few people around who've actually done the business and not studied it merely... Well, not merely, but not studied it only in abstract, but actually in reality.

03:06 Cindy Moehring: Yes.

03:07 Margaret Heffernan: And so I write about, obviously my own experiences, but I spent a lot of my time working with leaders of organizations around the world, and I'm very interested in the real lived experience of doing business rather than any particular theory. So when this role was offered to me, I was pretty excited 'cause it's not a full-time role, so I can do all the other things I do, but I just loved spending time with young people. And I think, to be honest, they like the fact that I have a somewhat different style from more trained educators.

03:43 Cindy Moehring: Yeah. Yeah. I totally agree with you. And I think business schools in particular are most open to that sort of Professor of Practice. And it creates this really nice bridge, I think, for the students...

03:55 Margaret Heffernan: Yeah, I agree.

03:56 Cindy Moehring: To go from this academic world, which for many of them is all they've ever known, to start to get a little bit of an insight into what's it really gonna be like on the other side. And then marrying those two together, I think it equips them to be able to handle that more readily and probably have less of a come up to speed time when they start. So, Margaret, you have a motto. And your motto is, "Let's not play the game. Let's change it." I love that, but I wanna know, how did you come up with that and why?

04:30 Margaret Heffernan: Well, I think that emerged when I wrote my first book, which was called The Naked Truth, which was really about women's careers, especially women's corporate careers. And I felt that an awful lot of training, a lot of writing, a lot of business school education, was to teach you how to play the game, and I felt pretty strongly, and I feel just as strongly now, that the game was designed by men for men, in a different era. And I didn't particularly think it would be a triumph to get very good at somebody else's game. So the whole point of life in fact is to figure out what is your own game, who are you, how do you want to do this, how do you want to bring your experience and your knowledge and your values to work? And just imitating men was really not a terribly exciting prospect, even if it was potentially a very rewarding prospect.

05:32 Margaret Heffernan: And I think since then, I think that that has deepened in the sense that I feel there is much that is badly, badly wrong about the right way that we run organizations, and about the impact that those organizations have on the world, and that there is probably more to change than to preserve. So the... Thinking about... So what are the bits that need to change and how do we go about that, is absolutely central to everything I do.

06:09 Cindy Moerhing: So, in 2018, there was an interesting statistic that of the 2500 largest companies in the world, forced CEO turnover, the number one reason for forced CEO turnover was unethical behavior. And that trend continued largely into 2019. And we all know that we still have primarily men that are at the very top of the largest corporations as CEOs. So, I think we also all know what was happening at around that time, 2018, there was the MeToo movement and everything else. So, an obvious question would be, for you, if more women were playing their game and not trying to fit into a man's world, per se, and if more women had been at the top, do you think we would have seen the same type of statistics? And if not, why not?

07:10 Margaret Heffernan: Yeah. So, this is sort of the question about if it had been Lehman Sisters, would we have had the financial crisis? I don't think it would make any difference, to be honest. I am extremely uncomfortable with the idea that women are uniquely ethical, and we're the angelic super human people who aren't subject to temptations and corruption like everybody else. I think, fundamentally, the way you see unethical behavior, what you see is an abuse of power, and the problem is about power. And I think if you give it sexual amounts of power to women, you will find as much corruption as you will see with men. And as it happens, right now there are fewer women with that power, and the women that have the power are so intensely scrutinized that if they have so much as a broken finger nail, they're hung out to dry.

08:14 Margaret Heffernan: But I think if we really were on a level playing field and you saw just as many men and just as many women with just as much power and the same degree of scrutiny, I don't see any particular reason to think that women would come out better, I think power is a very dangerous thing. In the time that I ran companies, I felt that it was something I ought to be afraid of. I think it's a problem, not a privilege, if you like. I think it's exceptionally difficult for it not to go to people's heads, and for people not to think that the fact that they have this power is because they're special. Being special, the rules don't really apply to them. And of course, very often when you have a lot of power, you're surrounded, whether you want this or not, you're surrounded by people who, for lack of a more elegant term, I will say, suck up to you.

09:13 Margaret Heffernan: One of the premises of Willful Blindness was a sense that when we saw a lot of corruption, particularly around the time of the financial crisis, starting with Enron, I didn't really buy George Bush's argument that this was just a few bad apples. I thought it's much, much more systemic than that.

09:37 Cindy Moehring: Yes.

09:37 Margaret Heffernan: And while I definitely accept there are bad guys out there and there are bad women out there, I think the more profound issue is, how do we run organizations so that power isn't as much of a problem? And so that it isn't as corrupting as it demonstrably is.

10:00 Cindy Moehring: Yeah, yeah. I am so glad you made the point though that you did about whether or not it would be the same between men and women, because I do think there are a lot of people that are trying to draw that conclusion, if you will. And honestly, I think it's looking at it the wrong way, it's just we only have men as the example, simply by virtue of the fact that men are at the top of these organizations, that doesn't mean it would necessarily be different. And to your point, Willful Blindness is a great segue into the larger question of power. And that book is all about, why do we ignore the obvious at our peril? And so, I'm just gonna ask you that question flat out. Why do you think that people in positions of power and otherwise within organizations will ignore the obvious?

10:50 Margaret Heffernan: Well, there are many, many reasons. One is because they are typically, not universally, but typically surrounded by people like themselves who like them. So, they're surrounded by cheerleaders, which means that that's a very helpful filtering system to keep the bad news and the early warning signs out. In addition, many of these individuals work insane, insane hours with an insane workload. And one of the most basic causes of willful blindness is fatigue, and cognitive overload. So, the more tired you are, the less productive you become, but also the more tired you are, the more your brain starts making shortcuts. And of course the stuff that you miss out is often the stuff that gets you into deep trouble. At the same time, we know that in order to absorb the huge amounts of information which we have to absorb to get through our daily lives, regardless of our position in an organization, our brain develops mental models of how the world works. And these are very, very useful because otherwise, if we had to figure out everything from first principles every day, it would take a day's work to get out of bed. [chuckle]

12:15 Margaret Heffernan: So, we have these mental models, just like economists have economic models, just like physicians have models of disease and so on. And they're intensely useful because they do mean we don't have to invent everything from scratch, but there's a problem with the efficiency that they give us, which is that they achieve that efficiency by paying lots of attention to what confirms the model and marginalizing, trivializing, editing out whatever doesn't fit into the model. So, one of the classic examples of this is Alan Greenspan, who was absolutely convinced his mental model said that the healthiest financial markets are those with the least amount of regulation. And so although they were routine breakdowns in the derivatives market, virtually on the clock every two years from 1998-2008, he steadfastly refused to see that this was a problem that required any kind of regulatory oversight.

13:26 Margaret Heffernan: And subsequently, in his testimony to Congress, he said as much when he said, he admitted that he had what he called an ideology, which I would call a model. And he said it had a flaw in it, but because it had served him so well to date, he didn't really pay attention to these early warning signs, which he could see sadly for all of us, only in retrospect. In addition, there's a huge amount about organizational structures and culture, which amplifies our blindness. So, there's something known as organizational silence, which shows that if you ask a group of executives, do you have issues and concerns at work that you don't voice? Up to 85% of them will say yes. And when you ask why, it's typically because they're afraid of initiating a conflict that they don't know how to manage.

14:29 Cindy Moehring: That is an amazing statistic.

14:31 Margaret Heffernan: It's a heart stopping statistic. And when I first read that, I thought that... It captured something, which I know from experience is true, which is the hardest thing in a responsible position is knowing what the heck is going on. Because people will tell you what you want to hear and they won't tell you what you don't want to hear, and you can't be everywhere. In addition, we know that human beings, generally speaking, are obedient, which is if you tell somebody to do something, even if it's mad, bad and stupid, there's a high likelihood that they will.

15:16 Margaret Heffernan: And we saw this, for example, in the Wells Fargo scandal, where people were told to sell eight products to every customer, something that has never been done in financial services. And everybody knew the target was impossible, but what they did kind of creatively is they thought, "Well, if we can't hit it the right way, we've got to hit it, so let's do it the wrong way." So, they just started selling products to people without the customers being told what they were being signed up for. I think this whole... It's a lot that we do in the way of managing people, we're kind of slicing and dicing work, which means a lot of the meaning of the work kind of falls in the gaps between.

16:00 Cindy Moehring: Yes, yes. And the meaning is the glue that gives people the purpose to get up and want to go do their piece of the work every day.

16:07 Margaret Heffernan: But if someone tells you, "Just fix this piece, what this piece does," you don't know whether you're doing a safe thing or a dangerous thing.

16:18 Cindy Moehring: Yeah. True.

16:18 Margaret Heffernan: So, the division of labor is a really big piece of this problem, I think. And I also think somewhat controversially, that money is a problem too, which is we know from a huge range of sometimes comic experiments that money really reorients people's thinking from others to themselves. And I think all of these problems co-exist, it's not like, "Oh, it's just one thing or another," they all kind of meet together to the point that there were times when I was writing Willful Blindness, I was kind of amazed we ever got anything intelligent done.

17:03 Cindy Moehring: Well, let me ask you, did you find at all that it was cultural, that these problems and issues we're talking about, and the 85% existed in let's say in the US, as opposed to in other parts of the world, or what did you find out about that?

17:17 Margaret Heffernan: Well, it's interesting 'cause I've been all over the world talking about this work, and you know in Singapore they said, "Willful blindness is very bad here because people care a lot about saving face." And in the Netherlands, they said, "Oh, it's particularly bad here because we don't like having arguments." And in Eastern Europe, they said, "Well, it's really bad here because of years of Soviet rule just taught us to just do as we're told and button up." And in England, they said, "Well, it's really bad here because we're so polite." And in America they said, "Oh, it's really bad here, 'cause we're so conformist." So, I have come to the conclusion it's bad everywhere. I haven't found a single place where people say to me, "Nothing like that ever happens here." I would love to find it, but I haven't found it.

18:10 Cindy Moehring: So, do you have any tips after these years of research that you can share with individuals for how they can be aware of this tendency toward willful blindness, but then counteract the effects of it?

18:26 Margaret Heffernan: Yeah. So, some of it is really simple. Which is, get a good night sleep, don't multi task. Absolutely, do not multi-task. It's a disaster. Find allies, colleagues and friends who are not like you, seek them out, you will not find them naturally because it's not the way our brains are designed, so when you find yourself moving to talk to that person who looks a bit like you, stop and go somewhere else, and talk to somebody who looks... Are completely different from you. And this will take more effort, but it will also be a lot more interesting. I think as a manager, I think it's really important to appreciate that on the whole people are not gonna tell you what's going on. So you have to think about, do I have an information network of people in different positions who trust me and whom I trust who will tell me. I always, in my company tended to have people who'd worked for me in previous companies, and they knew that they could come to me with everything, and the fact that they did that, kind of taught the others that they could too eventually.

19:39 Cindy Moehring: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

19:40 Margaret Heffernan: I think it's very important for leaders to model argument and conflict at work, so that people can see that it's safe.

19:49 Cindy Moehring: So that brings us to your most recent book that I wanna talk to you about a little bit and have you share with the audience, and there's really two points in it that I'm hoping we can get at. So your latest book is Uncharted: How to Navigate the Future, which is so important right now in these times that we're living in, because it's a very disruptive world and it's very unclear. And there are two parts of it that I wanna dive into with you, and the first one has to do with technology. And you've even lead tech companies, as you've mentioned here, and what I think was interesting about the book is you talk about the human factors and skills that are still really needed, different ones than before, so not so much about efficiency and predicting, but more about being able to come up with as you talk it, preparedness, and then some other values and skills and competencies that are important. So one, I'm hoping you can talk a little bit about what you think those skills are, and then two, knowing that technology is so prevalent in our world today, how do we hold those two in balance, the human competencies that you think we need with the technology that's really trying to take over for those human competency in respects.

21:03 Margaret Heffernan: Well, so I'll probably answer that question backwards, so I'll answer second bit first. I think technology is fantastic for things that are repetitive, predictable, that essentially allow us to outsource a huge amount of grind. I've outsourced to my phone, knowing all my kids phone numbers, right, I used to know all of my family's phone numbers by heart, I don't anymore because technology takes care of it for me, that's great. So I think it's very useful for that sort of work. I think it's very dangerous to outsource human judgment to technology for two reasons, one is because when I outsource to an algorithm, I'm outsourcing to a whole bunch of opinions, and algorithm is just a bunch of opinions encoded in numbers. I'm outsourcing to a bunch of opinions, opinions I don't know, which are typically protected as trade secrets, but whose decision I can't explain. So if as many people have done, you try to outsource who is going to get parole or who is entitled to certain kinds of social security benefits. I want to be sure that every base has been covered in terms of making sure this is a safe decision, and I want to be able to explain it because if it goes wrong, you could be sure I'm going to have to explain it. And "Oh, the computer said yes," is not a legitimate explanation.

22:54 Cindy Moehring: No. Never will be.

22:58 Margaret Heffernan: And software is not good at the why, it's not good at causality, it's very good at correlation, but it's poor at causality. And often, even the engineers who design these systems can't explain the decisions that they make, so this is a kind of spectacular form of willful blindness, really, which is saying, " I'm going to get a system I don't understand to make a decision that I can't explain, and that's kind of the ultimate in willful blindness. I think there's another issue here too, which is when you outsource a task to technology, as we're discussing earlier, you lose the ability to do what you've outsourced.

23:45 Margaret Heffernan: So I've lost the ability to know my kids phone numbers. The more I use GPS, literally, the smaller the part of my brain responsible for visual cognition becomes. I'm not exercising that part of the brain, so it doesn't need to be as big. The more I don't have to be polite to people because I can shout at Alexa what I want, the less polite my manner is, and we see this with kids who are used to shouting at Alexa whatever it is they want. And we've also seen it, for example, using tablets to collect electronic records in hospitals, which is we found that doctors were spending more time looking at the tablet than looking at the patient. So there is a cost to this always, and if you can't see it, look deeper, but you have to think about what skills am I happy to lose?

24:49 Cindy Moehring: Yeah, and the repetitive bureaucratic ones, they give you more time...

24:52 Margaret Heffernan: All for it.

24:53 Cindy Moehring: For judgment is kind of the balance. That's great. Now one other thing I wanna ask you about, there was a chapter in the book that was all about the creation of... Talking about preparedness. So it was the creation of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovation, CEPI, that was founded in 2017 to be a global insurance policy, hopefully to defend against future epidemics. I highly doubt you had any idea that we were on the verge of another global pandemic at the time you are writing that chapter. So this is an incredible moment, I think, to just be able to hear from you about what you think about that chapter in this moment when we are in the middle of a global pandemic.

25:42 Margaret Heffernan: Well, I think really the spur to writing the book as a whole was a recognition that we had a very, very poor understanding of how to think about the future. So we were tending to do forecasts. We invested with insane degrees of confidence. When forecasting, really at its best is accurate probably, maybe maximally 400 days out. Then if you're talking weather forecast, it's 500, sorry it's five days out, bearing in mind that weather forecasts are the pinnacle of forecasting knowledge. And yet we seem to spend all of our time saying, "What's gonna happen? What's gonna happen? And so that was the spirit of the book as a whole, and when I found out about the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness, I was overjoyed 'cause I thought somebody else is thinking about this.

26:39 Cindy Moehring: Right, yeah.

26:41 Margaret Heffernan: And so they set up the coalition up in 2017. It was started by the Wellcome Trust, which is the biggest funder of medical research in the world, largely because they recognize that governments had stopped doing epidemic planning. And they were alarmed by this. And they said, "This is dangerous because we know epidemics are always with us, we know they will all keep occurring, but there's no profile of an epidemic. Every single one is different. So we don't know when the next one will be. We don't know where it'll break out, and we can't predict the pathogen. So we have to think about this differently. And the way they chose to think about it was to ask a fantastic question, which is, "When an epidemic breaks out, what will we wish we had been doing now?

27:42 Cindy Moehring: Aha! Yes, exactly.

27:46 Margaret Heffernan: And so all of the epidemiologists who started working this question said, "Well actually, if an epidemic breaks out what you want, you want to walk into it with the following things intact: You want a vaccine that works. You want deep connections, affiliation, trust with local, national and global healthcare providers and systems. You want access to capital because you know you're gonna have to spend a lot of money very fast. And you want manufacturing and distribution contracts in place because you're going to have to make and distribute vaccine at speed. And so that's what they were set up to do, to put all of that in place. And what then the way they started was to start with the top six diseases that they thought had pandemic potential and where the impact would be gravest. And they started developing, working on those vaccines, aware that vaccine production at generally takes about 10 years.

28:53 Margaret Heffernan: The fastest we've ever done it is four years. And recognizing that many, many vaccine candidates fail. So this is very efficient, which is why governments didn't wanna do it, right? Because some of the vaccines won't work, and some of them you may never need. I mean they started working on a vaccine for Nipah. Well, there may or may not be a Nipah pandemic. And of course, the only sadness is really that instead of starting it in 2017, it would have been great if it started in 2007, right? But what I really liked about the people at CEPI was that they had this fantastic framework for addressing uncertainty. There's uncertainty for example in climate change. We know it's real, but we don't know which forests are going to catch on fire, which agricultural crops are going to be drowned this year.

29:50 Margaret Heffernan: But what we can do is start asking these questions, which is, if these things happen, or when these things happen, what do we need to have in place to cope with them? And that's almost the definition of a robust system. It's different from resilience in the sense that it's not about recovery. And actually, we can cope with it when it happens. And I think that we have not done that kind of preparedness thinking in business and management, generally, because it looks inefficient. Why waste your time? It may never happen. Well, so you're not gonna do preparedness thinking for everything, but the things that are likely, that would have a huge impact, I think now we've learned the lesson the hard way, we have to do those things. And not to do them means we're willfully blind.

30:50 Cindy Moehring: So on that brings me right to my last question. Knowing what you know with this wonderful body of knowledge and the uncertainty of the future, what do you think are the three words that would describe what's gonna be most important for business ethics and integrity as we move into this uncertain future?

31:11 Margaret Heffernan: I think it's certainly going to be the ability to conduct argument well. And we're both big fans of the Giving Voice to Values curriculum. I think it's a brilliant way of teaching people how to have the arguments around the things that we need to have the arguments around. And teaching people not just how to articulate their concerns, but also teaching leaders and managers how to listen and how to hear really what's being said. That's absolutely fundamental.

31:48 Cindy Moehring: Yes.

31:49 Margaret Heffernan: I think one of the conclusions I came to in willful blindness was that I didn't think you could never eliminate it, but that certain kinds of organizations were more susceptible to it. And those were organizations where there was a steeper hierarchy, where there was more bureaucracy and there was a culture of competitiveness, that all of those things make an organization more susceptible to willful blindness. So to the degree that you can lower the hierarchy, eliminate as much bureaucracy as humanly possible, I think you have a safer environment. It's never gonna be a 100% safe, but it's going to be safer. And I think to the degree that you have a collaborative rather than a competitive culture, people are less likely to hide information from you. And the third thing I would say, which again goes right back to basics, is that actually, if you're too tired to think, you're gonna miss things.

32:55 Margaret Heffernan: And many, many executives are. They're upright and they look like they're thinking, but we've known since 1888 that productivity taps out at about 40, 45 hours a week. Most senior leaders I know work much longer than that. And right now, after the huge amount of extra work required by responding to the pandemic, every single person I know is absolutely exhausted. And what we know from all the brain science is that when you are so tired, you cannot think, and we also know that ethical thinking is cognitively very expensive. So you have to think about what engineers call asset integrity, which is, you want the machinery with which you do your most important work, which in our cases is our brains, to be kept in tip-top condition. That means getting a good night's sleep, getting a decent amount of exercise, and being able to step away from the daily grind to have thinking time.

34:09 Cindy Moehring: Those are great, great thoughts. Margaret, this time together with you has been enriching and so enjoyable, and I wanna end with one last question just for fun that I always ask everybody. So a lot of us are exhausted and we also have some extra time on our hands because of COVID. So folks are watching more shows or Netflix documentaries, or episodes and series and things, or reading fun books, or podcasts, finding new things, new outlets. Do you have any good recommendations that are fun, but also, have a bit of an ethical dilemma embedded in them, because I find so many of the mainstream shows and books and podcasts do. But what have you been reading or watching or listening to that you'd recommend for fun?

34:55 Margaret Heffernan: Two radically different things.

[laughter]

34:58 Margaret Heffernan: So I caught up on a series which was on Netflix which is a US TV series, which is called Pose, which is about the transgender community in New York in the 1980s. My daughter put me on to it. It was a story I did not know at all. It's incredibly uplifting. It's incredibly moving. It taught me a great deal about transgender issues and the transgender community, which I'm ashamed I didn't know before and I'm glad I do now. But it's full of fantastic human beings. And it is really uplifting and utterly captivating. And the other thing I would say is, probably the best book I've read recently, is a book called Learning From the Germans, which is about how the Germans came to terms with their Nazi history. And it's written by an American philosopher. It's in two halves, the first half is about the German experience, and the second half is about the American experience of slavery. And it is deeply provocative, very moving, unbelievably thought-provoking, and one of the most wise things I have ever read about our need as Americans to think much more deeply about our past if it isn't going to undermine everything we stand for.

36:39 Cindy Moehring: Wow. That is great. I'm gonna add both of those to my list and I know many in the audience will too, and we'll put links to them in the show notes. Margaret, thank you. Thank you so much. This has been just a delightful time to spend with you, and I appreciate it very much.

36:54 Margaret Heffernan: Well, thank you for your wonderful work and your wonderful questions, and your wonderful spirit, and your optimism. Because, I think like me, you're an optimist, and if we don't believe we can get there, then we never will.

37:08 Cindy Moehring: That's right. Have to believe.

37:10 Margaret Heffernan: Yeah.

37:10 Cindy Moehring: All right. Thanks Margaret.

37:12 Margaret Heffernan: Thank you, Cindy. Take care. Bye-bye.

37:13 Cindy Moehring: Okay. Bye-bye.

Matt WallerCindy Moehring is the founder and executive chair of the Business Integrity Leadership Initiative at the Sam M. Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas. She recently retired from Walmart after 20 years, where she served as senior vice president, Global Chief Ethics Officer, and senior vice president, U.S. Chief Ethics and Compliance Officer.





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