The Read Responsibly Book Series, Episode 4

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If business is supposed to serve society, why do the costs of pollution, low wages, and systemic discrimination keep landing on the rest of us? That’s the central provocation of Christopher Marquis’s latest book, The Profiteers: How Business Privatizes Profits and Socializes Costs — and it’s a question that sits at the heart of everything Marcy has spent her career wrestling with too.

In this episode, Marcy sits down with Chris — Sinyi Professor of Chinese Management at the University of Cambridge Judge Business School, former Harvard Business School and Cornell professor, and one of the most rigorous academic voices in the business sustainability space — to talk about the structural forces that make it hard for even well-intentioned companies to do the right thing, what it’s going to take to actually hold corporations accountable, and why B Corps might be one of the most important experiments in capitalism that nobody is paying enough attention to. Plus: corporate gaslighting, astroturfing, the Business Roundtable pledge, and what Jack Welch once said about PCBs in the Hudson River that Chris still can’t let go of.

Meet Christopher Marquis

Christopher Marquis is the Sinyi Professor of Chinese Management at the University of Cambridge Judge Business School, where his research and teaching focus on how the biggest crises of our time — climate change, inequality, and discrimination — are connected to how capitalism currently prioritizes concentrating wealth for the few over the needs of everyone else.

He is the author of The Profiteers: How Business Privatizes Profits and Socializes Costs (PublicAffairs, 2024), and two prior award-winning books: Better Business: How the B Corp Movement Is Remaking Capitalism (Yale University Press, 2020) and Mao and Markets: The Communist Roots of Chinese Enterprise (Yale University Press, 2022), a Financial Times Best Book of 2022. He has authored more than 20 peer-reviewed academic articles and more than 50 Harvard Business School cases on sustainable business and social innovation.

Before Cambridge, Chris was the Samuel C. Johnson Professor in Sustainable Global Enterprise at Cornell University, and before that spent a decade as a professor at Harvard Business School. Earlier in his career, he was a Vice President and Technology Manager at JP Morgan Chase. He holds a PhD in Sociology and Business Administration from the University of Michigan.

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In This Episode

On the thread of his career — From community banking in Pittsburgh to JP Morgan Chase to a PhD at Michigan to Harvard, Cornell, and Cambridge. Chris talks about what drew him to academia and why the community banking world — unglamorous as it was — planted the seeds of everything he now studies.

On the concept behind The Profiteers — What economists call “externalities,” Chris calls a political and social choice. The concept of privatized profit and socialized cost is not just an accounting abstraction — it’s a description of how companies strategically shift moral weight onto individuals and away from themselves. The personal carbon footprint, popularized by BP, is one of the most striking examples.

On corporate gaslighting and astroturfing — Two chapters in The Profiteers every sustainability professional needs to read. Chris explains how companies manufacture the appearance of grassroots pressure and why, in a post-Citizens United world, it’s harder than ever to know who’s actually driving the public agenda.

On the Business Roundtable pledge — Marcy has a story about interviewing for a CSO role the week after the Business Roundtable published its 2019 stakeholder statement. The person who would have been her boss had never heard of it. Chris had not heard that part of the story, and neither have you.

On whether business can still be a force for good — Chris is an optimist by nature but a systems critic by training. The people inside companies, he says, are usually not the problem. The structure is the problem. His answer to whether business can be a vehicle for positive change is nuanced, honest, and worth hearing.

On B Corps — Chris has been studying the B Corp movement since 2009. He talks about why he thinks it’s one of the most important accountability structures in capitalism right now, why the community aspect matters as much as the certification, and why Minneapolis — yes, Minneapolis — has one of the most impressive B Corp ecosystems in the world.

On sustainability in MBA curricula — Chris calls it malpractice that Cambridge, and most top business schools, have gutted sustainability content from their MBA programs just as climate risk is becoming one of the defining business challenges of the century. He says this carefully, with the full awareness that his dean might hear it.

On the words we use — ESG, CSR, sustainability, regeneration — Chris has opinions. He also talks about a group of entrepreneurs in the UK working to change the dictionary definition of nature itself, and why that might matter more than any framework acronym.

On writing and publishing — Advice for Marcy as she works on her own book: your platform and your network are what publishers actually care about, and the best ideas are built in conversation, not in isolation.

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Shownotes

The Books

• The Profiteers: How Business Privatizes Profits and Socializes Costs — Christopher Marquis (PublicAffairs, 2024) (Amazon, Bookshop)
• Better Business: How the B Corp Movement Is Remaking Capitalism — Christopher Marquis (Yale University Press, 2020) (Amazon, Bookshop)
• Mao and Markets: The Communist Roots of Chinese Enterprise — Christopher Marquis and Kunyuan Qiao (Yale University Press, 2022) (Amazon, Bookshop)

People and Organizations Mentioned

• Jack Welch — Former CEO of General Electric; his remarks about PCBs in the Hudson River open The Profiteers
• John Ruggie — Former UN Special Representative on Business and Human Rights (also discussed in the preceding Christine Bader episode)
• Bill George — Former CEO of Medtronic; on the problem of corporate CEOs no longer living in the cities where their companies are headquartered
• B Lab — The nonprofit overseeing B Corp certification
• Business Roundtable — The 2019 stakeholder statement and what happened afterward
• John Fullerton — Regenerative economics; Marcy mentions recently completing his course
• Solventum — The 3M spinoff; a Star Tribune piece on leadership and place connection

Other Books Mentioned

• Incorruptible — Eric Ries (mentioned on nearly every episode of this series, apparently) (Amazon, Bookshop)
• Dirtbag Billionaire: The Rise and Fall of Patagonia and Yvon Chouinard — David Gelles (Amazon, Bookshop)

Resources

• chrismarquis.com
• Cambridge Judge Business School
• CSRD Overview — EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive
• Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM)

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