No guest this week. Just Marcy, a stack of books, and a proposal.

Six episodes into the Read Responsibly series, Marcy takes a solo lap: five things that have genuinely stuck from the first six author conversations, five books from the first half of 2026 that are already locked for this year’s Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability Book List, and the announcement of a Veerless / Table Stakes book club whose first title is being chosen by you.

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In This Episode:

5 Things I Took Away from our Read Responsibly Series So Far:

1. Every author has told me their book is a little bit wrong now. The question Marcy asks every guest, the defensiveness that never came, and why a book that couldn’t be wrong later was never saying anything in the first place.
2. The language problem belongs to all of us. Lisa Beth Lentini Walker’s observation that the ethics and compliance world simply kept the word “ethics” while sustainability drifted into an acronym that a state legislature can now ban. Same era, same companies, two different linguistic outcomes. Somebody chose.
3. Optimism is a methodology, not a mood. Trista Harris said she’s radically, unreasonably optimistic and that we’re five years from utopia, and said it with the affect of someone reporting the weather. Future Good isn’t a book about feeling hopeful. It’s a practice.
4. The insider is not a sellout. Christine Bader’s corporate idealists and Dave Stangis and Katherine Valvoda Smith’s deeply unfashionable practical guide, read side by side. There’s a whole profession doing careful, unwitnessed work inside organizations that will never thank them. Books are how that profession talks to itself.
5. The book that moved me most wasn’t about my field. Ellie Roscher’s Fair Game is about trans athletes on the cover and about who gets to belong on every page. Which is the conversation happening inside corporations right now, just with different lighting.

Five Books I’ve Loved in the First Half of 2026

1. On Natural Capital by Partha Dasgupta (Amazon, Bookshop)
   Dasgupta’s compression of a 600-page biodiversity review into a moral argument about pricing nature.
2. The Sustainable Investor by Peter Krull (Amazon, Bookshop)
   Krull on why ESG investing and sustainable investing are not synonyms and why conflating them did damage.
3. Incorruptible by Eric Ries (Amazon, Bookshop)
   On corruption as a design failure rather than a moral one, and the “financial gravity” that bends good companies away from their purpose.
4. Small Giants by Bo Burlingham (Amazon, Bookshop)
   This book almost argues with Ries about whether scale was the problem all along.
5. Greener Data Volume Three by Jaymie Scotto & Associates (Amazon)
   For everyone whose emissions math just got upended by AI compute.

And Finally, a Proposal

The book club. One book, read together, discussed on the show. Four candidates. Marcy isn’t picking. You are. Link to the LinkedIn poll here:

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