Table Stakes Podcast

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.

What if the systems collapsing all around us aren’t the end of something — but the rare, unconstrained chance to build something far better? That’s not wishful thinking for Trista Harris. It’s a methodology.

In this episode, Marcy sits down with Trista Harris, philanthropic futurist, founder of Future Good wearefuturegood.com), and author of Future Good (Amazon, Bookshop) , to talk about what it actually means to study the future for a living — and why she’s “radically, unreasonably optimistic” that we’re only five years from utopia. From the 2008 crisis that turned her into a futurist, to the scrappy reality of self- and hybrid-publishing, to a clear-eyed take on AI, system collapse, and what it means to stay human in a moment of exponential change, this is a conversation about building the future on purpose instead of bracing for the one we think we’ll be left with.

The Read Responsibly Book Series, Episode 4

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.

What happens to a corporate idealist when the company she believed in becomes the company that blew up the Gulf of Mexico? Christine Bader spent years doing innovative, genuinely groundbreaking work on human rights inside BP — and then Deepwater Horizon happened. That moment of reckoning is at the heart of her 2014 book, The Evolution of a Corporate Idealist: When Girl Meets Oil, and it’s still one of the most honest accounts of what it actually feels like to try to do good inside a big company.

In this episode, Marcy catches up with Christine — now adjunct faculty at Linfield University, head coach of a high school girls rugby team, and a sitting school board member in McMinnville, Oregon — to talk about what the book got right, what’s changed in twelve years (spoiler: not enough), and what it looks like when a global idealist goes hyper-local. Plus: the surprising joy of fact-checking, why the corporate idealist might not be dead after all, and the one book that changed how Christine thinks about her time.

What does it mean for a body to belong? That question is at the center of Ellie Roscher’s work — and it turns out, it’s also at the center of every conversation about responsible leadership, psychological safety, and what it actually costs a company when people don’t feel safe showing up as themselves.

In this Pride Month episode, Marcy sits down with Ellie Roscher, Minneapolis-based author, educator, former two-sport college athlete, and co-author of Fair Game: Trans Athletes and the Future of Sports (Bookshop, Amazon), to talk about the book, the moment we’re in, and why the fight over who gets to play is about so much more than sports. From the myths being used to exclude trans athletes to the structural failures that harm everyone — athletes, employees, and leaders alike — this is a conversation about bodies, belonging, and what courageous leadership looks like right now.

What does it actually take to build a responsible company? Mot just a company with a sustainability department, but one where corporate citizenship is woven into strategy, operations, and culture? That’s the question Dave Stangis and Katherine Valvoda Smith set out to answer nearly a decade ago, and it’s the question at the heart of this conversation.

Dave and Katherine join Marcy for the first episode of Table Stakes’ “Read Responsibly” book series to talk about 21st Century Corporate Citizenship: A Practical Guide to Delivering Value to Society and Your Business — what inspired it, how it’s held up across a decade of political and cultural turbulence, and what they’d add if they wrote it today. They also dig into the war over ESG terminology, the quiet disappearance of the word “ethics” from corporate vocabulary, and why the money in publishing a book is never actually in the book.

This is a conversation for practitioners, leaders, and anyone who believes that doing good and doing well are still compatible goals — even right now.

Sustainability reporting has become a standard expectation — but too often, what gets delivered is a dense mix of KPIs, checklists, and anecdotes that lack narrative coherence or context. That’s where ESGPS steps in. Veerless positions it as more than a new report; it is a reporting positioning system that helps organizations build disclosures designed for real stakeholder use.

In our newest Table Stakes episode, we had the privilege of chatting with the Veerless team about the development, rationale, and practical implications of ESGPS. Whether you’re already producing ESG reports or just beginning to plan your reporting strategy, this episode offers a front-row seat to what’s next in the ESG communications space.

Today, we’re returning to a conversation on moral distress we started last year. Moral distress was first studied by American ethicist Andrew Jameton related to nursing teams and ethical decision making in the 1980s. Today, the Veerless team applying Jameton’s concepts to the work of sustainability and the ethical decision making professionals in our field deal with every day. In today’s podcast, Veerless Senior Consultant Kris Fischer joins Marcy to discuss the overarching concept of moral distress and apply it to roles and functions in our industry.

After a brief hiatus since our fall series on sustainability at the Olympics, Table Stakes is back—and not a moment too soon. In a time when ESG headlines are swirling with uncertainty, backlash, and bold political shifts, we’re here to shine a light on the real momentum powering sustainability forward. This week’s episode kicks off our new biweekly series, unpacking the key takeaways from Veerless’ A Climate of Opportunity report and what’s happened in the six months since President Trump took office for a second time. From resilient governors to rebellious mayors, supply chain pressure to Gen Z firepower, we’re breaking down why ESG is far from dead—and how the work continues, with purpose.