Ronni and Brittany talk about a conference that Ronni attended where she listened to a woman named Jennifer Sey talk about “woke capitalism”: companies that adopt progressive business practices in order to appear altruistic or virtuous or socially responsible.
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Here’s a transcript of our conversation:
Ronni: Hey, Brittany.
Brittany: Hi, Ronni.
Ronni: Okay, so, I was just in the last episode telling you about this conference that I had gone to this past weekend, and there was a lot of really wonderful, amazing people there. In the last episode, I was talking about the unsung heroes of the data compilation, but there was this other topic that came up while I was listening to a speaker, and I kind of wanted to turn it into the What’s Own podcast. So, there was a speaker, and her name is Jennifer Say, and if you were on Twitter, you may have seen her posting, but if not, that’s okay.
Brittany: I’m scared of Twitter. Scared are too mean on Twitter.
Ronni: I was scared of Twitter before COVID, and then it was the only place I was getting information, so I had to jump in and I had to learn quickly. But it was good. I learned how to find my voice. I learned how to become brave. It’s led me to be able to work with the wonderful Tuttle twins and to be able to be on this podcast. So, for me, Twitter ended up being a really good place, even though it was very scary at first.
Brittany: I think that’s the one positive story I heard, but I’m so glad, you got here. I look on the positive side.
Ronni: Anyway, so go back to Jennifer say she was really big, She tweeted a lot during COVID, and one of the biggest things that she tweeted about was her kind of big passion was about kids and how different government mandates and restrictions were affecting kids, especially when it comes to wearing masks for young children and school closures. So, she was against these and she spoke up publicly about them. She used her platform. Well, I actually did not know this for the longest time, and I’d followed her for a very long time, is that she was actually one of the main higher-ups at Levi’s Jeans company. Do you know the pants? Oh, yes. No, this was a great story. Yes, I remember this. You’ve heard of her? Okay. Yeah. I had no idea that she even worked for the company, that she was a huge name within that company. Yeah, I wrote a whole article about her for a place called America’s Future. Yes. Because she talked about, yeah,
Brittany: I did. It was, yeah.
Ronni: Oh, cool. Well, she was there. I got to meet her. I was like, that name sounds familiar, and I couldn’t remember why. So, for our listeners who might not be as familiar when she was on Twitter, she never, not in her profile, not in any of her posts. She never said anything about working for Levi. She always kept her private opinions and private life separate from her professional life, which is working at Levi’s. So, most of her followers didn’t even know that she connected. Well, unfortunately though, she ended up still losing her job from Levi’s because they decided that the things that she was speaking out about, which again, is, she didn’t even talk about a lot of the COVID stuff. She specifically cared about kids and how school closures would affect them, and she cared about masks.
Brittany: That wasn’t even controversial, if I’m remembering it.
Ronni: Not even huge controversial things, just things that really showed that she cared about how these things affected kids. But anyway, she ended up losing her job at this company. She’d been working there for, oh, something 25 years?
Brittany: 20 Years. Yeah.
Ronni: A really long time, and again, one of the main higher-ups. But she lost her job because they told her that she no longer fit in with the company culture, and if she couldn’t stop talking about these things publicly, she was going to lose her job. And Jennifer was very brave, and she chose to lose her job instead of being silenced. So, she was up there talking, and she gave this really wonderful talk, but she used a term that was new for me called Woke Capitalism. Is that a term you’ve heard before?
Brittany: I have heard it before, yeah.
Ronni: Okay. Do you know what it means, or what do you think it means when you hear it?
Brittany: Yeah, just taking it from my understanding, these companies, everybody’s making it where they’re very woke. So, it’s like their policies are turning woke. In everything they do we have to have a stance on everything that reflects how woke we are. But that was my understanding. So, I would say if they’re doing that as a woke company, am I right?
Ronni: Yeah. So, in looking this up, I also learned of another term, and I’m going to bring it up only because I think maybe for some of our audience, they’ve heard these terms, but they don’t know what they mean. So, the other term I’ve heard is something called stakeholder capitalism. Do you know what that one is? Or have you heard that one?
Brittany: I know the word stakeholders, like somebody who has a stake in the company, somebody who has a part of that company, but I don’t know that in terms of.
Ronni: In their stakeholder capitalism. So, stakeholder capitalism, what’s considered that? And then what’s considered woke capitalism? There’s sort of an overlap, but not completely. So, I’ll explain it real fast. In stakeholder capitalism, that’s when companies are making a lot of their decisions in the best interest of their stakeholders. And what a stakeholder is, is someone like the employees or maybe the owners. It can also be people who have shares in the company who own the company, but it’s also the employees or even people in the local community in which the company affects. Those are considered the stakeholders. And stakeholder capitalism means that a company is making its decisions based off of what’s best for those people, not necessarily their customers, but what’s best for them. So, I dunno, what do you think?
Brittany: That’s interesting. So, it almost goes against market feedback where you are like, okay, what do my customers want? What does the consumer want? And they’re just concerned, what do we want it to sound like?
Ronni: Well, yeah, as far as when they’re making decisions for the company, we’re going to make a decision. This is what the people who work here want us to do. So, stakeholder capitalism can be a little bit problematic. However, I think what is different than stakeholder and woke capitalism is that with stakeholder capitalism, just because you’re listening to your employees when you’re making a decision, you could still be making good decisions. Maybe instead of doing market research or doing it, I don’t know, a little bit of inside research, but still, it’s not necessarily bad. I could see where it could be, okay, but with Woke Capitalism, this really refers to more progressive business practices that are done to appear altruistic or virtuous or extra socially responsible. And they’re usually more kind of left-leaning type of policies. And so that would be called Woke Capitalism. Or in today’s world, what we’ve been referring to is woke anyways. Right? Kind of the same thing. But the problem is that a lot of these companies that do woke capitalism, meaning that they make their business decisions based on what makes them look good, instead of what makes them money. So, they just want to look good. The problem is that these principles can actually hurt themselves and it limits themselves. And they’re also, it’s like they’re lying. They’re lying to themselves because you can’t, it’s can’t run a company that way. And so Jennifer say, who we talked about at the beginning, she found out that, so the Levi’s, the company that she worked for, they prided themselves on freedom and free speech, and everybody has a part to play in the world. And yet when she started speaking up and having free speech, she was kicked to the curb. So, she was really bothered by this whole idea of woke capitalism and how they’re basically, I kind of killing themselves because they’re not even standing up for their own principles that they claim to believe in. They want to look progressive.
Brittany: Yeah. I think that’s a problem with everything today, right? Even Hollywood, everything. You have these people who just want to look like they’re doing the right thing, almost so they don’t get attacked by other people. And it’s just, it’s so crazy.
Ronni: It is. But there’s so many companies that are out there doing that now. In fact, it’s almost hard-pressed to find a larger company that is not in some way practicing this woke capitalism. But there’s a couple of questions in this. First, the question is, why is this happening? Is this being done? Because these companies truly believe that, oh, if we look good, if we publicly stand for policies that we think are good, especially when it’s weird that they’re often political policies because they alienate a lot of the consumer base. But I mean, if that’s a strategy that they want to take, do they do that because it somehow increases their profits? Or is there another reason that they’re doing it? Is it something to do with this whole new collective push that we’re in where even corporations and companies are pushing towards the same, trying to make everyone believe and think the same thing?
Brittany: Yeah, I think it’s just pressure. Socially. Everybody wants one. Nobody wants to be the person that gets canceled. Nobody wants to be the organization that people are like, oh, well, this person said this something, and everyone’s so scared of this witch hunt, right? For wokeness. I think that’s a lot of what it is. I mean, when you talk about policies, I’m sure some of that gets political more like, oh, well, we want this policy to password and support this, but with the general just wokeness, like in the Jennifer says, I think it’s people just don’t want to have to deal with the backlash on Twitter. But the funny thing is, usually it’s not the majority of people who feel that way. It’s just the loudest people who feel that way.
Ronni: So, do you think this is going to be good for businesses? Do you think in the long run, this is going to make them money? Or do you think that when they go woke, they, as the saying goes, go broke? Do you think that that is the case?
Brittany: It is my hope that this whole woke thing leaves that it’s going to go away just because it’s so impractical. Everybody’s sick of what it’s doing to the rest of the world, not just in business. So, my hope would be that we all kind of change gears and that this stops being such a big part of our culture. But maybe I’m too optimistic. I don’t know.
Ronni: Yeah, I don’t know. I’m optimistic too, because I feel sometimes that’s all that we can do is be optimistic for the future and think about how can we be an unsung hero and do what we can to help.
Brittany: Just like our other episode then.
Ronni: Yeah, I threw that in.
Brittany: Perfect. I love it. Well, guys, this is such a great episode. If you haven’t looked up things about Jennifer say, she’s really, really just right on. I loved her so much when I read that article she wrote about a year ago, I guess. So, thank you for listening. Please like and subscribe and share with your friends. And until next time, Ronni, we’ll talk to you soon.
Ronni: All right, see you later.
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