How does individual shareholder activism work? How does personal agency and systems change work together in a theory of change? How do we become change makers? What did Catherine's mother teach me?
Catherine is Chief Executive of ShareAction. She coordinates civil society activism to promote responsible investment Catherine was recognised by the World Economic Forum as a Young Global Leader in 2014. ShareAction campaigns have significantly altered corporate strategy and government policy. For instance, on HSBC making environmental commitments and Tesco making healthy food commitments.
We chat about Catherine’s journey into activism and the theories of change that have influenced her.
We discuss how poetry, Ursula Le Guin and feminism have impacted us.
How to convince open minded skeptics to your cause.
Listen below, transcript and podcast links below. Video above and here.
Podcast links:
Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3gJTSuo
Spotify: https://sptfy.com/benyeoh
Anchor: https://anchor.fm/benjamin-yeoh
Contents (Youtube links)
01:08 Catherine’s activism journey
06:48 Catherine on community and theory of change
10:06 ShareAction theory of change
16:49 Healthy eating campaign, ideas on fiduciary duty
23:18 How to decide on campaign topics 26:32 Converting skeptics
28:54 Storying telling, individual agency at National Express
33:13 What poetry taught me
39:49 Questions on individual pension investors vote
50:30 Maximising the well being of people
54:11 Responsible Investment Bill idea, maximising welfare
58:10 Better growth not degrowth
1:01:11 Problems of vaccine nationalism
1:03:45 Underrated/overrated: art, cycling, carbon tax, voting, remote work, having children
1:15:41 Catherines advice to young people
Transcript (mostly unedited)
Catherine Howarth on Shareholder Activism, Better Growth and Being a Change Maker
Ben Yeoh: (00:01) Hello, and welcome to Ben Yeoh Chats, my podcast. If you're curious about wealth, this show is for you. How does shareholder activism work? In this episode, I speak to Catherine Howarth. We discussed how Catherine is thinking about her journey into activism and systems theory of change, how to grow back better and be a change maker. If you enjoy the show, please like and subscribe as it helps others find the podcast. Thank you, enjoy.
Hey everyone, I'm super excited to have Catherine Howarth with me today. Catherine is the Chief Executive of ShareAction. She coordinates civil society activism to promote responsible investment, and she was recognized as the World Economic Forum Young Global Leader in 2014. So, Catherine, welcome. Thank you.
Catherine Howarth: (00:54) Thanks Ben
Ben Yeoh: (00:55) So maybe we could start with just telling us a little bit about your journey into activism, how you kind of ended up in civil society, and your route into that.
Catherine Howarth: (01:08) Absolutely. Well, I, I feel like the roots of it go quite far back into my childhood and I have very vivid memories of reading about the suffragettes at school and being very interested and impressed by that. But after university, I wasn't sure you know, what I was going to do at all. I had a mini-crisis, but you know, you go through school, you get to university all hell's like, it's all plotted out. And then you come out into the blinking out, into the big wide world and you've got to make a choice out of a kazillion things you could do with your life, and I found that brief, beautifully whelming.
But anyway, I went to live in the East end of London; I grew up in West London and I went to live in east London. I have never been to East London, there's no reason as a young person growing up in West London, you would ever go to the East end of London, which I never had despite being a Londoner. Anyway, I went to live there and then I became involved in a… I'm a Roman Catholic, my mom's Irish, and I grew up Catholic and I turned it around for a church and I found this parish church an incredibly multicultural, amazing place full of people from all over the world. I mean that Catholic parish for a Londoner is one of the most multicultural institutions on the planet I would think, and it was an interesting experience. And I became involved in an amazing organization just as a volunteer called TELCO, The East London Community Organization. And it was just an amazing bit of luck really because TELCO would tap into a set of community organizers in the United States which had been kind of founded by an interesting activist and thinker called Saul Alinsky, who wrote an amazing book called Rules for Radicals which I would recommend.
And so, I kind of bumped into this very disciplined form, a very structured and very thoughtful form of activism, which thinks about how do you build power? How do you… for low-income communities for disadvantaged people. And how do you start to bear in mind that people in those kinds of communities operate inside their little community groupings? And in fact, they need to cross outside of those peoples and connect and figure out what their common self-interests are and then get organized, and they had a brilliant method of doing that. And so, yes, I just kind of came across this wonderful method of community organizing, and I got involved in activism, and then I got the opportunity to start the Living Wage Campaign in the UK.
And so, I left my job working for Think Tank whilst it was voluntary work, which was really what was inspiring and interesting, and so I became an organizer, community organizer. And I remember quite clearly my father thinking, “what is she doing with her career and her life” and express some concern. And the work indeed involved going to Canary Wharf night after night at about 9:00 PM when the cleaners would arrive and all the bankers went home and talking to cleaners about their lives and beginning to get organized, and then figuring out how we talked to banks about the coming to the UK first living wage employers. But equally working in hospitals in the east end, talking to cleaners who were on contracts that have been awarded by the National Health Service and where it was kind of outsourcing contracted labor just resulted in people in the hospital sector having absolutely rock bottom wages and no sick pay.
So as a result, they would come into work sick and unwell into the hospital, totally called public health hazard, just as a result of this kind of logical contracting and outsourcing. And it was very politicizing for me, all of that. And by the way, it's where I put my first flavor of ShareAction shareholder activism, which is what I've done for the last 13 years. Because we bought some shares in HSBC and Barclays, and I attended my first AGM and asked some questions and just kind of like almost by accident fed into all of that. But anyway, that's how I sort of posed the roots of it for me.
Ben Yeoh: (05:49) That's amazing. And I find this interesting that there was kind of seeds of your activist thinking from, I guess, quite young, partly you're saying, you know, never being the East-West London, seeing that mixed community, and partly from reading about the suffragettes and I guess coming quite early to an idea or theory of change or how political power can happen or how can you affect change. And do you think has been quite formative having a robust model of the theory of change about how political power might happen or not? Because I guess you think about, you know, old power structures or incumbent power structures and they often tell insurgent ideas of, you know, not going to work, what are you doing? isn't this crazy to feel, you know, you have a purpose, but you have, oh, this is a mechanism which might cause change. Is that being quite powerful for you?
Catherine Howarth :(06:48) That was essential for me. And I think any kind of social activism needs the discipline of a kind of a method or an explanatory framework. The world is big and overwhelming and it's so complex, and you know, each of us is so tiny. And so, you need to think in quite a structured way about how do you have an impact beyond just this unit of one person that… and that's about operating collectively. And that's about tapping into people's imagination, tapping into people's self-interest, and beginning to make people move together. It's like the power of the shell of fish know tiny but collectively quiet, you know, powerful and to defend itself. So yes, for me, it was transformational to come across this brilliantly thought three methodologically sound forms of community activism, which placed people in relationships between people absolutely at the heart of it was very sort of you-named theory, but effective.
And also, some such inspiration of very seasoned people experienced community organizers, who used to come and visit from the US where they were running amazing campaigns. And you know, for example, in the Southern Western State of the US where Mexican immigrants were so powerless, but through this approach had organized to get, you know, really basic facilities like you know, sanitation and waterworks and street lighting and basic things, which in these communities and, you know, the world richest country, The United States were not given at all in immigrant communities and some western states, but also in Chicago and other places. So, yes, it was a bit of a turning point I suppose, in my life. Well, I think you're right, that there were things in my upbringing and my education, which laid the foundation and made me at least spot the opportunity and grasp it when I came across that work.
Ben Yeoh: (09:11) And now at ShareAction, you've got a pretty robust theory of change as well. And part of what appeals to me about it is that there's a sort of element of ownership and direct democracy through it, which is an idea that goes across a lot of different sort of systems or power systems. Would you maybe articulate how you're thinking about ShareAction theory of change today, whether it's actually, maybe has it been this kind of the same routes over the last 10, 13 years, or has it kind of evolved a little bit in terms of thinking about using all of shareholder activism, the vote and influencing this kind of systemic change, but through a kind of personal change in the agency, although, you know, you guys do group up as a kind of Shoal of fish to influence companies?
Catherine Howarth: (10:06) Yes. So, I mean, well, the thing that attracted me to the work even around the finance industry and the corporate sector is that without doubt, you know, companies shape our world, day in day out and the allocation of capital into companies, therefore, shapes our world. But what's interesting about the corporate form is that it is backed by origins, quite democratically organized, so one shares one vote. And that goes back to the fact that people who originally put capital to work in companies wanted their interests represented, wanted to be able to hold directors accountable, but good stewardship of that capital and for the protection of their capital. So those were very kind of rational reasons to sort of establishing the foundations of corporate governance, and to ensure that if you put money to work in a company, you had the right to ask some questions about the directors in turn up at an annual general meeting.
But of course, a lot of those rights sort of almost with the dominant defined, and particularly in an era of institutional investment becoming so dominant where, you know, big pension funds, whole blocks of shares, and have a very un-relational approach with companies oftentimes very unusual for the trustees of the pension scheme to have any interaction at all with the corporate boards or anyone involved in the companies. This all leads to lots of chains into mediation, and lots of institutional structures that have got in the way of the kind of more democratic and relational culture, which I think business began with certain aspects of business balance. So, what we've done at ShareAction is just kind of make use of the rights that exist for shareholders to go and ask questions.
And also, what we've done is quite systematically think about who wields power in capital markets, which are fast institutional investment organizations, big fund managers, and so on. And then try to do it quite simply, but very useful tricks like ranking them against each other in terms of how responsible they are as stewards of capital and how much interest they take in the social-environmental performance you know, hundreds of companies that sit in their portfolios. And until fairly recently the investment world turned a pretty blind eye to corporate social environment performance, but that's changed very dramatically quite fast. Now I don't want to be too positive, I think it's a work in progress, but I think that partly because we face such terrifying risks, like runaway climate change and you know, chronic loss of species and, other challenges that are beginning to kind of driven a lot by business behaviors, but they're also beginning to bite business on the bum in terms of the potential financial impact of those things.
And so, for several reasons, the investment world is waking up; but one of them, I think, is that organizations like ours are doing a better job than needs to be done of holding accountable financial sector power for the influencing wheels on our world. And yes, so, I mean, those are some of the things that we get up to, and what's fun, I think is kind of combining, which is something we do, for example, through shareholder resolutions, providing the power of huge institutional asset managers and pension funds and so on, together with people that, you know, basically go out and buy a single share in a company, and then bring them together in these kinds of lovely, rule-based quite diverse coalitions to take actions; like filing shadow integration, which is an amazing right, that was again, really underused by starting to come back into its own where the shower wasn't company had the opportunity to take the initiative and put a proposition to management, and what we've been learning.
And by the way, this is all constant experimentation, and that's why I love the job, to be honest, is that it's like, you know, wildly free and we have a beer, oftentimes we surprise ourselves that it works by well. But, you know, just taking the initiative, putting these propositions forward, combining big investors with little, we live with people, and seeing what can be done to channel the power of business in a positive direction, because business shapes our world and it also shapes our world in ways that serve the public interest.
Ben Yeoh: (15:02) Yes. And I think that innovation on how to use the vote is amazing because in some ways it's almost like a direct democracy form. Imagine if you had it in a country, you know, you're putting forward your bill, and because you have a stake in say the country or the company you are being able to convince others or not to join you and then vote on it. And I think one of the great things about it is that the rights enshrined are generally also accepted by people who might on the one hand gone from a very safe, free-market point of view, because they've always said, yes, if you own a hundred percent of a company, you can do what you wish with that company, and then obviously in proportion. So actually, even someone not necessarily associated with this, like Milton Friedman was all about shareholder rights.
If you own it, then you can do what you wish for it. And the way of resolving what owners, when you have lots of different small owners of doing it is via this voting process, which is typically an annual process. I was intrigued by the work you've done on healthy eating and with supermarkets as an example of something, which seems to show a lot of innovation about how you can think about that. Would you like to maybe think… did that come about, because someone just had this idea, it's like, oh, how can we do systematic change on healthy eating? Well, you know, there are only a few supermarkets here in the UK. Maybe if we could influence them, we might make a lot of systemic change so that it comes across that. Or is it like a coffee conversation or sort of slowly dawned on people that there's this window or this door is opening up amongst corporates to listen to certain other ideas and let's push on that door?
Catherine Howarth: (16:49) It is a mixture of influences. So, I guess I've always been very interested in public health. And then I think this, like the reality, is that after years, or, you know, hundreds of years, or certainly in the last hundred and 50 human longevity has increased and life expectancy has grown a lot. But we are peeking out actually on life expectancy, and in fact, in UK women's life expectancy is beginning to turn down. And the reason for that is that we're eating unhealthy diets.; and the reason for that is that it is sort of cheap and easy to make profits in the food sector by selling foods that have high in sugar, fat, and salt. And, you know, collectively, even though we are so, you know, advanced supposedly, and our economy keeps growing, we are on a bit of a sort of self-destructing as far as human health is concerned.
And then, by the way, you know, when the long-pending pandemic is kind of all that is a fact that people that were, you know, obese and overweight and, or had other underlying health conditions, all of which are highly correlated with socioeconomic status were hugely more at risk of death and serious morbidity from COVID. So, we just felt like the moment was right to challenge the UK supermarket sector, which is a highly concentrated corporate kind of landscape with some very dominant players and, and Tesco is the largest of the lot and has 27% market share of grocery in the UK. And by the way, during the pandemic, all the supermarkets had been trading because they were allowed, you know, they were given special status because every other business had to look down because we do depend upon the supermarkets and supermarket workers were defined as key workers, essential to the collective wellbeing of the country, through the pandemic.
We just felt it was the right moment to say to Tesco, could you set some serious targets for shifting the health profile of people so they can get over the next decade. And bearing in mind that, you know, the minute you walked through the doors of a supermarket and your choices are being shaped and quite sophisticated ways by pricing, by the journey that you traveled through literally through the physical architecture of the shop by the placing of goods physically high to low, like, it is not like that. You just go in and you decide what you want, your choices are being shaped. So, there's no doubt that the supermarket sector can shape positively, our diets. And so that's what we asked them to do, and I thought that was brilliant was bringing investors together to do that.
Why? Because you have to think about the fiduciary duty of a large institutional investor, like a pension fund. Their duty is to invest in a way that delivers the best interest of the people on whose behalf they invest. So that's millions of working people who have retirement savings in these pension funds, and that obligation to invest in their best interest has been continuing to be defined quite narrowly as maximize the financial returns of the portfolio. But if the companies in the portfolio are operating in a way that undermines the best interests, the long-term security, the health and wellbeing, and the life expectancy of those people, then that's kind of a weird conundrum. And we thought that it starts, if this work on public health, it is a really interesting way of raising to debate about how did these big institutional investors define their core obligation to look after your interests?
Is it just maximizing returns in which case you want to invest in supermarkets that sell the maximum amount of profitable high in fat sugar and salt products; or is it more in the best interest of those millions of pension savers that you invest in supermarkets to make, you know, great profits? But don't do it at the expense of the health of the very people that those pension funds exist to the catheter. So, I just think it, it was a great campaign because it was successful and Tesco agreed to what we wanted. So yay not be like a successful campaign, but also illustrates and, and begins to honor us and much more interesting and deep debate about the purpose of big, powerful investment organizations and have this job in our society of investing money on our behalf and for our best interests; and where I think there's much scope to challenge the underlying premise and basis of a lot of that decision-making, and open it up in a way that does serve our collective self in our collective interests.
Ben Yeoh: (22:07) And how do you decide what sort of topics or areas to tackle? Because there is kind of so many. I mean, my reflection is the climate is very much in the news at the moment, and it's very good that a lot of people are working on it. But in some ways that leave the question of something like health, which has now also risen, it's something I've worked on for quite a long time. But arguably, for instance, this Tesco and health win, which has been a great win, has made a lot of short and long-term impact, which I think is kind of quite interesting; whereas arguably a lot of dimensions of climate, how should we put it? We're lagging, you know, as a collective, right? No one individual or fault on that. It'd be interesting to see how you'll think about some of these big topics. There are some frameworks like sustainable development goals, and there's a lot of things we can think about what's important to us, education, health environment, and things like that. I have no answer, I've just really intrigued as to how a great thinker like you might think about it.
Catherine Howarth: (23:18) Well, when we pick topics there are some key criteria, there are some pragmatic ones like ShareAction is a registered charity, so we have to find the money for everything we do. So, someone needs to be willing to fund it. That's why I'm pragmatic about the criteria there, but other things are really at work for us, we think about what to work on. First of all, will this build the movement for responsible investment? So, we know that to create systemic and positive transformational change in capital markets and capitalism and in the business community, lots of people need to be on board with that and need to own it, be excited about it.
So, it's one thing to work on climate change, but it's great to also work on health because there are different people who've not liked them up when it comes to thinking about these things. And it's been amazing actually to see how on the climate agenda, climate activists have become so interested in what's going on in financial markets and how is climate finance being handled by big financial institutions and companies. But equally, I think there's great potential for the whole galaxy of people, but think about health, including everyone in working professionally in the health field, doctors, nurses, and community health practitioners, but also people who you know, patients and their families and so on. But for a whole additional constituency people who maybe aren't really like all turned on about climate change, but thinking about health to also start thinking quest and questioning the role of finance and capital markets and companies in shaping our health outcomes.
So, building the movement and growing always a bigger, more inclusive, and more diverse movement, people that find these things interesting and relevant to them is part of the criteria. And then the other one is where are the issues which start kind of, as I was talking about earlier, like nudged you into to a slightly deeper set of questions about the internal logic in capital markets and the purpose of large institutional investors and how they find their purpose, how accountable they are to their stakeholders, who they can see as their stakeholders. So that's another thing I think when our campaign is going well, there's a sort of like, you know, there's the drama of the campaign, a shareholder resolution it's quite immediate friendly. It's a bit of a fight between shareholders and management and it's fun and it's got drama. But there's something else going on at a deeper level, which it's raising some deeper questions and those are good campaigns that sort of deal with those have all those ingredients woven in.
Ben Yeoh: (26:15) How would you convince someone who's sort of open-minded, but say a little bit skeptical of either your theory of change or even some of the topics you're doing. So, someone, you'd meet, but be open-minded to try and convince them to your course.
Catherine Howarth: (26:32) So there are people that are complete enough to be skeptics and I think we can just not worry about those people. The people I'm interested in are the ones who are kind of nascent, but apathetic supporters. And because to create change, you do need a base of support, you need any deep support. And what you want to do all the time is switching on people who are kind of potentially engaged and supportive, but just a bit busy with something else, other causes other issues. And the art of this is partly due to switching people on intellectually, but much more experientially building a bigger, deeper, and more powerful base of support. And I think that you cannot worry about that, the real skeptics, because, you know, there are people that will always be just antagonistic. I'm not worried about them. What I am concerned about is building all support rounds, work, and tapping into the latent apathetic, silent majority.
Ben Yeoh: (27:46) I was reflecting just on that. I think at least that's where for me storytelling or narrative, I think you've touched on this is extremely powerful for people. Maybe it's a part of being humans. Maybe this is more sort of personal for me, but for instance, I've read quite a lot of Ursula K Le Guin, and I think from that my understanding of feminism, particularly when I was younger was probably most enriched by deep thinking about her work than maybe reading other articles in the newspaper; or, you know, or like sort of social critical theory of which it wasn't my thing, and wouldn't understand. So, I was interesting, what do you think that maybe narrative or story has a place for things within activism, or has it informed any of your work?
Catherine Howarth: (28:47) Well, that's a big leap away. Ben, you’ve got me into Ursula, K Guin. I never read any of her work.
Ben Yeoh: (28:52) Oh really! You are a latecomer.
Catherine Howarth: (28:54) And I know several all of her wonderful books, so, and I that's all about you. So, thank you. But how could we discover the right Ursula K Le Guin, and also some of her videos? She did some great videos, not totally unlike the format we're talking about today. A bit less of a conversation, a bit more just her, but like what an amazing woman, by the way, I'd love to have further conversation. Maybe we'll have this sign another day about the deep thinking you've done about her work because I just really gobbled up her books and thoroughly enjoyed the model. What should I put into deep thinking in any case? Absolutely storytelling is so important and it's partly the stories we tell collectively about the endeavors we undertake together, but it's also the stories that people start to tell about themselves when they are involved in the action.
I believe in the power of activism to start to kickstart a process whereby people tell a different story about themselves. And they tell a story about themselves as a protagonist that took on corporate power or took on, you know, political power. And it's really through action that we become who we are. And that kind of conscious action for the greater good is a particular type of action that's very profound for people. So, I think it's really important that community organizing was particularly good at this. And so, my kind of apprenticeship, which was 10 years long in community organizing before I came to this work; was a kind of foundation block of everything I try and do in some ways in ShareAction. It was particularly good at having people articulate, you know, how they feel about the action they've been involved in what it means to them, how it changes who they are.
And also cause them to reflect on stories about, we won this battle, you know, we run this campaign. That's exciting that forms part of the collective narrative, but that personal narrative piece is great too. And it's not just a story to tell about yourself, but it's also a story to tell about other individuals. So, one of my favorite stories is of a young woman who was a wheelchair user who came on some of ShareAction, kind of training in you know, the art of the good question that a company's annual general meeting. And she was a poet actually, and also a really good athlete and a wheelchair athlete, and just a generally kick-ass young woman, phenomenal.
And she went to the annual general meeting of National Express; there was a bit of a moment, a bit of a hassle. There wasn't a disabled access venue by the way, so she had to kind of come in humiliating innocuous or service entrance. But she made it onto the floor there in general meetings. And she told her story about you know, standing at bus stops, this was the National Express and in a general meeting which is a big bus company in the UK, and about how you know, they wouldn't give her access onto the bus. And there would be, you know, we pushchairs and so on, which could be folded and they would give a priority over people, wheelchair users. And she told her story and she challenged the board and they changed the company's policy there and then because she was so compelling and it was her story. And then she got to tell the story of her AGM success. So those are the best, I think when people bring their own story to bear, and then it becomes a new part of their story that they got something changed, and then everyone could absorb that story, and off you go,
Ben Yeoh: (33:13) Yes, it becomes part of the… I always like to say, it's kind of the myths that we like to tell ourselves, you know, money is a human myth into subjective myths that we use for all of these things. And we have to tell ourselves the kind of new stories, the new myths in a good way for what we want to do. This might be a little bit micro, but it's just to occur to me in terms of what poetry has taught me, or at least when I was very young, I was taught by a certain brilliant Mrs. Howarth some poetry. And one of the things that she taught me was never to overuse adjectives and the power of the verb, particularly in poetry. I don't know. Do you have any micro thing or even micro thing about what humanities or poetry has taught you?
Catherine Howarth: (34:04) Gosh my mom, I’m so glad that my mom was your teacher, and I love the fact that you're so generous about the influence she had on you. And it's funny because she's 76 now, and she's still volunteering in primary schools, helping children learn to love poetry, which is lovely. And I felt very humbled by my mom's kind of grasp of poetry cause my own are quiet people. So, yes, I mean, I do draw on poetry here and there and I'm trying to get my children to engage in it. And the strange thing, they love poetry. They find it standardize the meter or something about it, taking my second son who's not amaze, you know, he's not such a keen reader, but he tunes into poetry.
I think we need more poetry in the world, that's all I can say. And I love that it's so informative to you, like a hugely successful fund manager and a figure in the finance sector and, you know, poetry is there in the background, staring it up and helping you so we should have more poetry and in all of activism. And it's, you know, some organizations draw on it more when we're not [inaudible 35:34]. And I'd say maybe one resolution out of today's conversation will be more poems.
Ben Yeoh: (35:40) Well, maybe [we need more poets] I already have a good friend who his other job, he always says, poets have two jobs. My poet friend Rishi Dastidar, I had a chat with him a few weeks ago, he always says poet slash something else, poet slash pension fund manager, poet slash copywriter, which has been there for a couple of thousand years. And he points out that poetry is still one of the oldest arts and it seeps into everywhere because of the power of the word or language things, which you might not call poetry. Now, if you think about it probably is poetry, but it's in disguise. We don't want to tell anyone that it is necessarily poetry. And I partly refer to it because like you were hinting to some of these seeds or sparks that we get when we're very young, somehow really grow with us.
And I've always said there have been quite a few handfuls of my teachers to be able to be grateful to them because they often really don't know the influence they have, you know. You're casting pebbles in the pond and they ripple or seeds through the garden and you don't know what, you don't know what takes root. And probably the vast majority of the time, you will never know that, you know, that's the nature of that. Yes, I think they are you know, very transformational; and I think it's the same with some of your work. You will you are planting a lot of seeds and ideas, and sometimes you have these big win-wins, but even when you don't have those successful campaigns, you are making well in the truth to power aspect, you're making powerful people think might not be able to convince them of that.
But then that next layer down in the ecosystem, you're making a lot of other people think whether they're engaged general public or other people within policymakers and things. And I think that's an area of influence, which is essentially impossible to measure. You'll never really be able to measure it, but I think it's increasingly, well, it's always been really important and I can see it and I can kind of see it in your work. And I see it broadly also in the work of teachers on this individual personal agency, but where there are systemic changes and, you know, translate it into policy speech. They've got this idea of this so-called Overton window, that this is a window where policy action can happen because it's acceptable to enough people. And a lot of this engaged activism or just talking about the challenges you know, we face without having to put you know, labels on it, moves where this policy or where the system can be. And I think we've seen this in social change movements throughout time, whether that's minority rights, disabled rights, women's rights, the ending of slavery, or all sorts of manners of things like that. And it's this, I don't know, intersectional between this.
Catherine Howarth: (38:32) Before we move on from teachers, I just want to ask if you've read the book Some Kids, I Taught and The Things They Taught Me.
Ben Yeoh: (38:42) Yes. I have.
Catherine Howarth: (38:44) Such a good book isn't it?
Ben Yeoh: (38:45) It is brilliant.
Catherine Howarth: (38:46) I loved it… that was a reading highlight for me of last year. And yes, it's about a poetry teacher and her reflections on…. as the title says, kids, she taught and the things they taught her and is just so wise and so funny and touching about children in different parts of the country, in different communities, and the cultures they came from. And that's just an absolutely beautiful book.
Ben Yeoh: (39:19) She had also very amazing parents did, I don't know if you read her essay, but they had traumas over the pandemic, both her parents passed. But if I recall correctly, her father on that certificate was what of died from a broken heart. There's an actual medical term for it, which is part of this essay she's written. So, if you haven't read the essay, it's incredibly moving.
Catherine Howarth: (39:49) I'll make sure to read that. That's a great recommendation. I was just going to tap into… you’ve mentioned about kind of the cycle of social change and movements for social change. And I talked about suffragettes at the very beginning of our interview. And one thing that was a real kind of an interesting eye-opener for me was one of the things that ShareAction tried to do is make a case that pension savers, a few, you know every working person is wanting the UK banks to pensions automatically roll in, which came in about 12 years ago or so. So, before that pensions were kind of a bit of a kind of slightly privileged workforce benefits for the more kind of mid-ranking employees, and middle managers and upwards. And then the government decided, gosh, everyone better be a pension say because we've kind of worried about the fact that the nation doesn't save enough and what would be the implications public finances.
So, everyone working in McDonald's, working cleaning jobs is now a pension saver; which means they have a stake in capital markets, they’re shareholders. One thing that ShareAction has been campaigning for fairly unsuccessfully, I would say. And we've had some… I mean, you've talked very kindly about our wins, but an area where I think we got a long way to go is in the kind of democratization of the system. And what we've been arguing for is that pension savers should have more rights to have a say about the policies that govern the investments. They should have access to information about what holdings the money is put into, and how votes were cast at company annual general meetings by the fund managers that invest on their behalf. Just to open up space a bit so that the actual real people whose money is having a little bit more agency and opportunity to question and so on.
And so, we've been making that case for a long time, and I've been kind of keeping a little track of the arguments that have put up why that's not a good idea. I need it to perfectly mirror the arguments that were way by why women should not have the vote over a hundred years ago. It's like, well, you know, they wouldn't know what to do with that information. They wouldn't know. They're not interested in, you know, all these arguments, which exactly give me some why your women shouldn't have a vote because they wouldn't know how to vote sensibly. After all, there are only women and they're not educated, which is basically about ordinary working people and why they're there. They couldn't be let into the mysteries of investment management and capital markets, and they're not interested again. And so, it's just been so interesting that I think these movements to democratize and open up spaces of power, whether it's capital markets today, which let's face, it is an incredible nexus of power in the 21st-century world, or a hundred years ago, parliament and women having the opportunity to elect people to represent in parliament.
It's just the same set of arguments. Why not? And I find that interesting as to why we shouldn't give up and why probably people look back and say, of course, people should have had more opportunity to have a say and be part of the story. But that's not the way the world looks at it right now, and particularly the professionals that are in charge of our money.
Ben Yeoh: (43:36) So I think a lot of the philosophical challenges are essentially smokescreens. I don't think they hold up if you poke them not even very hard at all; like we're saying your analogies to the women's vote. But I do think there is an issue of who would pay for a lot of this and some of the infrastructure issues. But I think that hopefully, it should be a diminishing problem because of where technology can come in. So arguably 20 years ago, if you had to do this by paper and post, you would probably quite have strong, bureaucratic, sludge money arguments on the other side. But I think there are an apple two or things coming through that, and actually, there's quite a powerful, other theory of change about how transparency can breed positive things for the system. Partly whether you view that through a check and balance, you know if you look back at the pandemic if we'd had more transparency on government decision-making and policy because you had outside experts look at it, our decision-making arguably could have been better. And then there are these other arguments like you say, about the rights of what people could do with that information. And that's the kind of wisdom of the crowd idea when they have that information out in the domain is usually pretty powerful.
So, I would be hopeful, but I do think there is an issue around you know, none of the incumbents particularly want to stump up any money for it. So, unless government either does or forces that it's less likely to be able to happen because there is a reasonable amount of money issue, but there are a lot of other second-order benefits for building up. Some of that infrastructure of saying who's got votes and rights and things, and particularly if part of the theory of the world is that the corporate form or the ownership of the corporate form is becoming a more powerful stakeholder in the world, or is recognition of the power that it wields, then having transparency into who ultimately owns or is voting or saying on that power, then becomes more important.
And then that will allow at the moment that I think there is a clause in the system as to, you know, if you own a tiny piece via an intermediary and another intermediate and another intermediary being able to get your vote, which ultimately you do own, although you might've delegated it to somebody else to get that back you know. There's a plumbing kink to do that. And that would take this infrastructure charge, but I do think there was a case that you could make to government and the powers that be to do that, to get that through,
Catherine Howarth: (46:33) They will, as I said, at the very beginning, you know, companies were designed democratically to start with. But then we didn't have intermediaries, people put money in, and they were rich people. And they insisted on having rights to hold accountable directors. And now we have poor people who own shares, with no right to hold anyone but themselves to be accountable. So, there's a way to go, I think technology is a friend here, but I mean, that's a bigger, deeper conversation about, is technology a force for good or, you know, inherently progressive. I think it all depends on the ethical and human and power-related structures we put around them and, and the governance. And so, the technology is certainly there to do this. But you're right, that I think large pension funds were like to volunteer, the argument will have to be made in parliament; and in policy circles that almost, you know, having put in place automatic enrollment and enable millions of people to have a stake in the system, which, you know, is in a way a kind of right-wing politician dream.
I don’t think, you know, Mrs. Thatcher was always very keen on this idea of shareholder democracy and that's right because it should be. Capitalism should be opened up for everybody and should operate in everyone's interest, but it won't operate in everyone's interest until we have more accountability in democratic structures properly and all that. And we don't have those yet.
Ben Yeoh: (48:15) So I think there's a really good analogy on that for making the case, but he kind of housing and this, you know, rightly or wrongly, you can have this notion of like right to own your house. I don't know whether that's true, but obviously in England, in the UK, there was a definite philosophical movement on that. You could say whether it started with that or not. Well, let's see, that's the kind of piece of capital asset idea which readily translates to this cousin idea of owning a piece of a company with where you are. And particularly now with automatic enrollment. I think this technology piece is really interesting as well, because for instance, the information that we give to the live technology players, it's kind of amazing. And we sort of semi willingly goes into that. But the transparency or the data that we're prepared to give to the government, the narrative around that seems to be much more worried.
So, we're much more worried for instance, about giving up some NHS data, which is meant to be used for our good. Then we are giving quite frankly, you know, the technology companies know vastly more about us than the NHS ever would. And then the NHS my belief would govern much better as you can argue about that, but you would put these things in place and be much more accountable. And it seems to me that the system, whether that's government or civil society or whoever hasn't made the case of the people saying, we will use your technological health data for good; we will be able to save costs and make you healthier. And which case data transparency in the technology is going to be a force for good, rather than just sending you angry memes on social media, which is not doing you any good, but somehow you think you're going to give away that data for free. And I think there is this similar thing if you get people to say, look, you own a piece of the supermarkets and these companies and things, and you can use your voice for an act of good in that sort of same way, but there's a kind of more foundational… I wouldn't necessarily say educational message, but a new story and narrative around how technology is enabling you to deck that. And I think maybe the stores in… go on,
Catherine Howarth: (50:30) Well, I was going to say it's very much the same corollary is what I was saying about helping supermarkets. So, the role of large institutional investors that hold supermarket and technology stocks on your behalf, if their only obligation and their purpose are that absolute, just simply maximize the returns from those stocks. Then in the case of the technology companies or the supermarket companies, who’s behaviors, having quietly significant impacts on all of our lives. You just haven't got those questions being asked by the shareholders who act on our behalf. And this is why I think we do need to open up this debate about the legal obligations of institutional investors and the purpose of their work in relation to the well-being and benefit of the people on whose behalf they act, And enable, legitimize that institutional investors can ask questions of technology companies about whether their policies and practices are beneficial to the people who own the stocks. So, it’s just an interesting space.
Ben Yeoh: (51:49) As you talk that maybe this is a line of work or maybe it goes more into sort of client earth and things, that there isn't being a really good test case for a very long time to redefine fiduciary duty for today. And I think there would be… I can't think of it, but I think there would be a very strong case if we came up with saying that it's shifted from this narrow idea of money to what it might be for broad stakeholders; because we're relying on essentially case law. And in fact, the original case law for prudent man goes back to I think something I'm slightly miss-telling it, but something like a horse and cart incident in the sixteen hundred you know, where this was based that there hasn’t been any clarification.
And now for those listening in, there is quite a lot of work being done with this. The lawyers Freshfields have put out a new report in association with the UN PRI, but that's based on a kind of legal understanding where of this. It hasn't been ratified by any case law or any actual judge precedence, even though there's QC and council. So, people are always a little bit wary because it hasn't been tested by the system. And unfortunately, you can't just ask the system, what do you think? But I think there would be some interesting, I mean that extends to some of the climate mitigation, you see worldwide using some of these principles, and I think there is that. And there was in the UK basis, a little bit of case law to do with what the law society has said about how we can choose investments or not, but it hasn't gone to the kind of what I call the steel man argument of sort of saying like, well, if you do something which you can definitively show is bad for a majority of people. I can't necessarily think of what it is, maybe a climate-related or something then actually does your fiduciary duty extend when you can see that those same people are the stakeholders that you're representing should that somehow take precedence, but it would in my view, and you can see how you can make the legal arguments around that. It would have to be retested today with how we can view the world today, as opposed to where the case law is, which has hundreds of years old.
Catherine Howarth: (54:04) Well, you could do it through case law or you could do it through legislation. I mean…
Ben Yeoh: (54:10) You could do it through legislation.
Catherine Howarth: (54:11) Even if we have legislators that we elect is that they write laws that are for the common good, and we need to re-write laws. ShareAction has published a model for the parliament which we call the Responsible Investment Bill, which sets out a new definition of investors' legal that encompasses this concept of… there's not a phrase we use in it, but kind of maximizing shareholder welfare instead of just maximizing shareholder wealth. When you go back to Milton Friedman and his arguments, which you cited the very beginning about, you know, the purpose of the company is to maximize. Well, if you just substitute that for maximizing welfare, then you immediately get into a world where companies have to think about whether their own and in a world of mass participation in pension funds, the public good is almost the same as the welfare of the millions of people who have slithered a little stake in, you know, hundreds of the world's biggest companies whose actions do need to serve the public interest more than they perhaps do at present, certainly when it comes to the climate crisis. But, certainly, I think also when it comes to the public health challenges we face today.
Ben Yeoh: (55:28) And that is not too far in extension for what some of in Milton Friedman’s actual papers, where he would argue if you look off to your stakeholders and its wealth-generating, he has no issues with those externalities for that. So obviously this is a slight step further, but it's not too far away from some of his original assertions, particularly if you put it in his place and time for what they were debating.
Catherine Howarth: (55:55) Indeed and a lot of what he was interested in was some disciplinary management. They shouldn't be bettering their interest, and I'm all in favor of that. So, you know, I don't think I'm very far from Milton Friedman.
Ben Yeoh: (56:10) No, and it's kind of surprising when you get back to some of what he was dealing with business [ ]. Also, at the time, there was a lot of how would we put it, cronyism, which was what he was kind of more worried about than some of these other aspects.
So, one of these things so finally on the big picture before may be dwelling on a couple more kind of quicker things is it touches on this, and I'm interested in what you think, which is essentially this debate or conflict to some degree. I think there's maybe less conflict than sometimes between essentially de-growth ideas, for want of a better word, like techno-optimism ideas or growth ideas. And I guess one of the big challenges, and we sort of said this, you know, can we use technology for good? Is that it does seem probably to a lot, but not all economists that to deal with poverty, whether that's in poor countries between countries or within countries, when you look at the deep or in a wealthy country, like the UK that they will need to have growth really to be able to achieve that. And so, we can talk about equitable growth as opposed to the problem with some degrowth, as it's quite hard to separate within that. And you're not going to be able well, according to the technique, optimist idea the innovation and the technology to face some of these things like health and climate would not happen without growth. On the other hand, like some elements, degrowth is kind of a sort of common sense. So, for instance, food waste, but, you know, in the sense that why would we waste food that you don't have to at seems common sense, but there's a very strong de-growth idea, right? Don't use more than you would do in whether that's the food supply chain or even food on the table. So, I was wondering whether this intersects with any of your thinking.
Catherine Howarth: (58:10) So I'm not a degrowth person, I'm a better growth person. And you know, I think gets back to the idea that we just talked about maximizing welfare rather than just maximizing wealth. We do need a clever version of GDP. And lots of clever people, far cleverer than I, but they had sort of working out how we can do that, and I hope we make some progress on it.
Ben Yeoh: (58:36) New Zealand might be getting there, which is also why it's flowing into their policy. They've got a kind of living budget idea, which is trying to put in forms of natural capital and therefore policy flowing from that. So maybe starting to happen in a couple of minutes.
Catherine Howarth: (58:51) Yes, I mean, we're going to need lots of experimentation. And I've had that meeting and having looked at that, and I'm not surprised. I think they have that incredibly brilliant leader. But yes, we need to grow within the safe space for human flourishing. And at the moment, the model of growth we've got is, you know, to use the phrase I used earlier, it's biting us in the bum. It, it is putting us at risk, but of course, we need growth, particularly in parts of the world where people are still suffering, totally unacceptable standard of living, and don't have the absolute necessities. So, a hundred percent I'm all for that. Yeah. So, I
Ben Yeoh: (59:43) Yes, so I mean… I have to say currently where the pandemic is, and what the UK has done on international aid has recently made me a little bit less hopeful. Because within say a progressive better growth agenda, you would want economic growth, technology transfer, and these types to poorer countries, whether you want to invoke what's happened in the past or not even just looking at today, partly because of positive spillovers as well as defeating externalities. And, you know, something like climate externality or pandemic externality, you can't hope to solve without bringing along poorer country counterparts. So that's maybe a little bit less hopeful, but with some of these other things more hopeful. So, I didn't know whether we wanted to end at least on the sort of macro section with anything you'll be doing and potentially more hopeful or any comments on the gap, what we did, what specifically on the UK and international aid. But, the fact that in general, richer nations are not helping poor nations through the pandemic in a way which makes if you were, not that we would have it, but if you had a global government, you would not be doing this right, because it's not a real win-win for everyone.
Catherine Howarth: (1:01:11) No, I mean, you know, vaccine nationalism is the perfect embodiment of everything wrong; just because it's so short, sighted apart from anything else that we will get a new variant of COVID if we don't vaccinate the world at speed. So, the idea that you warn them in your little island is just so foolish and so lacking in moral integrity. The thought I just can't bear it, but anyway, that's the world we're in. Where do I see some hope? Well, I mean, it's one of the reasons the last 13 years at ShareAction has been so fun and joyfulness is that I see, you know, bits and pieces of much more enlightened thinking at work in corners of the business community and the financial sector. And I think there are real limits to that; and I think as I've described earlier, it is critical that we have better and more structured ways of holding accountable people that wield significant power in capital markets and financial sector because their decisions and their policies have a huge impact on all of us.
That's why we're interested in the decisions that they make, but the potential for those decisions to be made well, and in the public interest exists. And I think the space of responsible investment is quite dynamic. And there's almost a bit of a race to the top going on with, and one can be very cynical and say a lot of it greenwash; but, you know, I do see a dynamic where financial services companies and investment firms are trying to out-compete each other in being good on ESG. Well, no way that would last, and also by the way, very interesting that you know, the Biden Administration, as I think seeing that caught up further. The Trump Administration was a break-off on some of that, but we're in a different era.
So, look, I don't want to be too cheerful because there's no consciousness about the world, but I also think people are starting to see that incredibly short-term approach to business management maximizations of profits, without any thought to the externalities created, and the impact of those externalities on the very people who own stock in your company. We were beginning to see through how that doesn't work and towards something better.
Ben Yeoh :(1:03:45) Great. Well, let's end with this kind of short section on a kind of underrated overrated with a few quick-fire topics, and then maybe some advice to young people or young activists thinking. So yes, for overrated underrated we can try a few things, some of these might be obvious, I guess. So overrated, underrated cycling?
Catherine Howarth: (1:04:09) Underrated.
Ben Yeoh :(1:04:10) underrated green, good to go around, although maybe don't have the infrastructure
Catherine Howarth: (1:04:16) It’s so delightful to cycle. It's so incredibly productive and efficient and use of time and you can't catch COVID on a bicycle. So, like all of these reasons it's, it's smarter, it's nicer and it's healthier and it's also cheaper. So, team cycling.
Ben Yeoh :(1:04:36) Great. Modern art, maybe art in general.
Catherine Howarth: (1:04:41) Overrated. No, arts in general. Okay.
Ben Yeoh :(1:04:44) So modern art, overrated, art in general underrated.
Catherine Howarth: (1:04:47) Yes. What do you mean by modern art? Do you mean modern painting?
Ben Yeoh :(1:04:56) Can be more precise. Let's say modern painting? I guess I was maybe slightly hinting towards these digital assets that we've got now that you have that might've heard. I mean, that would be the pinnacle of very modern art so-called NFTs.
Catherine Howarth: (1:05:10) I’m like we don't fall, which I am treating, so yes. Okay. Overrated
Ben Yeoh :(1:05:16) Carbon tax or price or something like that?
Catherine Howarth: (1:05:20) Underrated. We need one.
Ben Yeoh :(1:05:23) Yes, I completely agree. And I think this idea of carbon, whatever you want to call it, tax dividend, and then actually giving that back to the people, I would probably make it means-tested, but even not. So, some universal benefit, like a sort of child benefit idea would go down because it's although on the one hand the tax might be considered thought of as anti-progressive, the dividend itself would be progressive and more than weigh that out in my view. But anyway, we're not there yet, but maybe. Living in cities or urbanism?
Catherine Howarth: (1:06:03) Great question, because the pandemics shifting that. I love it. I'll just speak for myself. It's not underrated for me. But I love a visit to the countryside.
Ben Yeoh :(1:06:18) So maybe correctly rated. I think they're going to have a hard patch now, but I do think they probably have more solutions than problems, which is maybe no good.
Catherine Howarth: (1:06:29) Yes. I know I'm a dedicated city dweller and I think life can be beautiful in cities, but we do have to work hard on, you know, we all need green spaces. There's lots of potential for green space in cities. We can be way more creative with rooftop gardens and all that. We do need to probably fewer cars, more trees, and happier cities
Ben Yeoh :(1:06:54) Agreed. Okay. using your vote?
Catherine Howarth: (1:07:02) Overrated in the UK because we need electoral reform, but I think you will have heard loud and clear that I'm a Democrat and believe in democracy in the course of the conversation we've had. So yes, underrated probably in general and the world. Yeah.
Ben Yeoh :(1:07:25) Yes. Or at least underrated at the company level. I broadly agree. I think if you're a very powerful, notable person, then maybe, you know, your vote, you don't think has as much power as it should do from your power in the world. But for the average person and in the UK, a lot of people aren't voting, and so their voices aren't being heard. So, for the average person, I think it's underrated, maybe overrated in some of these niches. And, the last one for this one would be… oh, actually I had one more before the last one, we touched on. Which was remote work, which you sort of touched on with the other things.
Catherine Howarth: (1:08:10) Underrated. It was underrated so much by me. I was a real like got to be in the office person. And I can thank the pandemic for the fact that I've transformed my view, but that's because I think video calling technology is just incredibly marvelous and clever. And I just think it surely signals a productivity revolution just because less versus like running around on airplanes and won't be doing that anymore. And I think it's lovely to be at home, you can pop out and have lunch, you know, in your…
Ben Yeoh :(1:08:53) Very positive for your local communities actually, there's that whole community thing.
Catherine Howarth: (1:08:57) It’s great. There's a good piece in the Ft on it today, actually by finding FICO anyway, I'm fine.
Ben Yeoh :(1:09:02) I agree. I think the two caveats are… there is a specific value in face-to-face, but I think we will be able to do that mostly remote or a hybrid anyway like might meet up that they don't go away
Catherine Howarth: (1:09:17) To me I feel like we're having a lovely conversation. I think it would be that much better if we were breathing on each other, like…
Ben Yeoh :(1:09:26) We have an advantage that we've got, what you would call it, built up social or relationship capital. I do think if we, although having said that I have done some of these chats with people I've never met. So, like this philosopher in Utah talking about gamification and the benefits weigh that. So not only do we get all of the benefits and video, which are probably just as good. There's no way I would have been able to do that podcast without. So, I mean maybe you are right on that.
Catherine Howarth: (1:09:58) I am a fan of the handshake, I'm a fan of the hug, but I'm also a fan and we also really need to travel less and be with our neighbors more.
Ben Yeoh :(1:10:10) Yes. So, I mean, and I think it will make go hybrid like let's have a lunch or dinner every three or six months and meet up and have fruitful conversations that way, where we need meet on things with our community. So, yes, I think remote work is going to work. The second caveat is it is really good for knowledge workers, but I think as we alluded to, I don't know how this is necessarily going to help people in warehousing or people where you still need physical infrastructure and wouldn't want them to be left behind in the way that their productivity might not change. But I don't know, see how that goes.
Catherine Howarth: (1:10:49) That’s great that we can. One of the things to come out of this pandemic is that we start to value those people more than we did. We talk about underrated, people who do the essential jobs, so underrated, and we need to, you know, give them more dignity, give them more pay, look after them, and acknowledge how critical they are.
Ben Yeoh :(1:11:11) And to the extent that remote work can actually save some money from our knowledge worker part, then actually giving that to one of a better word, economist, speak again, giving you that to labour, as opposed to the capital knowledge part would seem to me to be a fair shift.
Catherine Howarth: (1:11:26) You know, what we need is a good, old-fashioned trade union, organizing all those roles. Any people have to get organized. No one's going to give them anything without them getting together and demanding it, but let's see, let’s hope.
Ben Yeoh :(1:11:39) Another theory of change, although like you say, legislation, you know, the minimum wage in the US argue one way or the other, but okay. The last one on, on this and then the advice would be having children.
Catherine Howarth: (1:11:57) Underrated.
Ben Yeoh :(1:11:58) Yes. I agree underrated. I slightly flip-flopped on this, but I am now kind of firmly on the view on two or three things. One is, I think my children have taught me more than I've learned from many other routes. You know, some of this is thinking also about autistic thinking, but that generally. And also, because I kind of think where we are now, we're going to need a younger activated generation to get us out of the problems because I don't see it coming from that older generation. And actually, children are the ones who can do that for all of the reasons, curiosity, new ideas, and as you would hope, the younger generation always does things better as you expect than the older generation. And given where we are now, that we were going to need more of it than less of that. And that's going to have to overcome any of the other challenges that we're worried about natural environment things, which are there, but unfortunately, or fortunately, they're going to have to figure out those things. And we're only going to be able to do it with them and with that presence, as opposed to not, that's kind of where I've ended up on that.
Catherine Howarth: (1:13:04) Yes. I completely agree. Yesterday my son had his last day in primary school, my older son. It was an emotional day saying goodbye to his little mates, and it's a very multicultural school. The white children are a small minority of the class and they've had the most amazing education together for seven years. It's just a very small school, one for elementary, just thirty in his year group. And they've been on a little journey together for seven years in primary school. And they've learned so much about the world and are just amazed by how beautiful the education is they've had. He came back from school at age six to tell me all about the sustainable development goals. I was gobsmacked, you know, and they're enlightened. And they are learning about personal resilience, they are learning all these brilliant skills. And they are learning that not all is right about the world but, you know, they can do something about that and they must do something about that. And I'm just very impressed by the education my boys have had in the local primary school here. And it does make me hopeful and you're right, that kids are going to have to put things right. That we all, I was going to use a swear word, but…
Ben Yeoh :(1:14:25) I completely agree. And you know, I think I was taught about the ozone layer, but nothing around broad sustainability or any of these other issues, which we're now being taught. And I speak to senior managers today in something like healthcare, which is generally quite purposeful. And a lot of them say, yes, we fell into it. We didn't necessarily think about it you know. We could have gone into healthcare, we could have gone into advertising and we've ended up in a big biopharmaceutical company or medical technology company, but they're saying the generation Y or Z that they're speaking to are attracted to them because it is purposeful that they feel like, okay, this is how we're going to make an impact. And that's a generational sea change about what they're seeing. And then actually this goes into how you attract those sorts of people, you know, active people who are engaged, wanting to work in the more purposeful type of business, this idea that we can have tech for good or business for good as well. Great. So maybe ending on the final question would be, do you have any advice or thoughts for perhaps younger people or younger activists or people who are activists in general about what they could be doing in the world?
Catherine Howarth: (1:15:41) Wow. Well, I would say read a lot and not just on Twitter, try to read outside your bubble or social media or Instagram or whatever it is, read books and listen a lot, especially to people who are outside of your social groups. And try and get deeply into something, practice something, I don't know what it might be. Try and get good, get a little mastery at something, or a few things, keep moving, experimenting, I don't know. I haven't got any advice. I'm so humbled to face that question is just
Ben Yeoh :(1:16:30) That sounds like brilliant advice. Listen, read a lot, also think outside your box, be kind of constructively challenged by those who might not be quite like you or inside your circle, and therefore step outside of your comfort zone a little bit. I had an improv master talking about that in terms of that practice as well. And then I think this idea of deep mastery on something that you're interested in, you know, knowing something or to the extent that you can know a lot of things are helpful. Because I think nowadays if you have deep mastery of something, you can maybe apply it to the things you didn't think about. So, when you go outside your box, and then also if you're curious about whatever it is, and you have deep mastery of it, it's very satisfying for people to follow that.
Catherine Howarth: (1:17:25) And that might be karate, or it might be a flute, or it might be, you know…
Ben Yeoh :(1:17:32) Poetry, canoeing, hairdressing whatever it is.
Catherine Howarth: (1:17:35) Whatever it is.
Ben Yeoh :(1:17:37) In fact, the weirder, the better, maybe. Great. Well, on that note, I would like to thank you very much. It's been an amazing time.
Catherine Howarth: (1:17:49) Yes. That's great. Great, absolutely great. Ben, thank you so much for asking me to do it.
Ben Yeoh :(1:17:53) Thank you. If you appreciate the show, please like, and subscribe as it helps others find the podcast.
