Do businesses still have a social responsibility?

Note: Transcripts are automatically generated from episode audio, and are not fully corrected for spelling, grammar, and formatting.

LEAH SELIGMANN: We used to always think that we had these tea leaves that could tell us what was coming in the future. We’re going to be on a common trajectory towards this, towards that, and that’s just not the case. The obstacles are not in the way of the path. The obstacles actually are the path. And if you think about it as a CEO, you need to be ready to deal with anything. It’s so fraught right now. Some businesses will go out of business because of it.

BOB SAFIAN: That’s Leah Seligmann, CEO of The B Team, a network of CEOs and leaders launched by Richard Branson to advocate for heightened role and responsibility for business in society. Right now, that ethos is facing heavy headwinds on areas from climate change to diversity. I wanted to talk to Leah to hear how the highest profile CEOs are navigating this in their private conversations, as well as publicly.

Leah shares where leaders are pulling back, how they’re pressing forward, and what approaches and actions can have the most impact right now. Trust and responsibility are key pressures for every business leader in 2025. So let’s get to it. I’m Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response. 

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I’m Bob Safian. I’m here with Leah Seligmann, CEO of The B Team. Leah, thanks for being here.

SELIGMANN: Thanks so much for having me. It’s great to see you.

Copy LinkHow business leaders are reacting to attacks on social and environmental initiatives

SAFIAN: Yeah. So The B Team was founded by Sir Richard Branson, that’s the “B,” a decade or so ago. I remember when it came onto the scene advocating a better way to do business for the well-being of people and the planet, if I have that right. It was kind of this wave of business as a vehicle for social good and social impact and environmental impact. Recently and particularly in 2025, this ethos has been under pressure. I’m curious how surprised you’ve been by that, has the organization been by this kind of change of mood, of tone?

SELIGMANN: I think that the writing was on the wall for a while around a change of mood and a change of tone on these different topics. But it’s powerful, and it’s like a tidal wave. And I think the feeling of CEOs is that we really need to re-own the narrative, re-own why we’re doing these things because they’re good for business, they’re good for our people, they’re good for our communities, and get away from a lot of the narrative, the language, and the programs that left people behind.

SAFIAN: Yeah. I mean, in my private conversations with business leaders and CEOs, they’re struggling about how to navigate this new – and really shifting almost every day – landscape.

SELIGMANN: It’s been a fascinating year, and we’ve had a lot of conversations with The B Team leader group. So I get to work for this amazing group of global leaders. Half of them are from the business sector, half of them are from civil society, but their focus is really how do we transform business? And I think we were all a little shell-shocked, to be honest, at the beginning of the year and seeing all of these things that we’ve seen as wins, ways to operationalize this type of rhetoric, how do you drive it into your business?

And when the attacks started happening, not just the little bits of ‘you’re woke or you’re not woke’ or whatever, but these really strategic, well-thought-out systemic attacks on the legal system, the legal underpinnings of this work, and then the vicious escalation of social media mobs going after CEOs, to have that happening and have CEOs really scared and unsure of what they can say or what they can do.

And I think what we’ve been spending the last couple of months on is thinking about how do you retake that and go to the things that you really have license to speak about and get a little bit away from the a CEO has to stand up for everything all the time, which really was the place that we were a couple of years ago.

Copy LinkIs collective action amongst business leaders feasible?

SAFIAN: I know you used the word courage a lot, the courage to speak out in the right places, the courage to act. The collective of The B Team is based on the idea that maybe it’s easier to be courageous in this way when others are joining you. But we’re not seeing a lot of collective action these days, aside from fawning dinners at the White House from tech CEOs. How do you make that start to happen? Or is that not really the goal? Is it not necessarily the courage to speak out and act in the way it was a few years ago?

SELIGMANN: I think that the appetite for not just the appetite to speak out, but the appetite to hear a bunch of people sitting there and speaking out into the wind has really decreased. Those statements were useful. They served a purpose in raising awareness and this idea that sustainability and treating people well could be good for business. At this moment in time though, I think that it rings hollow.

And so the courage that we’re really looking for is a different type of courage than we needed a few years ago. A few years ago, we needed someone to stand up on a pedestal and yell, “I’m doing this. Do it too.” And now what’s needed is the deeper engagement with your people, with your employees, a quieter type of courage in many respects, to get your people and your stakeholders behind you.

So that when you do stand up, you stand on solid footing. And that has been a really difficult shift. Instead of a place where we’ve put CEOs of, ‘just speak and we’ll all follow,’ it’s more engaged. Figure out what people care about and why they’re worried about it and why what you’re saying isn’t landing, and then go from there. So I think that’s a significant shift, but it is a type of courage.

And I don’t want to undermine the idea that it actually takes courage to pause sometimes and to listen and to understand why you’ve missed your mark. And that maybe is the hardest type of courage because we’re so wired towards action.

SAFIAN: There was a period where the trust for corporate leaders and CEOs was higher than any other figures in public life in a lot of ways, right? Do you have a sense about why that eroded?

SELIGMANN: I think a big piece of it has to do with the pay gap between everyday working people, and that growing inequality makes it really hard to feel like the person that you’ve put so much trust in actually sees your problems and sees your challenges and is trying to make your life better.

And so we still see employers and CEOs having high trust with their own employees, but this idea that business as a whole is a trusted institution has really eroded along with all of our institutions. Trust in government, trust in the news and the media, all of these things have been impacted by a crisis of trust. There is a real crisis of trust between those in power and those that don’t see themselves as having power.

Copy LinkInside The B Team’s new strategy

SAFIAN: The B Team recently announced a new strategy initiative. Lots of high profile business leaders signed on as part of your group, from Marc Benioff at Salesforce to Hamdi Ulukaya at Chobani, and Ryan Gellert at Patagonia. Can you explain what the new strategy is? What’s changed? Is this what you mean when you’re talking about being quieter in some ways?

SELIGMANN: When and where we speak is definitely a huge piece of it, but I think the biggest piece is the pace. It used to be that you would have one major thing happen and everybody had time to get riled up and create opposition and drive things forward and create coalitions. And now we have multiple times a day things that are coming out that are shifting the landscape, and we need to be much more aware of and able to respond to the context that we’re in.

And so the outcomes, the long-term goals of The B Team remain the same. How do we catalyze business to be a force for good in the world? That’s the same. But now we’re in a moment where every single day you have massive changes. We’re in the middle of a planetary crisis where supply chains are being disrupted. You have massive weather events happening at a speed and scale we’ve never seen or heard before.

We have geopolitical shifts. One world order is ending, but we have yet to define or design the world order that we’re heading towards. And so you have businesses trying to figure out, how do they drive forward what they’re trying to do? And then the last piece is we’re in the middle of this incredible technology revolution. Technology isn’t good or bad, technology is potential.

And we have businesses really trying to figure out how they harness the power of AI and minimize the downsides. And so what we at The B Team decided is that we needed to get very clear on our values, very clear on our outcomes, and be much more nimble in our approach. Where can The B Team come in and initiate or catalyze something? Where are there multiple fragmented efforts happening that we could help weave things together?

And honestly, how can we stop being just a group that does a statement every six months and turn into a group that’s actually catalyzing real change?

SAFIAN: Let me have you take me through each of those areas. Maybe we can dig into them each more.

SELIGMANN: Yeah.

Copy LinkHow business leaders can respond to our climate crisis

SAFIAN: So first, climate. So we’ve seen companies make climate pledges every six months or whatever, not always delivering. We’ve got a U.S. administration that seems actively hostile to climate action. So what do you do? What advice do you give to leaders who want to act and act boldly maybe, but maybe face a skeptical board or shareholders or ‘we’re getting on the wrong side of the Trump White House?’ Are there specific things where this is the opportunity?

SELIGMANN: So on climate, I think the number one thing just to throw out there is that most leaders that act on climate see it as in their business interest. It’s not necessarily something to tell a good story about. Yes, we don’t want to all be baking the planet. Yes, we depend on a living healthy planet for everything we do. I think the shift is when and where you talk about things and how you push it forward.

Business leaders that stick to the fundamentals of why we have to deal with climate, that doesn’t change with political cycles. The fact that your supply chain is going to be disrupted, that doesn’t shift with who’s in power politically. That’s where we need business leaders to step up and lean in. But also to remember that the reason they got into that game wasn’t because they thought it was going to be a nice PR story, you got into climate because you had to.

SAFIAN: But if you’re an automaker and you’ve been investing in electric vehicles, but now there’s resistance to the idea of that, what is smart business in that environment? Is it smart to say, ‘I’m going to stick with electric vehicles,’ or ‘I’m going to pull back on it a little bit?’

SELIGMANN: I think it’s about weighing the short-term and the long term. An electric vehicle company without the infrastructure to support electric vehicles, that comes from the government. So much of this isn’t enabled by the government. It’s really difficult. So in the U.S. context, it’s challenging, but it’s also where markets are moving. And if you think about this globally and all of the places that auto companies want to be selling and where that innovation might not be happening in the U.S., but it’s certainly happening in Europe, it’s happening in China. And many of these companies are serving multiple political regimes all at once. And so I think the thing that’s really struck me in all the conversations with the leaders is sitting in the U.S., I feel like we’re the center of the world here, and everything that we do is all that, right?

But when you get onto these calls, and we had one just last week, with leaders from around the world and they’re sitting there like, “This is what’s happening in an African context. This is what’s happening in an Asian context,” and you realize the world is big. And so if innovation isn’t happening in one specific spot, it doesn’t mean that it’s not happening elsewhere.

And so for a lot of these companies that have heavily invested in new technologies that are being rolled back with the new political regime in the U.S., it’s a question of whether or not you got into that strategy just to get a tax credit in a couple of years or whether you got into it because you felt like that was the direction of travel. And if you felt like that was the direction of travel, you’re biding your time, you’re building up different pieces of those capabilities. And when the moment of opportunity and context hits your product, then you’re ready to roll.

Copy LinkShould business leaders engage in geopolitics?

SAFIAN: All right. Let’s try talking about geopolitics. We’ve seen a lot of trade disruption. There are ongoing armed conflicts around the world. What’s the appropriate role of corporate leaders in these realms? Should they be assertive in engaging with governments or do tariff disruptions make businesses more vulnerable and less empowered to act with courage?

SELIGMANN: I think that most business leaders actually take the chaos with the tariffs and everything as a signal to just wait and see and batten down the hatches a little bit. And that is a natural response in a moment when there’s so much riding on business being a force for stability and peace. It’s not necessarily the right response.

And so for me and I think for a lot of The B Team leaders, it’s not necessarily about standing up and yelling about everything, but really digging deeply and engaging with different people across all political spectrums and understanding if they understand how it’s impacting your business and the unintended consequences of some of these policies and where the government can be a real partner in growing your business and where you need to really be able to go it alone.

SAFIAN: I’ve been thinking about when Sir Richard launched B Team, I’m sure he wasn’t anticipating trade wars at this level, right? I mean, it just wasn’t on the radar at that point.

SELIGMANN: Don’t you kind of think though that nothing was really on the radar? I think what we’ve learned is we used to always think that we had these tea leaves that could tell us what was coming in the future. We’re going to be on a common trajectory towards this, towards that, and that’s just not the case. We’ve been playing around with this quote a lot this year.

I think we stole it from a headline or something, but it’s the obstacles are not in the way of the path, the obstacles actually are the path. And if you think about it, as a CEO, you need to be ready to deal with anything. You need to be ready to navigate anything. And so how we navigate those obstacles is the bigger issue and the geopolitics is it’s so fraught right now. Some businesses will go out of business because of it.

SAFIAN: This pressure that’s on CEOs, I could see them needing each other or wanting to turn to each other more than ever to work through how they think about this. I mean, is that happening more, or are they uneasy about admitting to each other that this stuff has gotten so obstacle-ridden?

SELIGMANN: I think the beauty of a group like The B Team is that we talk about it as a community of courage. Courage is a team sport. That if you’re just alone pushing as hard as you can, you’ll push pretty hard. But if you have others there to support you and to help navigate the journey, then you’ll push even harder.

It’s not just courage, it’s this courage meets resilience, where you have one courageous act, followed by another courageous act, followed by another courageous act, and you have these little teeny little bits and ripples that lead towards someone who’s really pushing to change the course of history. You’re right to ask about it. How do you navigate these hard times?

You share and you have an ability to say, help me when you need help or feel sorry for me when you need someone to feel sorry for you, but mostly just push me further and faster. Let’s go.

SAFIAN: This moment is so delicate for business leaders who want to have impact beyond shareholder value. Leah talks about courage and moving further faster, but we need to pick our spots when volatility is rampant. So is AI making this easier or complicating things? And what’s the most important advice she’s hearing and giving? We’ll talk about that more after the break. Stay with us.

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Before the break, B-Team CEO Leah Seligmann talked about the role of business in society and the need for CEOs to push further and faster. Now she talks about the pros and cons of AI, the peril of waiting for a silver bullet, the need for hope, and the most important advice she’s hearing from leaders right now. Let’s jump back in.

Copy LinkOpportunities & risks for business leaders with AI

Let’s talk about technology innovations in AI moving so fast, huge hope for game-changing breakthroughs. Also fear, anxiety about loss of control, impact on jobs. Where are you, where is The B Team on this optimism-fear spectrum?

SELIGMANN: I would say that we’re totally up on both. So the optimism is here for such a good reason. I mean, with AI, we have the ability to completely democratize information and learning and skill training and to use resources so much smarter than we ever have used before. So there’s tremendous potential, and I don’t want to underestimate that potential because that potential is why we also need to talk about what is the ethical and humane use of these technologies?

How do we think about digital and global governance? How do we think about integrating AI into our workforces in a way that doesn’t replace people but augments people? That is going to be the just or unjust transition of our time. This is the moment when we have a couple of minutes really for business leaders and government leaders to come together and think, how do we really use this technology to all of its positive and minimize the downside?

And I don’t know if we’ll grab that moment, but I do know that the way that we’ve thought about business, the way we’ve thought about workforces, the way we’ve thought about everything will be fundamentally different within the next five years. And that is a wild change to be living through. The slower we move, the more fragmented we are. All of those pieces are where the downside can come in.

SAFIAN: I mean, with AI responsibility, there’s a lot of conversation, lip service maybe, but it often feels like the primary motivation is like, “I got to go, go, go so I don’t fall behind, and we’ll figure that stuff out later.”

SELIGMANN: It is. And the thing that we need to figure out is not the high-tech stuff, and I think that’s the problem we have right now. The thing that’s missing right now is the very, very lo-fi stuff of human intelligence: how do we interact, human relationships, and the ability to build community. I think the lip service is at our own detriment, just like it was when we thought about social media and we’re seeing the negative impacts of mental health.

We have that same potential for huge risk with AI. And the thing that I fear is this idea that it’s going to be the companies just regulating themselves, and that it’s going to be left up to the benevolent CEO to just determine whether or not it’s the appropriate use of this technology instead of a real collaboration between government and business.

SAFIAN: Because you’re not convinced that the company on its own is going to always make the right decision?

SELIGMANN: They are not accountable to all of society, of all of humanity. And that works when there is a functional dialogue happening between business and government because business knows the technology so much better, and government is responsible for taking care of society.

SAFIAN: And AI’s impact on jobs, is that something that you at The B Team are trying to help your constituents and collective prepare for, or is it more that you’re trying to get government to be more active in expressing what the wider societal goals should be?

SELIGMANN: So just to clarify, I think government needs to express the wider societal goals and help do that. I don’t think that business has time to wait for government to get its act together to express those wider societal goals. So just because I think that there’s this role and this need for that dialogue doesn’t mean that a CEO doesn’t need to start getting themselves prepared and ensuring that they are really putting people and humanity at the center of the outcomes that we’re going for.

One of our B Team leaders has often said, “There’s no jobs on a dead planet, but a planet and a society without jobs is also a scary place.” People without purpose. People without a sense of what they need to do. And these are the things that we need to be grappling with.

There’s a lot of hope.

SAFIAN: There’s a lot of hope. With climate change, there’s some folks that say, “Oh, AI can help us reset the whole trajectory on sustainability,” almost like there’s some silver bullet out there that this technology can help us find. Do you buy that — on the hopeful AI front, with climate change?

SELIGMANN: I think that anytime you put all of your hope into a silver bullet, you’re really doing a number. And when we have the type of crisis that you have with climate, you don’t have the luxury of a silver bullet. We need to do everything we can to reduce emissions. We need to do everything we can to deploy smart technologies. We need to do everything we can to help people adapt to a more challenging climate. So just saying, “Let’s wait until AI figures it all out and all these governments figure out how to deploy it and everybody deploy and then we’ve saved it,” is a ridiculous way to proceed.

Copy LinkWhy the B Team stopped using the term “DEI”

SAFIAN: I’m curious. I noticed that diversity, DEI, isn’t particularly prioritized within the new B Team strategy. Was that conscious?

SELIGMANN: The word itself might not be used, but The B Team is seeking to create workplaces that are open to all people because we have a strong belief, not just that everybody deserves an opportunity, but business thrives when it attracts the best talent. And so it’s not a deprioritization. I think what we are looking to do in the new strategy is identify openings when there’s a moment where you can push something really hard. And I think that the treatment of our people is going to be a place where we prioritize quite a bit.

SAFIAN: But not using terms like DEI or diversity?

SELIGMANN: What does DEI even mean? I mean, I know what the acronym stands for, but it doesn’t mean anything to anybody. What value does that acronym give us? It doesn’t give us much. I think it covers a huge ground of incredibly rich thinking and work and things that do need to stay in the workplace, but the label DEI just has led to a tremendous backsliding of a vicious unleashing of anti-people rhetoric. And so yeah, I think that language does need to change.

Do we need to throw out all the language? No. But if you’re using a term that has become so co-opted that it makes people feel like you’re accusing them of a bad word or something, then you’ve got a problem. Business is great at innovating and selling their products and meeting people where they’re at. And if we can’t listen to the backlash on DEI and think maybe we are not positioning this right, then we have a big, big problem.

I don’t know many business leaders that would stick with terminology that has that kind of reaction from such a broad swath of their stakeholders and be successful.

Copy LinkThe goal of The B Team

SAFIAN: Many businesses, of course, are not part of The B Team collective. Is there something that those places and CEOs that aren’t part of The B Team have in common? Is there something about the collective that they’re missing?

SELIGMANN: Our goal was always to be a small group, a group of leaders that we felt like were really driving and pushing this agenda. The agenda is meant to be a broad agenda that could invite anyone in wherever they are, but that little cohort of 33 business leaders is not meant to represent everyone.

SAFIAN: Your goal for The B Team to scale its impact is not necessarily to expand The B Team to instead of being 33 leaders, be 300 leaders.

SELIGMANN: No. Our goal is to have a group of leaders that are in the spaces that are scaling. A lot of organizations are like, “I just want so-and-so board member or leader to only focus on me and not waste their time anywhere else.” I’m the opposite. I want my leaders out in the world. I want them to be part of every coalition to drive their businesses to be a force in shaping the mainstream conversation around the role of business and society.

The group that we have right now, they are in the rooms with so many other coalitions of CEOs and leaders that are trying to do something. And if they can use their role to help bring things together, to weave things together, to lift the ambition of those efforts, I see that as success. And I want the movement… Ideally, no one would look back and be like, “The B Team did this.” They would be like, “A bunch of people all over the world did these different things,” and we created some positive change in the world.

SAFIAN: Yeah, no. Momentum can come from lots of different places and you want to activate as much of it as you can.

SELIGMANN: We don’t need nor should we want or seek credit. We should seek impact. It doesn’t matter to me if The B Team name is ever known.

SAFIAN: Not a lot of people become CEOs if they don’t have an interest or an ability to get credit for what they’re doing. So it’s a tricky balance.

SELIGMANN: It is, but the joy of my job is I get to be a CEO of an organization that’s supporting CEOs that are really driving huge change.

Copy LinkResilience and optimism in volatile times

SAFIAN: We talked a bit about the volatility and the paralysis that CEOs can feel when so much is changing. How do leaders separate what’s significant in all these shifts from the distractions when so many things are coming at us so fast?

SELIGMANN: Things are changing so quickly, and I think it’s a new muscle, actually for all of us, to be able to handle current events at this pace. What I see the leaders doing is looking for joy in a lot of different places because the world is hard. The news, I mean, I’m sure that your newsfeed is tough. Mine is tough. Navigating this requires resilience. That means you need to tap into those basics of, are you eating every day? Are you meditating if you meditate? Are you sleeping, ever?

All of those different pieces are really important for navigating such noise in the system, and being able to say, “Does this really matter or does it just feel like it should matter? Or is it actually irrelevant to what I’m trying to achieve?” And then as a group, we try to bring that joy into the way we interact. There’s a lot of humor in The B Team. Just because it’s hard doesn’t mean you can’t have a laugh, you can’t have a drink, you can’t have a whatever. Just go for it.

Jesper, our chair, is in a heavy metal band and he’s a singer. And you can get his stuff on Spotify or wherever. Life is short. And that helps, I think, deal with some of the challenges that they’re facing. There’s never been more momentum for this agenda than there is today. There’ve never been more people thinking about how we create a world that’s good for people on a healthy planet than we have today, and it gives me real hope.

SAFIAN: Amen. Amen to all that. Well, Leah, thank you so much for sharing.

SELIGMANN: It was so nice to meet you. Thank you for having me.

SAFIAN: Listening to Leah, it’s like being inside the head of a CEO in 2025. You can hear the swings between hope and worry. As she says about AI, you need to be totally focused on both the optimism and the fear. I’ve persisted as a business journalist because I fundamentally believe that business can be a vehicle for progress and positive change. The motivation behind The B Team, it’s similar to my own.

I felt some pride when business leaders step up with courage to do what’s right, even if it might cost shareholders some near-term wins. But I’ll confess dismay at overreaching and performative choices by CEOs to talk about responsibility as a leader and then only apply that responsibility when it’s good for your stock price. That’s not really courage. Today’s environment is tricky, in part because we’re so disconnected from each other.

Too many leaders are out of touch with vast swaths of their community, of our world, but that only heightens the need and the opportunity for impact. So I’m doubling down on the idea that business can be a force for good, and I’m remaining hopeful that courage and resilience will outlast selfishness and fear. It’s the way I want to live, and it’s the world I want to be in. I’m Bob Safian. Thanks for listening.