Reimagining Capitalism: How Business Can Save the World

"This book was written before the pandemic, but its relevance has become greater since. A lot of the book is about climate change and the absolute need to respond to this emergency. In the US, the book is subtitled “in a world on fire.” The fire that she was referring to was literal there, the wildfires in Australia and California. But, in fact, that subtitle now works as a bit of a metaphor for the consequences of the Covid-19 crisis. A lot of the solutions that she puts out—the cooperation and collaboration between government, business and communities—work for the crisis we’re going through now, as well as the crisis that she was mainly writing about at the time. It’s about the challenge that crises (in the plural) pose to a capitalist world. What I like about the book is that Henderson is very clearly not an enemy of capitalism. She believes that the solutions lie in harnessing the good things about business: the entrepreneurialism, the desire and need to collaborate, the great power of consumer companies as a way of solving big problems. She looks, for example, at the way the German economy was rebuilt after the Second World War , and the forced collaboration between employers, government and trade unions. Those traditions have helped keep German factories running during the pandemic. So there are lots of lessons in here that perhaps Henderson didn’t necessarily intend. I’ve actually spoken to her since the book came out and she very clearly does see these as the sort of things that might help us in a difficult time now. But the thrust of the book is really about the far deeper crisis of the climate emergency and ways in which that can be tackled using the great power of capitalism. Yes, and she’s got plenty of examples of purpose-driven companies that are doing the right thing. One is a company I haven’t come across, a US flour company called King Arthur Flour, which is building community through baking. There are other nice examples in there, including more familiar ones, like Unilever trying to make palm oil sustainable. I wouldn’t say she’s neutral. She’s very positive about purpose-driven capitalism, but she’s also clear-eyed enough to spot where things have gone wrong, where some of the well-meaning efforts by companies decline into cynicism and scepticism and don’t work. There are some good lessons in the book. I think that sort of scepticism can be useful, but when it becomes cynicism you end up with what you were describing, people saying it’s all the fault of capitalism, tear the whole thing down. That would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater, which is what Henderson recognizes, I think. As I said, I’m a fan of Margaret Heffernan’s book Uncharted , which is not about everything going on now, but is prescient. In the book, epidemic preparedness is one of the case studies that she picked. It’s deliberately not neat solutions, but it has neat lessons about the ways in which we can prepare for future crises, including pandemics. As I’ve been reading books that are coming out in the latter part of this year—some of which weren’t entered for the prize or will now be eligible for next year—you’re beginning to see people who’ve either been adapting their ideas or using some of the early consequences of Covid-19 to shape their thoughts about what comes next. I don’t think I’ve seen anything yet that I think is original or wide-ranging enough. What I expect will happen in 2021 is that somebody will write the equivalent of Andrew Ross Sorkin’s book, Too Big to Fail , which was a minute-by-minute account of the financial crisis. He produced it at incredible speed and rooted it as the definitive account of the crisis as it happened. So I’m expecting there’ll be some books of that sort. Of course, they may not be business books. They may be science books or politics books . Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . As is often the case, we may have to wait a while for the book that tells us how the world of work has been affected or what is going to happen, because we’re still living through this. It’s going to be hard to work out what the future of work looks like, probably, until we’re part of the way into it. A lot of people will overshoot. I think there will be books that suggest we’re going further than we are. In a world which has vaccines or even just therapies and behavioural ways of returning to normal (or nearer to what used to be normal), we may find that the next normal or the new normal—or whatever horrible cliché one wants to apply to it—is actually closer to the old normal than we thought, because people will yearn to get back to some of the things that made business worth doing or work worth pursuing, faster than we think. It may not be as different as the futurologists think. These are books that will already be underway. Maybe it’s not quite fair to talk about waves these days, but we may be subject to a wave of rather bad Covid-19 books before we get to the good one."