The Stakeholder Podcast: Vital Farms and Stakeholder-Centered Capitalism

Professor Ed Freeman’s recently launched The Stakeholder Podcast features interviews with some of the world’s best theorists, policymakers, scholars, authors and practioners of stakeholder thinking. With new episodes posted weekly, the podcast’s interviews tackle the real-world consequences of managing strictly for shareholder value and shares a new vision for capitalism centered on creating value for all stakeholders.

In a recent episode, Russell Diez-Canseco, CEO of Vital Farms, a partner company of Conscious Capitalism Inc and Alexander McCobin, CEO of Conscious Capitalism Inc., tell Professor Freeman what changed their minds from “shareholder value maximizers” and led them to become two of the most outspoken advocates for stakeholder-centered capitalism. “Vital Farms was truly behaving differently,” Diez-Canseco says about his first run-in with a stakeholder-oriented company. “When they met to make a decision or debate something, they said, ‘Lets go around and think about how this effects each of our stakeholders”. . . I had been trained to think the world was a zero-sum game, [but] when you treat stakeholders as part of the system, you actually grow the pie.” McCobin addresses how Conscious Capitalism “isn’t some woo-woo philosophy . . . “it’s a better strategy for business,” a strategy without tradeoffs, “where you have to create room for the possibility that [business] actually could make everyone better off.”

Freeman, Diez-Canseco, and McCobin talk about how Vital Farms revolutionized the egg farming business, why Conscious Capitalism is the future, and why AC/DC’s Back in Black was the last great rock ‘n’ roll album.