Theodore Roosevelt Malloch, author of the best-selling book "Spiritual Enterprise: Doing Virtuous Business" (2008) and CEO of business consulting firm The Roosevelt Group, spoke last night as part of a six-week tour around the United States and Canada promoting the documentary "Doing Virtuous Business" (2010). Malloch, a research scholar at Yale University, is showing a sneak preview of the film at several universities, hoping to receive feedback before its release. The documentary focuses on how firms can promote virtue in the business world.
The Daily spoke with Malloch yesterday about the documentary and his motives for making it.
Kathryn Sullivan: What is the focus of "Doing Virtuous Business"?
Ted Malloch: It's an argument about how companies can be profitable and do good, and it argues the case from virtue ethics, so it identifies 14 different virtues and then it gives examples in 14 different companies where they're embodied. Obviously, I have a cast of characters. There are different academic people, business school people and deans of different universities that are in the film, so some leading lights, and then these 14 CEOs.
KS: What is the purpose of the documentary showing?
TM: This is a sneak preview. … I'm on a six-week, 26-city tour where people — mostly students and faculty, and I think there's going to be some corporate respondents on a panel — look at the movie and tell us what their impressions are. It's soon to be released.
KS: What is the mission of The Roosevelt Group?
TM: It's a for-profit consulting firm that I've had for 20 years, and we work with very large corporations to talk about penetrating various markets and risks. The largest program I've ever had is with [Pricewaterhouse Coopers]. It's a very large accounting and management consulting firm. The name of the program is the CEO Learning Partnership and the subject is ‘Inventing the Future,' so we talk about what's going to happen in a given industry or a set of industries over the next three to five years. It's oriented toward larger, for-profit multinational companies. That's what I've done primarily in the last 17 or 18 years.
KS: How did you decide to develop The Roosevelt Group?
TM: I was on the board of the World Economic Forum. When I came out of that, I basically got the idea of working with CEOs independently and then with groups of CEOs to think about the future. That's where it really got started…
KS: What does your current work include?
TM: I spend more and more of my time teaching at Yale where I have a very large research grant on this topic. I have three post-doc students and two other people working with me, and we're working on 24 case studies, which are business case studies on businesses that exhibit virtue.
KS: What are the companies included in these case studies?
TM: It's a wide range. Fourteen of the companies are based in North America, and 10 of them are based outside around the world. They come from all different industries, public and private companies, and all kinds of different backgrounds. One is Tata … in India. Another is HSBC. … And another would be Cargill, which is one of the largest private companies in the world; it's a $100-billion private company.
KS: What is the goal of this research?
TM: It's basically to provide cases of the whole paradigm of virtuous capitalism that can be taught in business schools. I'm teaching a course at Yale in the school of management on the topic of the virtue in business.
KS: What are your goals in the future?
TM: The big thing is right now the launch of this film, so once it shows on PBS, about 15 million people will see it, and it will be translated into five languages and shown in other countries around the world. Our hope is that it generates a lot of interest and builds a case for more case studies and more academic studies and more interest in this whole topic. I've already been to 15 to 18 different places, and the response has been overwhelmingly positive, very inspirational. Generally people are very interested in this kind of narrative. There's so much anti-business narrative out there, so this is a different approach. It's saying that business can actually be a positive force.
