Judy Samuelson, founder and executive director of the Aspen Institute Business and Society Program and author of Six New Rules of Business: Creating Real Value in a Changing World, explores the role of leadership in today's world. In this interview with Ira Bedzow, director of the Biomedical Ethics and Humanities Program at New York Medical College and the Senior Scholar of the Aspen Center for Social Values, Samuelson digs into the move away from shareholder primacy and the new role of employees. (length 37:34)
Judy Samuelson, founder and executive director of the Aspen Institute Business and Society Program and author of Six New Rules of Business: Creating Real Value in a Changing World, explores the role of leadership in today's world.
In this interview with Ira Bedzow, director of the Biomedical Ethics and Humanities Program at New York Medical College and the Senior Scholar of the Aspen Center for Social Values, Samuelson digs into the move away from shareholder primacy and the new role of employees. (length 37:34)
Ira Bedzow:
Welcome to What's Next in People + Strategy, a podcast from SHRM's Executive Network. I'm Ira Bedzow, a contributor to the SHRM Executive Network and senior scholar of the Aspen Center for Social Values. I'm also the co-director of the Maimonides Institute for Medicine Ethics and the Holocaust, a contributor at the MirYam Institute, and a regular contributor in Forbes for their diversity, equity, and inclusion section. The SHRM Executive Network is a premier network of executives and thought leaders in the field of human resources, advancing the HR profession by engaging thought leaders and executive practitioners to create solutions and drive success for people and organizations.
Today, I'm excited to talk with Judy Samuelson, who is the founder and executive director of the Aspen Institute Business and Society Program. An author of Six New Rules of Business, Creating Real Value in a Changing World. Signature programs under Judy's leadership include a 10 year campaign to disrupt Milton Friedman's narrative about corporate purpose, the Aspen principles of long term value creation, and a partnership with Korn Ferry to rethink executive pay.
She previously worked in legislative affairs in California and banking in New York's Garment center and ran the Ford Foundation's office of program related investments. Samuelson blogs for Quarts at Work and is a Bellagio fellow and a director of The Financial Health Network. In The Six New Rules of Business, Creating Value in a Changing World, Judy describes the profound shifts in attitudes and mindsets that are redefining our notions of what constitutes business success, unraveling the old rules that focused solely on profits, shareholder mindset, and the bottom line that led to corporate greed and short-termism. And offers a new set of rules that enable executives and leaders to think and manage differently by embracing a new definition of business success. Judy, welcome to our conversation today.
Judy Samuelson:
Wow. Thank you. But first of all, thank you for that generous introduction of the book. I'm glad you enjoyed it. So I appreciate very much.
Ira Bedzow:
Before we get started in the book and so forth, I would love to know just what's ax to grind? Your passion, what you're looking to accomplish, big picture, in your professional life.
Judy Samuelson:
All right. Great question. I think ax to grind, for reasons I'm not sure I can explain, I tend to think in terms of systems and system change. I like to get the route cause analysis and I have landed on the need to eradicate shareholder primacy. It's kind of an organizing principle for this part of my... last part of my career and for the organization that I lead. And there's a lot to that. There's a lot of layers to it. It requires both critique, but also ways of trying to change the game as we move forward. And so I kind of think that's what I'm here to do.
Ira Bedzow:
Well, so let me ask you, Judy, why focus or why start with shareholder primacy? Was there an experience in business that you had that you saw practically that this is just not the way things should be done or was it an intellectual process in terms of understanding the theory behind shareholder primacy and seeing that there were fallacies within the economic philosophy? How did this become your passion project?
Judy Samuelson:
Well, I think it's important to step back and say, why focus on business at all and then get to the rules of what governs business behavior. And in this case, particularly talking about public companies that oftentimes feels like slaves to capital markets, more than being able to set their own agenda and make sure that they're aligning with the long term health of society. We need business at the table. We need businesses' extraordinary reach and networks and capacity and talent and distribution systems. We've seen this recently in the time of COVID with extraordinary results around developing vaccines at a fast pace. But then of course, it doesn't stop there and requires a lot of other engagement, both with public sector and nonprofits in terms of distribution and message. And it's a complex endeavor, but we need business at the table to solve our most complex problems. To me, that's abundantly clear.
So that takes me to that sector. And then shareholder primacy is kind of a theory that was emboldened and reinforced or a set of rules that got put in place in the early '80s. And that took it from kind of an idea and embedded it in protocols and decision rules inside the company. And that's what we're working with. It's one thing was the kind of Milton Friedman-esque idea that the purpose of business is business. I think he's often misquoted and not necessarily as bad as the cartoon version might be. He basically thought leave to government the things that they're responsible for, which is public initiative. And leave to business, those things that business can govern well. But it became a cartoon. And he also focuses on a single objective function, which never ends well. Profit maximization is a problem in and of itself.
So I think for those reasons, it comes back and it kind of looms large in business decision making. We can't assume that business will be able to stay long term, put the public at the center of its... at the enterprise and also manage to the shareholder primacy thinking and theory.
Ira Bedzow:
I definitely understand where you're coming from. I actually would want to take a step back also and look at the relationship, especially since we're talking about Milton Friedman, about the relationship between business and economics in general as a discipline. I think that when economics... No, we're taking a broad stroke here or painting with a broad brush, but I think two things happen with regards to the development of economics as a discipline that affects business practice in a way that there's a misdirected or miscommunication. The first is, I think, when ethics became a discipline outside of political economy, it tried to see itself as a science which was value neutral. But it still needed a goal or a function with which to work, to show how that science could both measure as well as look at progress or waste. And it was very easy to calculate either utility or profit maximization or something that was quantitative, which reduced, if you will, the number of variables that the economy was involved in, but also made it clearer to understand if there was growth or not.
The second one was that as it became a science, it became much more mathematical. And then once you recognize that economics becoming a mathematical science, it's easier to quantify things, but once you quantify things, that which you can measure becomes that which is the priority. So now you have businesses who are really learning business and academia through economists and quantitative analysts. And they're seeing a smaller but quantifiable system that they can analyze and work in, losing that bigger picture of business' role in social life, community, life, the country, and so forth. So I recognize the desire to disrupt Milton Friedman's narrative is really also a desire to see how business actually plays out in society, rather than how business is described in theory or in academia. That being said, how did you start or found the business and society program in the Aspen Institute? What was the impetus? How did that come about and become as successful as it is today?
Judy Samuelson:
It came about because I'd worked in government after college and state government in California. I'd gone to business school. I worked in banking. I took a job at the Ford Foundation that ended up being kind of the early pilot, if you will, around engaging in what today would be called impact investing. Investing with more intentions and constraints. But ultimately, my time at the Ford Foundation was up and I was able to stay on this question of the role of corporations. And at the time, I was looking at business schools and trying to understand. We had extraordinary examples of businesses that were ahead of the curve in their industry. And I was trying to understand how we can get more of this.
And what I mean by ahead of their curve, they were leaning into principles that we take for granted today are important that you don't have a healthy business without a healthy community or healthy society. We have to be conscious and build for a future that is with a different and more diverse workforce, a more diverse customer base. We need to be attuned to the consequences of business decisions. And we saw businesses that were leaning in that direction and I wanted to understand how we could get more of that. But business schools, at the time the MBA was the degree of choice. It's cooled off a little bit, but it's still a significant part of our education system. Business education at both the undergrad and the graduate level, it's the largest offering on campus. And started looking at business schools, but that brought us, then, back into the role of business.
And I think that that moment was... Enron hit and it started opening up fresh new questions about whether the design of business and, again, these decision rules around profit maximization and putting shareholders at the center and the design of decision making around shareholders, whether that was holding us back and what we needed to do about it. So short-termism became a popular word. We helped invent it through dialogue that we did on Curbing Short-termism in Business and Capital Markets, and the rest of it rolled from there. So it's been a long journey I've been at it for about 23 years, and I think it's been productive.
Ira Bedzow:
The business and society programs that you run, are they primarily for business leaders? Or do you also include business students or the general population in terms of where you're finding your information having the most impact?
Judy Samuelson:
Well, many programs. We're part of the Aspen Institute. And I'd say the Aspen Institute essentially does two things. It works on systems change and kind of leans into domains where we look at both the role of institutions and those who lead them, and those who can be influential in the design of institutions and how they go about their business. Our focus and of the business society program is what I've described. The role of corporations, particularly looking at public companies and their impact on society. But we tend to all do the same things. We work through dialogue, sharpening the question, bringing people together across different perspectives, who are leaning into the same question and finding where the solutions and then building out from there in terms of how fresh ideas enter both business education, as well as boardrooms. So it's usually about dialogue and it's also about supporting the change agents. And those change agents can be found in any system. We tend not to work at the very retail level directly with students, although we've worked a lot on business education with students as kind of the audience for this work.
Ira Bedzow:
How was the book written in your mind and how did it come about and what was the purpose of putting this book out there?
Judy Samuelson:
The initial purpose, I have to admit, is I needed a break. I've been at this 15 years, and I felt like I needed to clear my head. And I managed to get a fellowship with the Rockefeller Foundation at their extraordinary Bellagio Center in Bellagio, Italy. And I needed a project in order for them to accept me in. I proposed writing up what we had learned so far about influencing business, and it somehow started moving into whether or not I was writing a book. And I think it's been a series of fortunate conversations with people I met at one point, just having fans, and sadly at a memorial conference for Lynn Stout who had been a close friend and advisor, and wrote a book called The Shareholder Value Myth. And Steve Piersanti at Berrett Koehler, the publisher of the book, was her editor and asked me what I was working on. And next thing you know, we're in conversation with a publisher about a book.
But then, it took shape then in conversation with Steve, where he listened to what I was trying to say. And essentially said, "What I hear you saying is that these rules that you call them, are already written. They're already in play." That really kind of lit a fire for me. And I was able to talk about it as a continuing journey. Yeah. Some of this is already in play. Some of it's still got a long ways to go. But it started to take shape. The rules are essentially a conceit for what are the forces that are driving change. And so, yes, I was able to call from lots of conversations, lots of incredible experiences, that I've been able to be a part of through the work that we've done at The Business and Society Program and call on those examples. And you have these things, these moments that kind of inspire a new way of thinking. People you've read, ideas that have stuck with you. And they've all shaped me.
Ira Bedzow:
I think that using this book as an impetus for having many different conversations on many different platforms about where business has been and what type of perspectival pivots need to happen for business to be successful, and for society to be successful. Using this book as that impetus for the conversations, I think, is a really great idea. And I'm happy that we're doing this here, but I hope you're doing it in many, many other places. If you don't mind, tell me about these six rules.
Judy Samuelson:
I think the one that, really, I think is most transformative today is how much the role of employees has become a new accountability mechanism on business itself. I'm a believer that employees are a remarkably important source of fresh thinking in this domain because they are so fully aligned with the business itself. Consumers ultimately rebound to price and convenience. We all know this to be true through the incredible resurgence and success of Amazon in the last year. And investors are often cited as the account that they're holding companies to account, but they come in lots of shapes and sizes and have different timeframes. And frankly have very different objectives from one another. Employees tend to see the company in the same way that the executives do. They want it to succeed.
This is their source of financial security and economic opportunity, but they play an interesting role in that they kind of sit... And this would connect me to another epiphany that leads to another of the rules. In an age of social media, and what Don Tapscott wrote about, is calling radical transparency. It's changed the game. And so I write both about employees and how the impetus of their ability to kind of sit both inside the firm, but the kind of connections that they have outside the firm, and then empowered by social media, that they sit as kind of inside, outside. And they're connecting the dots between what the company has to do, it's impact outside, the risks that they perceive outside, and how that influences the conversation inside. And they're playing this useful role, I'd say.
Executives today that are speaking out on everything from democracy to the use of bathrooms, are often speaking out because of their own employees. And that's abundantly clear now. And then, this radical transparency. The role of NGOs in harnessing brands and driving the change by picking a brand that they believe will unlock a window to the system itself, to the use of commodities that are having bad effects in terms of everything from deforestation, when it comes to Palm oil, to the decline of fisheries because of overfishing. NGOs have become very, very sophisticated about deploying brands to their own ends, to their own message, to their own scarce resource that they are representing in the organization. And so, that kind of thing is also a huge, big change and motivator.
Ira Bedzow:
Before we get into mine, I want to talk about the labor and employee base, right? You have the owners and you have the employees. And they almost put them at odds to each other in terms of different interests and different values and different levels of power in that power dynamic or that power struggle. Today, when I speak to human resource leaders, when I speak to people in DEI, when I speak to people in organizational ethics, they no longer talk as if there are owners and labor. Or they no longer talk about interests. They really talk about companies as communities. And communities, even if people have very different positions or stakes in that community, it's not a warfare, if you will. Or it's not a oppositional or antagonistic relationship. It's complex, it's nuanced. But there are ways that even if people have different interests, the interest could still speak to shared values, right?
So I see today, a lot of organizations trying to change the role of labor from being basically a human tool to members of a community that speaks to mission and purpose. But then you hear things like Amazon's toxic culture. You hear certain complaints in healthcare in terms of how medical professionals are being treated a certain way, because there's a misunderstanding or a disconnect between health system leaders and the health employees. So we're talking the language, but as you say, with regards to systems, the systems still haven't caught up yet to understand what does it mean to be operational, as opposed to just conceptual, when we're talking about that community orientation. Have you been seeing that?
Judy Samuelson:
Well, I think we are living through it in real time. These are changing very rapidly. We work with Korn Ferry on a complicated question around the design of CEO pay. And we've learned a lot from the work that they've done in the leadership domain and they're the first to say that CEOs today, when they're searching for CEOs, they're looking for people that actually understands that they're going to be leading a community. The community of course is... Certainly there's a kind of inside the gate version of that. And the employees are not just another stakeholder. They're not another stakeholder. They are the enterprise. They are the interface with the customer. They are the guarantors of high quality service and delivery and making sure that airplanes arrive on time. They are the operations. And so there's no degrees of difference there.
And increasingly, again, because of self-organizing all of these employee resource groups, identity within companies. It's an interesting and complex domain in which to operate. I don't think human resource executives are driving toward being a community. I think they're responding to what they experience as being part of that community themselves. So that's part of the puzzle, but then that community doesn't stop at the gate. We used to have this note fence line neighbors. None of that is relevant in a digital world and in the global world and in a world of complex supply chains. And so it's a short walk from the interest of employees to the interest of the communities in which they live to the health of society. We're in a world of hurt here. And inequality is growing. Wealth is being further concentrated. This doesn't bode well for business. And the uncertainty that we're facing and the disruptions that we're facing in the political domain, I think are closely connected to these ideas, which takes us back to the lower corporations.
Who gets what? When 90% of the profits are being returned to shareholders, which has been the case for the last decade, when 91% of profits are returned to shareholders, we're not investing enough in the employees, the real value creators, the employees. And we're certainly not investing in our future. And so these are the questions that I think executives are being called to account. And if anything, business executives wanted certainty, not uncertainty. And so they're operating in a complicated environment. We all are. And they're being called to the table to think about this differently. Boards, executives. They're also being called to listen to their employees differently. I think that's another conversation.
Ira Bedzow:
Yeah, well, it also speaks to another one of your rules in terms of looking at the number of stakeholders or who your community is is not simply your shareholders and not simply the company itself. Or the broader society in which the company is embedded. And that's not simply something to take advantage of, but it's something to consider when thinking about your mission and your purpose and values.
Judy Samuelson:
Can I also say it's important to say the shareholders are not the owners of the company. You talked about how that language is shifted. It's shifting in part because more people are waking up to the fact that the shareholders own shares of stock and those come with specific rights. They're fairly limited rights. They're important. They do get to ones that get to vote on directors. But that's a funny way to try to... Voting boards in and out is not a very nuanced way to be able to be effective in influencing the outcome. Or influencing it, except when there's a kind of worth upheaval. So shareholders are at a remove. And of course, shareholders come in, as I said before, lots of shapes and sizes, and there are a lot of employee shareholders. So that is the board, the role of the board, its responsibility is to the health of the enterprise itself. It is not to shareholders. And so they're an important constituent. They can make noise. They need to be listened to as well. But that game is changing.
Ira Bedzow:
So I want to ask you about this socially conscious consumer and how that's affecting business decisions and so forth. So we've seen, for a couple of years now, how consumers, of course, are always going to be sensitive towards price and quality of product. But they're also looking at the social conscience of the companies. And they're almost trying to vote with their dollar in terms of what values as consumers they're looking to promote. And you see the response of this in a number of companies where you see some companies getting involved in political questions or social questions, you see certain companies that are responding in terms of environmental concerns or other types of concerns, but then you always hear how those concerns are not necessarily sincere or authentic, but they're marketing employees. And that's cynical. I recognize that.
But one of the concerns I would have in reading your book is someone reading this book and say, "I now understand the lingo and I understand what needs to be said. And because consumers are socially conscious, but also very price sensitive, and the news cycle is very fast, I can take advantage of certain public relations stunts. Or certain call outs, or certain types of giving voice to values that other people have, while at the same time not necessarily making systemic change." How do you see your book and this type of promotion or advocacy for changing business providing tools for systemic change?
Judy Samuelson:
The biggest agency that the executive has is with the choices that he or she can make at the company. That's the domain where they have the most control and where they have the most impact. It is true that consumers can influence the conversation and NGOs, again, that are strategic about this, they start with campaigns that resonate with consumers. But that pretty much takes us into the world of brands. It's not necessarily relevant to the entire B2B universe of business. It certainly doesn't explain some of the change in CEO voice. That is if you kind of track that, as I said before, that's more aligned with what they're hearing from employees than it is something they're hearing in a singular way from consumers. And of course, consumers don't all agree with one another either, just like employees don't. But there are plenty of executives that would say, I don't want to turn off any consumer.
Ira Bedzow:
I hear you and agree with you wholeheartedly. But let me tell you about what my favorite rule was, since you asked. So I loved the rule... Or I would just say the frame shift between seeing your hard assets as the business value to now seeing the intangibles as the business value that a company has. And I think that's important in a number of ways. First off, I think that in a fluid economy where you need creativity, innovation, technological advance, the intangibles of employee and leadership creativity, communication, and innovative thinking will take you very far. I think that hard assets provide the solid foundation for production, but they're also just... they're a capital expense that you can buy or lease or trade, if you will. It doesn't have the same growth potential, or economies of scale that you can multiply that the intangibles might have.
This goes back to the economics, though, however. The intangibles, while they have all of that benefit, it's also very difficult to measure, right? So one of the things that I think about when I see the values of intangibles is the same thing that I see in terms of the values of community or the values of social capital, like trust and loyalty and so forth. It is extremely important to keep a society and a community together, if you have loyalty and trust, but you don't know how to value or measure that properly. And you only recognize its true importance when it's gone. So how can companies look to build that "cultural space" that allows for these intangibles to really provide the value that they have as opposed to seeing it as a value, but also recognizing that its value is harder to recognize and the hard assets that a company has.
Judy Samuelson:
This is a domain that's changing rapidly. There's a lot of conversation about metrics and measurement and disclosure. And that's something that's really, we're hearing a lot of noise about that's coming from business, but also coming from capital market actors that want to be able to make comparisons between companies for their own ends, as well as to drive change. There's a guy that I like to quote, his name is Jerry Muller, who wrote a book called tyranny of metrics. And he says that the most useful metrics are ones that help you diagnose and analyze, not to reward or punish. And that takes, I think, us into this question that you've posed about how do you actually measure the intangible asset. Anybody watching the market today knows that the stock market doesn't represent the real value of enterprises. It's all over the map.
I mean, look at GameStop, look at the cryptocurrency stuff. These companies that are going public with massive evaluations and then, to what end do they land eventually depends on a whole bunch of things that may or may not be in control of the executive. So it's a pretty crazy world out there to assume that valuation is going to be represented well by the stock market. We're back trying to say metrics to what end? Real investors. Investors that have the time and inclination to go deep into an enterprise and to really understand and unpack it are looking for those kinds of metrics that they know land in the domain of helping the executive continually manage forward. Continuous improvements. Think of the quality movements and how we measure it in that domain. Kind of what today they're calling lean manufacturing. You're looking for measures that help you understand and unpack the culture.
And there's actually really interesting work going on. Morgan Stanley Investment Management is doing really interesting work. They've released a report called culture quant that takes massive amounts of data. They're working, I believe, with Glassdoor to capture data around turnover and around kind of impressions that employees have of companies to try to unpack the culture of enterprises. And if they can understand which companies have the best culture, they often have an ability to then predict alpha or predict a company that will continue to produce over a long period of time. So there's actually a lot of interesting information that is starting to emerge in that domain. And other companies that work on things like talent and search are trying to understand the culture of enterprise because they know they need to match leaders to culture. So there's a fair amount going on in that domain.
Ira Bedzow:
I see now, companies are having that same type of challenge. Do we look at what we can measure, how we can measure it to assess and continue? Or do we look at almost the integration function of everything that we're doing, we're doing well, we're doing good, and we're fulfilling our purpose and our mission. Even if there are certain things that we can't measure to quantify our success, but we can still intuit that we're being more successful with these types of changes. Right? And you see this in terms of certain types of how do we hire for diversity? How do we make certain decisions in corporate social responsibility? How do we make certain changes that we know are right and good, but we don't necessarily know how that speaks to our bottom line. But people are starting to make these types of changes, recognizing that metrics allow you to assess, but they also... They can't be the only thing that we use for our decision making.
Judy Samuelson:
I already said that single objective functions don't end well and they don't play to the strength in managers and executives. I mean, these guys don't get to the top of companies because they've only focused on one thing. Sometimes they do, but that doesn't really prepare them for the job of the multitasking involved in managing an enterprise. I mean, there's a company that only has one objective, whatever that is, it may be customer satisfaction. If that's the only thing they're focused on, that may take them to make decisions that cut corners in terms of the quality of the product, if it's about price. Or it may have another unintended consequence. It's not just about shareholder value maximization or profit maximization, but that's not a... Companies don't have a luxury to operate that way. They have to be taking into consideration what you say, the integration of management. They have to be thinking broadly. They have to be thinking in the future. They have to be thinking outside of the domain that they can control and looking at the impacts that are deep in the supply chain. That's how we manage today. That's what we have to do in a complicated global world.
And the other thing is it takes me back to the question of fulfilling the purpose and the mission of the enterprise. I mean, that's a signaling device. I mean, a company that's been thoughtful about why we exist is more inclined to be thinking about metrics that are aligned with that end. And I always like to quote Jeff Wiener, who grew LinkedIn before it was sold to Microsoft. And he talks about authenticity and authentic leadership. And I asked him at one point what does that really mean to him. And he said it's keeping your promises. Executives are speaking out today on a lot of different questions, but they're also speaking out about the enterprise and where it's headed and keeping their promises to their employees, to the broader public that grants a license to operate, these are also important questions of authenticity.
Ira Bedzow:
No, I agree. I think that it's one thing to look at the company. It's another thing to look at the company within the greater context of the society and the economy that the company has embedded. Just like we can't look at individuals alone. We have to look at individuals in relation to family, friends, neighborhood, state, country, and world. I want to conclude, if you don't mind, telling me what's next. I mean, now that you've published this book, you're putting out in the world a need to see different rules for how business should be productive. Where do you see yourself and the Business in Society program going in the next one to five years?
Judy Samuelson:
So I guess two things come to mind. One, the last rule in the book is about companies can't address the most complicated problems by themselves. It requires collaboration and co-creation. So whether it's we're back to talking about the vaccines. I mean, those were complicated partnerships. In many cases, they were learning from one another. There was long term investment by the public sector as well, to get us to a point where we could have a fast succession of vaccinations. That's a very complex endeavor, and that problem is never going to be over. So it's kind of a metaphor for what's required in business, across climates, across all kinds of complicated questions around social justice and beyond. And so, understanding the culture of boards and their ability, for example, to manage in that domain. Not just for the competitive mindset, but with a mindset that's broad and engaged enough to think about what their role is in co-creating, in leading an industry association or subordinating their brand in order to enable something to move forward. For people can't follow them if they're starting with their brand first.
So those are different kinds of ideas that are germinating in leadership and that I think that we will pay more attention to. And then it's back to taking down the intervening and the kind of what I call the scaffolding that supports putting shareholders first and foremost. We need to look at the design of decision making and where business has real choices. Where they have choices about how and whether they're fairly compensating the value creators, their own employees. Or are they going to begin to make different choices and thoughtful ones that start to do a bit of a reset in terms of rebalancing who gets the upside and the rewards of business. And it also takes us into complicated questions, like how do we pay executives? Why are we loading executives up with stock?
If we want that to be the loudest signal in the pay package, well, that's what we've got now. But if we want a different result and in this kind of so-called stakeholder era, we definitely are looking for different signals. Worker voice is an important question. What kinds of examples are we seeing? How will we bring the voice of workers back in to both operations and in governance? And then finally, I'm really interested in finance classrooms. How do we disrupt finance classrooms to help them catch up with the reality and the limitations of an economic model that you've spoken about. But also the practical, how we measure value in a world of intangibles. So those are some of the questions that are ahead for us.
Ira Bedzow:
Judy, thank you for sharing your expertise with us today. For more information on the topics we've discussed and for further details on the SHRM Executive Network, visit shrm.org/executive.