TRANSCRIPT 🔗
Marcy Twete: Welcome back to Table Stakes. I'm Marcy Tweet, the CEO of Veerless, and your host of Table Stakes, the podcast for responsible, sustainable leaders and companies. And this time I really mean welcome back with full awareness that it's been a while. ⁓ we took a break, and honestly, podcasting has been one of those things lately that I'm Not always sure if people are listening. I don't know if I'm always listening. I kind of pick up my phone and I binge podcasts for a while and then I stop for a few weeks, but I asked our team and I've asked a lot of people, should we come back? Should we be doing this podcast? And honestly, I only wanted to come back when we had something worth coming back for. And I'm very certain we finally do. So let me talk about where this next series started because this is just a quick trailer to let you know what's coming. Every year since 2018, when I was still in corporate, I've published an annual book list that I have called the Corporate Sustainability or Corporate Responsibility Book list. It's had a few different names, ESG book list, but year after year it's become my personal and Veerless's most read piece of content on LinkedIn, on our blog, everywhere. People share it, people argue about it. I've heard about book clubs coming out of it, and people come back for it every year. And as I've been putting together those lists, I really think throughout the year about the kinds of books that I'm reading, the kinds of books that are adding to my work at Veerless, and I ask this. What does it mean for a book to really change how someone leads? And what does it really mean for a book to change how someone thinks about their work, about sustainability? It's not just to inspire people, which is often what books are for, it's to give them a framework that genuinely shifts how they make decisions, how they think about their responsibility to the people around them, to the world around them. And that question has become a little bit Personal for me lately because I guess this is the big announcement. I'm in the middle of writing my own book right now. ⁓ and the middle, to say the middle is a a big word because it really feels like I'm at the beginning. I'm in the process of querying agents, my book proposal is done, and this whole experience has made me want to go back to some of the authors whose work has shaped my book list and really my work as a sustainability leader over the past. 10 plus years ⁓ of almost doing this book list. Actually, 2027 will be my 10th list. So, in the next few months, in the sort of back half of 2026, that's exactly what we're going to do on Table Stakes. I'm going to come back to the authors who have been a part of that list and I'm gonna ask them: what do you know now that you didn't know when you wrote your book? What are the leaders in our world still not hearing about sustainability, about the work you do, and how does a book change the way people think about all the topics under this umbrella? Ethics and purpose and sustainability and responsibility. So that's what we're gonna do for the second half of 2026. Table Stakes is becoming a book series. I love book podcasts. They're a huge amount of the podcast that I listen to when I pick up my podcast app. And I am so excited. I have already gotten commitments from extraordinary authors who have been a part of my book list. You're gonna hear from Sarah Young from Expansive. Of impact from Lisa Beth Lantini Walker, who wrote Raise Your Game, from Christine Bader, whose book Girl Meets Oil is a field guide to corporate responsibility. Dave Stangus and Catherine Smith, who wrote 21st Century Corporate Citizenship, and a big get, Andrew Winston, who wrote The Big Pivot, a book that, if anything, has gotten more urgent in the last few years. So more, more, more. There's lots coming. If you followed my book list over the years, you already know these are not people who deal in Platitudes. These are thinkers. These are people who are on the ground, have done the work, have written it down, and they're willing to come back and be honest about what's worked, what hasn't worked, what's changed. I'm so excited to have these conversations and I can't wait to hear what you think of them. So subscribe to Table Stakes, keep us on your podcast list, and you will see our first bookcast very, very soon. Have a great day.