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A couple years back, a business school friend of mine said she wanted to start a non -partisan organization that united business leaders with the goal of protecting democracy.
Her vision was to ensure business leaders were civically informed, and to foster proactivity toward their big picture goals.
The organization was designed to give people concrete ways to lend their resources and their expertise.
She had named the organization the Leadership Now Project.
I was in. My partner at the time joined as one of the group's founding members and I joined too.
It's been amazing to see the Leadership Now Project grow into what it is today.
Its mission is especially important now given it's a really big election year, not just in the US, but around the world.
I'm Madupak Inola. This is TED Business.
Today's speaker is Daniela Malou Ayres.
She's the founder of the Leadership Now project.
And like I mentioned earlier, she and I go way back.
She's here to tell us about the role business leaders can play in safeguarding American democracy.
Then, after the talk, she and I reconnect to talk about business, politics, and what this coming year might look like.
But first, a quick break.
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So a few years ago, I was catching up with a friend from business school.
A Turkish executive who on the surface seemed to be thriving.
She had a great career, a beautiful family, and she was just one of those people who seemed to have it all together.
But in reality, she was struggling.
The Turkish government had started going after business leaders whose views it disagreed with.
Some of their companies had been shut down.
Others were in jail.
And she was scared.
And she felt guilty because she and everyone she knew had stayed out of politics.
They had focused on building their companies and raising their children.
And now they were paying the price.
As she left, she said to me with urgency, in Turkey we're in season 10 in this series we call The Demise of Democracy.
In the US, you're in season three.
On January 6th, 2021, I could hear the sirens from my home.
Living six blocks from the Capitol in a neighborhood more typically occupied by strollers, not angry insurrectionists, I asked my children to stay inside and play in the basement where they could not hear the violence.
And I watched in fear as our institutions and our leaders came under attack.
The next season in the decline of American democracy had begun.
OK, so this is not the problem I thought needed solving when I got an engineering degree and an MBA in the 90s.
The Berlin Wall had fallen and every leading political scientist assured us that communism and authoritarianism were in permanent decline.
Democracy was the clear winner in a long Cold War battle, and economic growth and development was the new imperative.
So pursuing a government job, but in a boring, inefficient -seeming path, seemed illogical.
And so we went off to get our MBAs and change the world through business, in Johannesburg or Beijing or Moscow or New York or Silicon Valley.
Our big challenge was innovating enough to create opportunities in new markets.
Standing here today, this is not the future I imagined in the 90s.
Communism might be a distant memory but authoritarianism is on the rise.
And for those who build careers in business, assuming that rule of law and democratic capitalism would remain intact, we now have the obligation, the opportunity, the power to take action.
And my generation, Gen Xers, have a particular obligation because we now lead the majority of companies in the US.
And I don't just mean the C -suite, I mean, the investors, the entrepreneurs, the executives who saw success as our public institutions faltered.
OK, so some of you might be getting a little skeptical, thinking, is she suggesting we need more corporate influence in politics?
OK, look, I am not suggesting we need more checks written to advance specific, narrow corporate interests.
What I'm talking about here today is about a different challenge.
and I'd suggest an even bigger one, that the pro -democracy business leaders will stay out of politics because it's the safe thing to do.
It's the respectable thing to do.
And what history tells us, that when business leaders stay out of politics, from Nazi Germany to modern day Turkey and Hungary, and they passively enable autocrats, democracies collapse.
But when business leaders engage we have a better chance of democracy surviving, as occurred in South Africa when a group of business leaders played a pivotal role in ending apartheid without a civil war.
Okay, so what does the solution really look like?
I'm not suggesting we need more corporate virtue signaling and CEO statements on every issue of the day.
And the Silicon Valley dream of techno -optimism, I fear, also can't help us.
I don't think Tech Bros.
inheriting the Earth will answer our problems for us.
What we need now are courageous leaders who understand that it is squarely in their self -interest to protect our elections and reform our institutions, to ensure that disinformation doesn't dominate politics, and to really play their role in protecting our system.
So, for 20 years, saving American democracy was not part of my professional ambitions.
I was advising companies at Bain.
I was part of building a management consulting company across five continents.
And even when I went into government, it was to focus on boosting private investment in newly emerging economies.
But when I got to Washington and joined the Obama administration, here's what got me scared.
was that our public institutions that projected so much power seemed underneath to be fragile and disruptable.
And by 2017, it was clear that that disruption was well underway.
And it was time to pivot to a new mission, to focus on bringing business leaders into the project to renew American democracy.
I consulted with some of the most thoughtful academics studying the US political system and pulled together a group of my Harvard Business School classmates to design a different kind of political organization.
We started to bring together business leaders from different industries, geographies, and political persuasions.
We call it the Leadership Now project.
Since 2018, we've been deploying our time, dollars, and networks to preserving democracy and we've seen that we can make progress.
We now have members in more than 20 states and some real successes under our belt.
And our members are individual business leaders who come to this work not as Democrats or Republicans but as Americans.
We focus our efforts on the higher ROI strategies at the state and federal level.
We really work to make the economic case that an unstable democracy harms business and our And increasingly, we're clear at what's really at stake.
That when democracy falters, the rule of law goes out the window, innovation is crushed along with dissent, leaders reward friends and punish enemies, and wars become far more likely.
We've built leadership now, applying modern business thinking to an old school political model, the dues -paying membership organization, which some of those powerful players in politics have employed for decades, like the Chamber of Commerce, the NAACP, the NRA, unions, the Sierra Club.
They've all used this model because it helps us and them to play the long game.
We're not just seeking silver bullets.
And we don't give up when we fail, but we can replicate and scale successes across different states when we win.
and our members are taking real action together.
Let me share a few examples of how, where we sought to uphold trust in elections, where we sought to protect the people and policies that are working to shore up our democracy, and how we've pushed back on political retribution, which we see continuing to increase.
So in October 2020, we issued the first public statement by a business organization seeking to reinforce the legitimacy of the presidential election process.
More than 200 leaders from across industries joined us.
And later, major business associations and corporations also joined in calling for the certification of the election and condemnation of the January 6th attack on the Capitol.
We've worked to support some of the leaders who are willing to push back on threats to democracy.
So in 2022, a group of Wisconsin business leaders, a bipartisan group, ask their candidates for governor if they would be willing to certify elections regardless of the result, a basic nonpartisan question.
When one of the candidates refused to agree, they endorsed his competitor, who went on to win a closely fought election.
Later that year, we worked with our member, Paul Tagliabue, the former Commissioner of the NFL, to pull together his long -standing networks in business, sports, and the military to support legislation to protect future presidential election transitions.
Later that year, Congress did just that, passing legislation to reform the Electoral Count Act on a bipartisan basis.
We stand with companies that are threatened with political retribution.
The governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, had threatened Disney with political retribution and actually had exacted political retribution for the companies disagreeing with him and his legislature.
We argued that this was something that was more typical in autocracies, not democracies like the US, and set a dangerous precedent.
Our amicus brief on the case was filed and we continue to support Disney's position as the case moves forward. We take a clear position against laws that damage democracy.
In August 2023, Jenny Britton, the founder of Jenny's Splendid Ice Cream, joined more than 50 business leaders in her state of Ohio, making the case that a cynical measure that sought to limit citizens' ability to weigh in on ballot initiatives was bad for democracy.
The ballot initiative ultimately was defeated, 57 to 43%, with both Democrats and Republicans voting against it.
Look, this is just a start.
There are many more successes that we can have together.
And here's the good news.
You don't have to act alone.
Our polling of business leaders shows that the majority care about democracy, they would like to protect democracy in the U .S. So here's a few things you can do together with like -minded business leaders.
Remember that small actions have power.
If election administrators are threatened in a city, even if just ten executives come together and take a stand, they will be seen as courageous leaders and the unexpected voices that are standing up for our system.
Now imagine if in every city and industry, a dozen executives came together and made a plan for how they will respond when democracy is threatened.
Look, we're at a tenuous moment and I am certain that we can win this fight, but we have watched too many seasons of democracy's decline in the U .S. and around the world and we need to work now in urgency, together, to save our democracy, and I'm more convinced than ever that business leaders have a role to play in Thank you.
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Hi, Danyela. It's so good to have you on Ted Business.
Thanks for having me, Majipe.
Such a pleasure. And we go way back, so for me it's always fun to hear more about your journey.
Can you actually take us through the moment where you decided, you know what, what I'm right now.
It's not the right thing.
I want to start leadership now." I had spent most of my career in business but had just spent five years in the Obama administration.
And a lot of the time when I was working in government, I thought, there are so many problems worth trying to solve, and this country has the capacity to solve them.
But government could be insular in its problem solving and sometimes unintentionally didn't benefit from all of the expertise and innovation that we have in this country, particularly in the business sector.
I joined the State Department a week after the WikiLeaks scandal and it just showed, right, that technology was now able to disrupt our diplomatic relationships around the world, I was able to disrupt governments and we'd obviously just had a very contentious election, one that raised to me a lot more than just an issue of one candidate or one election.
It raised, do we have a democracy that people have faith in?
I saw this moment where people were paying attention to politics, were ready to do something that was more meaningful than how they'd engaged in the past and we needed to harness that energy.
Now I mean you raise the idea or the thought that yeah people were not as engaged and people are skeptical about politics and skeptical about business.
So for people who are skeptical and you're bringing this idea of merging the two or a public private partnerships, what would you say to them?
What would you say in terms of why this is so important and how we can count on business to keep the public's interest in mind.
How would we even think about and have vulnerable communities in mind and at heart given it's coming from a corporate lens?
So we wanted to explicitly stake out a different position for business than some of what the existing business oriented entities in politics like many of the chambers of commerce who say our only goal, minimizing taxes and minimizing regulation.
We're not going to worry about any of the other things that might be an issue for our system, work collaboratively with other organizations in a coalition, I see what we're building here is the Coalition for Democracy.
And business is a part of that coalition.
And we need to do the work to have a group of businesspeople who are well informed and committed enough to participate in the coalition, and then work with many other different communities in the process, and in a given state, we'll collaborate with many different organizations that have similar goals, and they might be approaching those goals differently, they might disagree with us on other things, but we know that we're all committed to democracy.
The one last thing I would just say is that our organization is explicitly business people who are members.
We don't actually have any corporate members institutionally.
Our resources are through membership dues of individuals who are here to stand up for democracy as business people and as citizens.
So we do see this as akin to organizations of individuals, not in representing institutions.
Right, right. The idea that you're having business people who are making decisions not institutional is really important.
You mentioned having coalitions where people are coming together with common goals.
what's an example of a common goal besides just the goal of having a democracy that works?
I'll give an example right now our members in Ohio are working to support objective redistricting in the state.
Okay. And there's going to be a ballot initiative in November mm -hmm that would create objective redistricting and many of the business people in our membership have seen that highly gerrymandered legislature is very polarized, makes bad decisions that are inconsistent with what the citizens want.
And we're working in coalition with a wide range of groups who share that concern and goals to get the message out.
What else would you like to see business people do to further the progress of the movement that you're a part of?
Yeah, well it's 2024, we do happen to have an election coming up in the U .S. You might have noticed.
And we're really worried about election officials and election administrators.
Many of them have been threatened.
Many have quit their jobs.
We've worked with election administrators in Pennsylvania and in Arizona, for instance, Republicans, who came under threat on social media.
They've had people come to their homes.
They've even had to hide their families because there was a lack of faith in the results of the election.
So this year, we just did an amicus brief, a friend of the court brief in Wisconsin, to support the head of elections who the state legislature has tried to kick out without cause.
That that case has been dismissed and she's still in place.
The business community is coming around to celebrate those who are election officials, to support poll working, time off for poll working in their companies.
So this is a year where reminding people that having faith in our elections is warranted.
And supporting those who are willing to serve in those elections is really critical.
It seems really basic in a certain way but it's so valuable.
Our members in Wisconsin wrote a letter to every election administrator thanking them for their work.
So I think supporting those workers and reinforcing faith in the election is a really core thing that business leaders can do everywhere in this country.
We have a lot of entrepreneurs as listeners.
So what is one thing you think every budding entrepreneur should know?
So the main piece of advice I would give entrepreneurs is finding your partners in crime early.
a couple of people who share the vision of what can be done.
I've worked on two things that frankly were big visions and there would be so many doubts that you can get to that place, that there's not someone else already doing it.
And I think having a few people, they don't have to be even on your team.
They can be friends, they can be board members, but who can really explore that vision with you and think through how it can be a reality and be a cheerleader and celebrate when you win is really critical.
And in addition to having a lot of entrepreneurs, we have a global listener base.
And so, what advice would you give someone who wants to start a Leadership Now project elsewhere in another country, in another yeah, region, what would you say?
First of all, please do.
We hear from budding political entrepreneurs in other countries about the risks they're seeing to democracy often.
And we need as many like -minded leaders to be tackling this issue in creative ways.
I think my advice to them would be who are the existing networks you can tap into that are ready to mobilize?
It was absolutely critical in starting leadership now that we could tap into Harvard Business School alumni and It wasn't the only network we wanted to ever mobilize, but it gave us a grounding and we knew who within those networks might be ready to engage.
And then you could grow from there.
So figuring out if it's an industry group, if it's an alumni group, if it's a social network, who can you start with and then you can be deliberate about going beyond.
That makes sense. I think my last question to you is, what is your hope for the next generation?
I have two daughters, 17 and 12.
So I think about it often and they give me lots of inspiration for the work.
I really like to see a sense that there is a proactive positive agenda coming from government and policy that's helping to inspire action across sectors.
And right now people are feeling more scared, skeptical, frustrated about a variety of things.
But I don't think it's impossible to turn that around.
People want a positive vision ultimately, and I really hope we can turn that corner sooner rather than later.
Danyelah, it is always a treat to talk to you.
Thank you for spending time with me today to talk about your TED talk and leadership now.
Thank you. Incredible to be here.
Thank you. That's it for today.
Ted Business is part of the Ted Audio collective.
This episode was produced by Hanna Kingsley Ma, edited by Alejandra Salazar and fact -checked by Julia Dickerson.
Special thanks to Maria Lajos, Farah Degrange, Corey Hajim, Daniela Balarezzo, and Michelle Quint.
I'm Madupa Ekinola talk to you again next week.
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