Doing Good, Badly Podcast

DoingGoodBadly

The road to a burning planet is paved with good intentions. A podcast unpacking what went wrong and what might still go right. 🎙️ doinggoodbadly.substack.com

Episodes

  1. Aug 4

    The Business of Consulting: Not a Time to Be Boring

    An episode about consultants, which is a little awkward given that we are two consultants ourselves. The reality of most of what a big firm sells is the average opinion in a nicer suit, and it costs the most at exactly the moment a safe answer is not what you or the world needs. We spend a while dissecting why the consultants reputation is earned, from the metrics obsession that vanishes anything a spreadsheet cannot hold, to the sharper argument Mazzucato and Collington make in The Big Con, is that the real product is a client left worse at its own job than before the firm arrived, and continsouly reliant on an increasing amount of support. The opioid history and the oil-sponsored climate summit are in there too. Then we make the case for our existence and why there is still a place for consulting. We talk a lot about the version of the job we actually believe in, the one that is smaller, stranger, and genuinely bad for repeat business, because every problem turns out to be a creative problem and the people who shift anything are the ones thinking sideways and stealing like artists. There is a line in here about making the rebellion delightful that reorganised the whole conversation for us. Not a time to be boring, so go listen. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit doinggoodbadly.substack.com

  2. Jul 21

    I Am Not a Cat: Buycotts, GameStop, and what your wallet is actually buying

    Last episode was about not buying things. This one is the opposite move: spending on purpose. The buycott. Here is the part nobody puts on the tote bag. The wallet is a lousy ballot. One dollar, one vote is not one person, one vote. The rich vote early and often, the seller sets the options, and the whole thing tallies attention rather than virtue. And yet, a few times, it drew blood. We get into three of them. GameStop, where a crowd in bandanas shorted a hedge fund into oblivion and, if you read the letters, it was never really about the money. Nike and Kaepernick, the buycott a brand ordered in advance, ran the numbers on, and monetized from both ends, burning shoes and all. Patagonia taking out a full-page ad to tell people not to buy the jacket, then selling a billion dollars of jackets anyway. The ones that work are not random. They share the same bones: a clear target, a tight window, a signal loud enough that the wider community cannot ignore it, a cost to join low enough that almost anyone can, and a pressure point where all that deployed capital actually lands. Miss one of those and you get a hashtag that trends for a day and changes nothing. Hit all of them and a crowd of first-time buyers can move a company, a market, or a conversation. Strip the mechanics off all of them and what is left is memory. Not the sales numbers, not the stock charts, the story people carry afterward. GameStop went quiet for three years and the crowd was still there when Roaring Kitty came back. People remember the Nike ad longer than they remember the burning. People remember “Don’t Buy This Jacket” and could not tell you a single other thing Patagonia has done. That is the real currency here, and it is the one thing your wallet cannot actually buy. The wallet is a terrible ballot. But coordinated people are genuinely dangerous to the comfortable, and every so often they prove it. Thanks for listening to Doing Good, Badly! Subscribe and find the receipts on substack. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit doinggoodbadly.substack.com

    I Am Not a Cat: Buycotts, GameStop, and what your wallet is actually buying

  3. Jul 19

    Don't Buy It - The Story of Boycotts

    The most powerful boycott in American history lasted 381 days and started with a murder. Seventy years later, the biggest boycott story of the year is about oat milk and a chatbot. Welcome to consumer power, where the stakes swing from life and death to a very bad website. Everyone says vote with your dollars. This episode is about the part nobody mentions: the money is the least interesting weapon you have. The real one is memory, and whether a company can survive being remembered. We trace it from the bus that Rosa Parks would not give up, to the oat milk brand that answered a boycott with the most tone-deaf PR response, to the AI standoff that sent more than a million people to the cancel button in a single week. We also get into who actually gets to boycott, why perfect is the enemy of useful, and how paying attention to nothing at all is its own kind of protest. We meant to cover buycotts in here too. They got too good, so they get their own episode next. For the full receipt list and to subscribe, visit us at Too tired for hype. Too stubborn to quit. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit doinggoodbadly.substack.com

    Don't Buy It - The Story of Boycotts

  4. Jul 19

    In A Capitalist System There Is No Alternative (Until There Is)

    In January 2026, Mark Carney stood at Davos and said what most people in power have spent years carefully not saying: the old model isn’t coming back, and nostalgia isn’t a plan. We had so many thoughts, and we still have more. The speech didn’t come out of nowhere. It landed at the end of a long arc, from the 1930s debate over who corporations actually owe anything to, through the moment Milton Friedman made shareholder primacy into a kind of religion, through the brief window when Larry Fink mentioned ESG 26 times in one letter and then once and then not at all, through the quiet collapse of the Net Zero Banking Alliance and the organizations that signed its commitments and then, one by one, didn’t. This episode traces that arc. How the language of responsibility got built, scaled, weaponized, and hollowed out and what Mark Fisher had to say about why it was always going to be hard to imagine anything different. We get into what Carney is actually arguing (and what he borrowed from the Finnish president to say it), why the Davos setting is either deeply ironic or entirely strategic, and why two sustainability consultants who have watched all of this from the inside are still, against the available evidence, stubbornly optimistic. Not because things are fine. Because the pretending is over, and that might be exactly what was needed. For all the receipts from this episode and to subscribe visit us. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit doinggoodbadly.substack.com

    In A Capitalist System There Is No Alternative (Until There Is)

  5. Jul 19

    Why Corporate Values Fail, Who Pays for It, and One Very Famous Hot Dog

    Every company has values. They’re on the wall, in the handbook, probably in a custom font. Most of them ‘are bland, toothless, or just plain dishonest.’ In Episode 03, Jo and Kristy get into taxonomy of corporate values and why most companies get them wrong. We break down the Lencioni taxonomy, which has been sitting in the Harvard Business Review since 2002 telling companies exactly what they’re doing wrong and has been cheerfully ignored ever since. We get into H&M, whose former head of sustainability spent a decade saying all the right things before becoming CEO. The quotes are genuinely extraordinary. We get into Oatly, which is not a villain story so much as a grief story, and we’re still bummed out for Mr. Science. And then there’s Costco. We did not plan to end up here. A company so unsexy its entire marketing strategy is currently a CEO eating a hot dog in one take. And yet. Costco turns out to be one of the most genuinely values-aligned businesses in North America right now. The gap between what organizations say they believe and what they do when it costs something is not usually malicious. It is not even usually cynical. But when it gets wide enough, something breaks that is harder to pinpoint than a lost customer or a bad headline. Psychologists call it moral injury. We call it Episode 03. Skeptical but hopeful. Optimism without the b******t. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit doinggoodbadly.substack.com

    Why Corporate Values Fail, Who Pays for It, and One Very Famous Hot Dog

  6. Jul 19

    The Devil Bought Everlane: The Heartbreak and Economics of Selling Out

    The brand that trademarked radical transparency just got sold to the least transparent fashion company most people can name. In this episode we break down the Everlane acquisition by Shein -- what actually happened, why it hit so hard, and what it reveals about the gap between values as a brand identity and values as a legal structure. We get into the founding story and the early cracks. The economics of the sale and who actually got paid. Who Shein is and what they are really buying. The psychology of the Shein haul and why it is the complete opposite of everything Everlane stood for. And the heartbreak -- because this brand was not just a place to shop. For a lot of women it was a place to put their values, their identity, and their hope that doing the right thing inside a broken system was actually possible. When that gets sold on a Saturday morning to the company it was supposed to be the antidote to, it does not feel like a business transaction. It feels personal. Because it is. We also get into mission lock, the structural tools that actually protect values when the money gets hard and why the lesson here is not that the mission failed. It is that the mission was never structurally protected in the first place. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit doinggoodbadly.substack.com

    The Devil Bought Everlane: The Heartbreak and Economics of Selling Out

  7. Jul 19

    Finally. Someone Said It.

    Doing good is complicated. Doing it badly is apparently very easy. We investigated.We’ve spent years inside sustainability, impact, and strategy work. In boardrooms. In workshops. In decks that promised transformation and delivered incremental change. We’ve seen what moves the needle. We’ve seen what stalls out. And we’ve seen how often the language of change runs ahead of the systems meant to deliver it. This podcast exists because pretending that doesn’t happen isn’t helping anyone. If you’re tired of nodding along to stories that don’t add up, or watching good intentions collapse under bad incentives, you’re in the right place. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit doinggoodbadly.substack.com

    Finally. Someone Said It.
  • 7 Episodes

About

The road to a burning planet is paved with good intentions. A podcast unpacking what went wrong and what might still go right. 🎙️ doinggoodbadly.substack.com

Information

  • Creator
    DoingGoodBadly
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    7
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © DoingGoodBadly
  • Show Website
    Doing Good, Badly Podcast