Episode 6: Rob Chesnut on integrity and the ethical revolution

Inspiring Legal

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[00:00 - 00:09]: Welcome to Inspiring Legal, the podcast for in-house legal.
[00:10 - 00:16]: Get insights, learn from peers, life lessons from some of the most influential GCs.
[00:16 - 00:19]: If it's related to in-house legal, we cover it.
[00:19 - 00:30]: For more inspiration, go to openli.com slash community.
[00:32 - 00:35]: So welcome back to Inspiring Legal.
[00:35 - 00:39]: Today, I am joined once again by Rob.
[00:39 - 00:47]: Rob has an inspiring background, former GC and Chief Ethics Officer at Airbnb,
[00:47 - 00:51]: author to the bestseller book, Intentional Integrity,
[00:51 - 00:55]: how smart companies can lead an ethical revolution.
[00:56 - 00:59]: He also has a background from trust and safety in eBay.
[00:59 - 01:03]: And today he's joining us to talk about integrity
[01:03 - 01:09]: and how we in the legal community can inspire each other
[01:09 - 01:18]: to create companies that stand out and help us all create a better online environment.
[01:18 - 01:20]: So welcome, Rob.
[01:21 - 01:22]: Thanks for having me, Stine.
[01:23 - 01:28]: Rob, maybe for the listeners out there that don't know about you,
[01:28 - 01:31]: tell them a little bit about your background
[01:31 - 01:37]: and maybe also how you came about writing a book that became a bestseller.
[01:37 - 01:41]: Well, by way of background, I was a federal prosecutor early in my career.
[01:41 - 01:47]: I moved over to eBay in the early days of eBay back in 1999.
[01:47 - 01:53]: And after eBay, I became the general counsel of a company called Chegg
[01:53 - 01:58]: and then later general counsel and chief ethics officer at Airbnb.
[01:58 - 02:04]: You know, the journey to writing a book, it was not an intentional one.
[02:04 - 02:07]: I never thought I'd be an author.
[02:07 - 02:12]: But, you know, while at Airbnb, I really noticed that the world was changing.
[02:12 - 02:17]: In that, you know, when I was growing up,
[02:17 - 02:21]: companies were expected to do one thing, and that was make money.
[02:21 - 02:23]: You know, that's what a company did.
[02:23 - 02:27]: They were supposed to focus on just shareholders.
[02:27 - 02:31]: And exactly how it got done wasn't as important.
[02:31 - 02:34]: You know, if there was bad behavior by leaders,
[02:34 - 02:37]: you know, that tended to get swept under the rug.
[02:37 - 02:40]: It wasn't talked about.
[02:40 - 02:44]: You know, if the company had a little money left over and had a good year,
[02:44 - 02:48]: maybe they would make a nice little donation, and that was integrity.
[02:48 - 02:56]: But I noticed that the world has changed,
[02:56 - 02:58]: and I think the Internet has a lot to do with this.
[02:58 - 03:00]: The world has become a lot more connected,
[03:00 - 03:03]: and there's a lot more transparency.
[03:03 - 03:09]: And with this connectedness and transparency has come increased expectations on companies.
[03:09 - 03:12]: It's not good enough now for a company just to make money.
[03:12 - 03:15]: People expect that, but they want more.
[03:15 - 03:20]: They want a company that is also going to act responsibly in the world
[03:20 - 03:23]: and actually solve some of the world's biggest problems.
[03:23 - 03:28]: I think, you know, many of us are discouraged with government's ability to solve them,
[03:28 - 03:31]: and we are increasingly looking at companies to solve these problems.
[03:31 - 03:36]: And, you know, there's pressure on companies from all directions here.
[03:36 - 03:38]: Employees.
[03:38 - 03:40]: Look, employees today want more than a paycheck, Stine.
[03:40 - 03:45]: They want to be part of something aligned with their own values.
[03:45 - 03:48]: They want to be working for something that they believe is good and right,
[03:48 - 03:55]: and they are increasingly putting pressure on their employer to behave responsibly.
[03:55 - 04:03]: And if they see something they don't like, you know, in the old days they wouldn't say anything.
[04:03 - 04:07]: Today what happens is they tweet about it.
[04:07 - 04:12]: They post blog posts about it, right, like Susan Fowler did with Uber,
[04:12 - 04:16]: did her famous blog post that really turned that company upside down.
[04:16 - 04:19]: They go on Glassdoor and discuss it.
[04:19 - 04:22]: They may not only leave, they may leave noisily.
[04:22 - 04:30]: They may leave copying documents and taking documents to the government and turning in their old company.
[04:30 - 04:34]: And it's not just employees that are putting pressure on companies to behave well.
[04:34 - 04:36]: It is customers.
[04:36 - 04:39]: We live in an age of conscious consumerism.
[04:39 - 04:46]: That is, consumers want to do business with companies that have values aligned with their own.
[04:46 - 04:50]: So companies are increasingly under pressure to care about things like the environment,
[04:50 - 04:52]: as their customers do.
[04:52 - 05:01]: If the company can align its purpose and its values with its employees, it can be really powerful.
[05:01 - 05:07]: Studies, there's a Harvard Business Review study that just came out that showed that when there's an alignment
[05:07 - 05:14]: between the values of employees and the values of a company, productivity is significantly higher.
[05:14 - 05:17]: Employee retention is up.
[05:17 - 05:22]: And even diversity and inclusion goes up.
[05:22 - 05:26]: There is a misalignment, where, by the way, you may find in a company like Twitter,
[05:26 - 05:31]: where there's a significant change in the stated purpose of the company.
[05:31 - 05:36]: That bodes poorly for the performance of the company going forward.
[05:36 - 05:44]: Consumers, if they feel aligned with the company, they'll become ambassadors supporting a company.
[05:44 - 05:54]: Government, as well as raising the stakes on companies, to push them and pressure them into behaving with integrity,
[05:54 - 05:58]: to think about stakeholders beyond just shareholders.
[05:58 - 06:06]: And we noticed all of this happening while I was at Airbnb, and I went to talk to our founder, Brian Chesky.
[06:06 - 06:11]: And we talked about things like sexual harassment in the workplace and things that were going on at Uber
[06:11 - 06:13]: and other large tech companies.
[06:13 - 06:18]: And we came to the fundamental question, how do you drive integrity into the culture of a company?
[06:18 - 06:20]: How do you do it?
[06:20 - 06:28]: We both agreed that it was important and that it would actually help the business as well as be the right thing to do.
[06:28 - 06:34]: But we weren't quite sure how to do it, but Brian, in his very Brian way, looked at me and said, go big.
[06:34 - 06:42]: And we went out and we created an integrity program, where we openli talked about the importance of doing the right thing
[06:42 - 06:45]: and what the right thing meant at Airbnb.
[06:45 - 06:50]: And what surprised me, Stine, was how the employees reacted to it.
[06:50 - 06:52]: They loved it.
[06:52 - 07:00]: It meant a lot to them to be working at a place that genuinely cared about doing the right thing and talked about it openli.
[07:00 - 07:07]: And the program became really successful, and employees talked about it, were inspired by it.
[07:07 - 07:09]: It became really part of the culture of the company.
[07:09 - 07:11]: And that's when my wife got involved.
[07:11 - 07:16]: My wife, early in her career, had been in the publishing industry.
[07:16 - 07:20]: And so she said, well, Rob, you've got to write a book about this.
[07:20 - 07:22]: I'm like, I can't write a book.
[07:22 - 07:23]: I'm not going to.
[07:23 - 07:24]: I...