Doing Good, Badly

About Doing Good, Badly

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 (https://doinggoodbadly.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

DoingGoodBadly

Category

business · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

23 May 2026

Latest episode

13 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

11 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   13 Oct 2026

   How I Made My Climate Anxiety Pay

   Every job, from the farm to the finance department, needs people who think about sustainability and get creative about how to act on it. In this episode we dive deep into what skills it takes for anyone trying to get into impact work and the realities for the organizations still hiring to resource the sustainability department as if it all belongs to one person. It also comes with plenty of career advice nobody asked for (buyer beware), from two people who’ve spent their whole careers in jobs that didn’t have a title yet. There’s a green skills gap that keeps getting wider every year, with companies hiring for green skills faster than the workforce can train and find them.1 (#user-content-fn-1) The odd part is that most of the people being hired into that work don’t have the word sustainability anywhere near their job title. Sustainability work has already moved into finance, operations, procurement, and marketing. Yet the way we hire, train, and talk about sustainability careers still assumes it belongs to one person in one department, who will somehow make everyone else’s job greener on their behalf. The gap is probably bigger than the reports suggest. Even after a few years of steady growth, only 17.6% of workers worldwide list a single green skill on their LinkedIn profiles,2 (#user-content-fn-2) which leaves more than four out of five people heading into a hotter world without any skills to face that new world reality. Most of what gets measured is technical knowledge, like carbon accounting and reporting frameworks, and very little of it captures whether someone can actually move a strategy forward inside an organization. A lot of sustainability work happens without a playbook, done by people who are working out what to do as they go, and nobody has figured out how to put that on a certification yet. “We want it to be everybody’s job, but unless you have that be central in your business, and it is part of everybody’s job description and part of their meetings, then it becomes nobody’s job.”- Joanna That’s how you end up with chief sustainability officer job descriptions written for someone who can apparently run the reporting, the marketing, the people management and a decent chunk of the finance function all at once.3 (#user-content-fn-3) Organizations that can’t find that person tend to hand the B Corp certification to whoever started as an intern in May. The skills that actually get this work done, like systems thinking, creativity or the nerve to make a room a bit uncomfortable, still get called soft skills, and they’re also the hardest ones to spot on a resume that ai has screened before any human has.4 (#user-content-fn-4) Meanwhile, a lot of the knowledge we’re going to need to adapt to a hotter world belongs to people who have never been anywhere near a sustainability department. That includes the farmers and fishers whose jobs are growing fastest5 (#user-content-fn-5) and who have been watching the land and water change for decades. Making room for them takes a different idea of what counts as expertise than most hiring managers currently have, especially the ones who are worried about whether a candidate brought an iced coffee to the interview.6 (#user-content-fn-6)This episode is our argument for treating every job as a sustainability job, and for what organizations would have to change to make that true. It’s also our attempt at honest career advice for anyone trying to get into this work, which may sound a bit unexpected coming from two people who’ve spent their whole careers in it. Along the way we hold a moment of silence for the money that choice has cost us. All The Receipts on our substack https://doinggoodbadly.substack.com/ (https://doinggoodbadly.substack.com/) 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 (https://doinggoodbadly.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

2. 

   29 Sept 2026

   This Is a Climate Emergency, but We're Not Screwed Yet

   We're not climate doomers, we're climate realists, and the climate solutions we need to meet the moment may already be here. Every few days another post goes around telling us the world is hard right now but good things are still happening.We get why people share it, but it mostly tells everyone that someone else has this under control and that everyone can get back to business as usual. It's the same story we grew up on, where a hero turns up just before the credits, and climate has been sold to us that way for years, most recently by billionaires who wanted to be Tony Stark.¹ But the harsh reality is - nobody is coming to do this for us, and we think it is more useful right now to be a little scared and motivated than to be soothed. I despair most of the time, but we can’t afford the luxury of despair.- David Suzuki Part of the problem is that extreme weather has become background noise, something we watch on the news and scroll past, and we have been desensitized one record-breaking summer and one climate disaster after another. Weather, climate and water disasters have gone up 5 times in 50 years, and the losses went from an average of $49 million a day in the 1970s to $383 million a day in the 2010s. In Canada, insured losses went from $14 billion between 2006 and 2015 to $37 billion between 2016 and 2025, and the Arctic is warming roughly 3 times faster than the global average. When the hunger stones along the Danube start showing up again, carved centuries ago to warn that if the water is this low famine is coming, it gets hard to keep calling any of this a trend.² None of this is news to the people who have been ringing the alarm for a decade or more, from the Paris Agreement in 2015 to the IPCC’s 2018 warning that we had twelve years, which in Canada lost the news cycle nine days later to cannabis legalization.³ Mainstream climate coverage peaked in 2021 and has been falling ever since, and this September’s UN report saying we will now pass 1.5°C degrees was mostly read as game over (I mean read the cover…. they are saying there are many ways to recover we just need to act - Navigating exceedance of 1.5°C and pathways towards return). The report itself says something more demanding, which is that how far we overshoot, and for how long, still depends on what governments and companies decide to do next, and so far what they have decided goes well beyond inaction, with more money flowing into fossil fuels and climate conferences sponsored by some of the biggest polluters in the world. David Suzuki clearly points out that when there is a war, economics get set aside, and we have watched that happen twice in recent memory. During COVID governments rewrote the rules to keep people alive and safe, and in the past year Canada decided defence was a priority and the capital showed up almost overnight, including from funds that weren’t even allowed to invest in defence a few years ago.⁴ The argument that there simply aren’t enough climate solutions to fund does not survive that comparison, because solutions show up where the money and the political will go. We also don’t have to re-invent the model. Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps put three million young men to work in the 1930s, planted three billion trees, built 711 state parks and sent $25 of every $30 paycheque home to their families, and Canada already has its own versions. Canadian wildland firefighters get deployed from Australia to Greece because of the expertise built through CIFFC, and Indigenous Guardians, running at more than 240 sites, returns up to $3.70 in social, cultural, economic and environmental value for every dollar invested. Canada already has a climate corps, it is Indigenous-led, and most people have never heard of it. We really deeply need to sit in wonder and whimsy at the natural world and the gifts we've been given, and find the fight in ourselves. - Kristy, Sustainability Consultant Not Giving Up! We are in a climate emergency, and we are not screwed yet. Every time a flood or a fire makes the news, somebody asks who is going to fix it, and the answer is simple - you and me, and a lot of ordinary people who haven't been hired yet. That work will be done by millions of people finding their role in it rather than by one hero, which is exactly where we go next episode, with climate jobs and the skills it will take to fill them. Next episode we look at those jobs, who is training for them, and what it would take for the rest of us to get one. All The Receipts on our substack https://doinggoodbadly.substack.com/ (https://doinggoodbadly.substack.com/) 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 (https://doinggoodbadly.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

3. 

   18 Aug 2026

   Dicks in Space

   Every billionaire with a rocket sells the same story: they are saving us. Earth is fragile, the future is dangerous, and they are the ones who will get humanity through it. It is a rescue, and they are the only rescue on offer. None of which is true. They are not doing this to save you and me, and our neighbours. They are doing it for ego, for power, and for growth, because a man who already owns this much of the planet starts to find the planet small. They will tell you Earth is finite, that infinite growth on one world is impossible, so we have no choice but to expand outward. But the limit they have run into is not the planet's. It is their own. And what they are selling is not a solution to that limit, it is a way to keep growing past it, somewhere new. Bezos says he wants to move heavy industry off Earth so the planet can stay a treasure, and Musk says Mars is humanity's backup drive, and both of them would like you to hear this as generosity. But Musk's own pay package only pays out once a million people are actually standing on Mars, which means the moment he saves the species is also the moment he collects, and once salvation and payday are the same milestone it stops being obvious that we are the ones being rescued. Wealth is no sort of power at all unless you make it one. Wealth is a State-made thing, a convention, the most artificial of powers.- H.G. Wells, The Time Machine and Other Stories The billionaire brain is not a metaphor. Paul Piff spent years at Berkeley proving that as people get richer, their empathy goes down. Money, he said, makes you more likely to act like a jerk. Dacher Keltner found the same from the other side: feeling powerful shuts off the parts of the brain that enable you to read other people. Two decades of studies, and the findings only became more concrete. The more power someone holds, the less they can see the world from anyone else's perspective. Then that brain runs into the one thing money can never fix, which is that the man hoarding is is going to die anyway. Terror Management Theory is the research on what we do with that knowledge, and the finding is that we manage the fear of dying by building things meant to outlast us. For most people that is children, or work. For a man with unlimited money and no real sense of anyone else, it is a rocket with his name on it, or a bunker under a mountain. Both are built to survive the end of the world rather than prevent it, and neither has room in the plan for the rest of us. We get into the money too, the speed and size of the space industry, and what those same fortunes could do aimed at the ground instead of the sky. It does not tie up in a bow, which is the honest answer. Overview Effect can change the way we look at the planet but also other things like countries, ethnicities, religions; it can prompt an instant reevaluation of our shared harmony and a shift in focus to all the wonderful things we have in common instead of what makes us different. - Will Shatner & Josh Brandon (https://variety.com/2022/tv/news/william-shatner-space-boldly-go-excerpt-1235395113/) All The Receipts on our substack https://doinggoodbadly.substack.com/ (https://doinggoodbadly.substack.com/) 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 (https://doinggoodbadly.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

4. 

   4 Aug 2026

   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 (https://doinggoodbadly.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

5. 

   21 Jul 2026

   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. (https://doinggoodbadly.substack.com/p/4b854921-864c-43d4-89df-937245ea47fb) 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 (https://doinggoodbadly.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

6. 

   19 Jul 2026

   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 (https://doinggoodbadly.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

7. 

   7 Jul 2026

   Don't Buy It

   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 t...

8. 

   16 Jun 2026

   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 ...

9. 

   26 May 2026

   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 reve...

10. 

    26 May 2026

    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 o...

11. 

    23 May 2026

    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. ...

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