The Fox in the Hen House: Matthew McCarthy On Why the Biggest Threat to Your Business is You

Matthew McCarthy, former CEO of Ben & Jerry’s—one of the world’s most outspoken purpose-driven brands—brings his expertise to “It Shouldn’t Be This Hard.”

This conversation navigates his time as a CEO, and the intention-action gap at the heart of modern business: what leaders know they should do differently, and why they are hesitating when it comes down to how to do it. Drawing on decades leading iconic brands at Unilever and Ben & Jerry’s, Matthew gives us the scoop on sustainability versus profit, company and consumer culture, and the political charge of the anti-woke movement.

This is not the conversation you think it is. The threat, it turns out, is closer than anyone wants to admit.

“The biggest threat to most organizations is not their competitors. It’s themselves.”

Are You the Fox in Your Own Hen House?

**Q: How do you balance sales, profit, and purpose? **

The moment you sit on the side of purpose, profit tips. The moment you shift toward profit, purpose lifts off the ground. For decades, we’ve framed purpose and profit as opposing forces, one goes up, the other comes down. A constant balancing act between doing well and doing good. The problem is not effort or intention, it’s the framing that’s fundamentally broken.

“That whole framing of balance is fundamentally broken if not part of the problem.”

The fox in the hen house is our own thinking. We talk ourselves out of the right move, find comfort, and then wonder why the gap between intention and action gets wider. What we talk ourselves out of says less about our values and more about what we believe we’re actually capable of.

“Some of the worst enemies of the businesses and the brands I’ve worked on were us—the kind of stuff we would do to ourselves, to be in the kind of the sales prevention business.”

And nowhere does that become more obvious than when businesses start talking about growth. Matthew points to a word most leadership teams use daily without ever questioning it: scale.

“What is it with this word scale? We use it liberally, but we use it so imprecisely—and that creates conflicts of understanding about what we’re talking about.”

Ask a room of leaders what scale means and you will get a different answer from every seat at the table. Finance hears margin. Manufacturing hears headcount. Procurement hears supply chain resilience. Everyone is solving their own problem.

“Money doesn’t really care about purpose. People care about purpose.”

Matthew is careful to separate the two. Money is not the villain, it’s an instrument. We created it. The problem is not profit. It’s what we think profit requires us to sacrifice.

*The threat was never the market. It was the room. *

Purpose and Profit Are Not Enemies

**Q: Can a business really do both — scale and do good? **

There is, he admits, a tortured relationship between trying to scale a business, build a brand, and do it sustainably. But plenty of businesses have made unbelievable amounts of money doing things the people they serve actually care about. The data is clear. The demand has always been there. What is not there is the willingness to follow through.

When systems produce harmful products, blame travels in the wrong direction.

“The fact that lots of products suck or lots of products do bad things to the environment is not the consumer’s fault—even if they’re the ones paying for it.”

Younger generations care more about the impact they are having in their communities and their world. The MAHA movement is the most recent signal: consumer expectations around health, ingredients, and transparency are accelerating. This is not a trend. It is a baseline for what people now expect from brands. So why are so many companies still failing to convert?

“A lot of energy in organizations gets really wasted, squandered with people debating versus deciding… let’s put most of our energy into the how.”

Do we care about it? Do we think it matters to the future viability of our company? Could it create risks—like not knowing where your main ingredient is coming from in ten years because of climate change? That is material. That is not a reporting thing. That is a question of whether you care and whether it matters to you.

The biggest obstacles to growth, trust, and impact are often the ones we create ourselves. But if that’s true, then the next question becomes: How do leaders build organizations that don’t get in their own way?

“Who’s They?” Authorizing Yourself

**Q: What did your personal journey teach you? **

The path between A and B looks straightforward until you start navigating it. Matthew describes his younger approach to decision-making as spaghetti, twisting away from discomfort, around risk, and toward whatever route felt safest for his reputation. The more he avoided, the more twists would swirl into tangles. The comfortable path is rarely the right one.

The cost was not just missed opportunities to do better, it was also energy. He found himself exhausted, not by the work, but by the contortion of avoiding it. And when things went wrong, the blame went up.

“When I hear people say, ‘Well, they’re not allowing us to do this’—I’m like, who? Well, you know, they. I’m like, well, who’s they? Give me names.”

He asks because he did the same thing. For years, Matthew delegated up, waiting for the company or his boss to authorize what he already knew needed to be done. Pointing at the people above him when nothing happened. The moment he honestly reflected, and began to understand the boundaries he was setting for himself, things began to shift in place.

If you are waiting for someone else to authorize you, you’ve already decided you do not deserve the role you are in.

Everyone else is worried about the same thing. Worried about messing up, about the Wall Street Journal story, about what happens when it goes wrong. Matthew knows that feeling—he faced it. But how you handle the mess is what sets you and your business apart.

“How you handle things not only teaches yourself about your own relationship with resilience, but everybody else is watching. Your peers are watching. Your subordinates are watching. Your bosses are watching. Whoever it is.”

Resilience is essential for development. The mistakes that feel monumental can be momentary when teams turn setbacks into pivotal learning moments. Giving in to avoidance and repeating what’s easy will not get you where you want to be.

The lesson that stuck with Matthew came from his father:

“If you don’t authorize yourself, if you’re waiting around for others to authorize you, I guarantee you, you will have waited too long.”

Stop waiting and start doing. The light will always be yellow unless you turn it green.

“Wokery Pokery”

“Are you sure you’re sticking with this whole do-good for the planet stuff?”

**Q: Has the woke movement gotten too woke and excluded itself from business as usual? Or succeeded too well and scared companies into inactivity? **

For years, the debate around corporate purpose has pushed many businesses into silence. Ben & Jerry’s faced it firsthand around their sustainability initiatives. Unilever took grief in the financial press for positions its leaders took and held. But what’s actually driving the backlash?

“A lot of [the anti-woke movement] has no care for the topics. It’s monetizing conflict.”

The backlash is not ideological, it’s financial. Companies retreating in response aren’t being careful. They are being played.

The players who have made money a certain way for a long time do not want anything threatening their successful business model. A microplastics problem, a chemical concern, or a water contamination issue can somehow become a P&L threat instead of a product problem.

Hiding no longer works. The holding statement is dead. Consumers do not read statements, they watch behavior. And now more than ever, they notice the gap between what a brand says and what it ships, funds, lobbies for, and pays its people.

“You are what you do, not what you say. [If] You don’t have a walk before your talk, you’re inviting criticism.”

The companies getting called out are not always the ones doing the most harm. They are the ones whose words did not translate into tangible actions.

Trust: The Hidden Fuel

**Q: What’s the through-line connecting all of this? **

**Matthew: “Trust.” **

It sounds simple. It is not.

We are living through what Matthew calls a “manufactured moment of terror.” Governments stress out their people. Institutions losing credibility. AI is developing so quickly, we cannot keep up. There is, he says, a war on trust across government, business, technology, science, academia. And most leaders aren’t treating it as the business problem it actually is.

“We crave trust and there’s a real lack of it. And so that’s the first thing I look for when I get to a team, whether I walk into a small team room, a huddle room, or I walk into a room of a thousand people—my radar is on the trust.”

When Matthew walks into a team huddle or an all-hands of a thousand people, his radar is already on. Not on the agenda… on the room. What is the level of trust here? Has it gone up or down? Has anyone diagnosed why? Too many people inside organizations are distracted by their own exhaustion, their lack of trust in management, or their fear of what AI is about to do to their role. And that distraction has a direct impact on corporate performance.

And you can’t cold brew your way out of it.

“This collapse of employee-trust, employee-engagement—you can have as much cold brew and kombucha on tap. If people are not feeling connected to what you’re doing every day, you are taxing your own profits. You will fall short.”

The same is true when a business gets acquired. The instinct is to syndicate it—bolt it on, absorb the costs, ask whether it can scale. Those are the wrong questions. They lead to answers that destroy value. What you actually have to ask is how you nurture something and grow it from the core out. Disconnection is expensive whether it’s a person or an organization.

“If you want to do great things, you need a lot of trust—and if people don’t trust you, they won’t help you—and if we don’t help each other, we can’t do big things.”

He also clarifies to be careful about the labels we use. Toxic people, he says, is a term we reach for too quickly.

“Most people are not toxic, right? We use that term ‘toxic people.’ Most people are engaging in toxic behavior because of some reason.”

He’s seen countless situations where trust was low, fear was high, and both results and people suffered. The worst bosses he had were probably going through something that caused them to behave badly. That reframe—from toxic person to person in a toxic moment—requires something most organizations and people aren’t considering: curiosity.

Curiosity, he says, is the precursor to every great idea. It’s what turns a problem into a breakthrough. But curiosity is hard to sustain when trust is low and fear is high. The two can’t coexist for long.

Business, Matthew reminds us, is not the enemy. We work. We want to be proud of what we produce and the impact we have—money is part of that. There is a long list of things that business does wrong, and he’s the first to acknowledge his own faults. But that’s not an argument for businesses staying out of the hard conversations about things that truly matter.

“All businesses are groups of people that have come together to do something. All humans have values. Therefore, all organizations have values. So this whole idea of, check your values at the door, is not just outdated. It’s a dangerous distortion.”

Trust is the fuel. The biggest obstacles to growth, impact, and performance are usually the ones organizations put up for themselves to cross. Which raises the question Matthew keeps coming back to:

“How do you build an organization that doesn’t get in its own way?”

The “Crucible Moment”

**Q: In the spirit of the podcast—what has been the hardest part for you? **

He calls it his “crucible moment.” Unsatisfied employees, struggling management, a board not fully qualified to give the guidance it’s supposed to give, and a parent company freaking out—all at once. The pressure comes from having to choose between two things, both of which are important. So how do you make that choice? Well, that’s what being a CEO is all about.

“Often you’re in the business of choosing between two painful things. And people want to romanticize too often that there’s right decisions and wrong decisions.”

“You could say—boohoo, that’s what CEOs get paid to do. And that’s true. I don’t have a whole lot of sympathy for CEOs, including myself.”

But that’s not actually where he’s going.

The CEO framing is becoming less relevant by the day. As organizations flatten and spans of control widen, the decisions that used to sit with the C-suite are now sitting with people who never signed up for them. A middle manager choosing between laying off people including their friends, or defaulting on payments. Instead of being strictly an executive dilemma, responsibility has spread across organizations that do not have the right culture to support it.

Tariffs landing overnight. Regulations change every twenty minutes. The external pressure is relentless. And internally, people are still expected to make decisions with guaranteed pain on both sides.

“We’re still wanting to talk about CEOs or C-suites or activist investors or boards. And those folks are all fine, but they are becoming increasingly less relevant every day as spans of control and distribution of authority happens within the organization. And I don’t know that we’ve actually done the right culture work to understand how we support people who are in positions of making decisions that have guaranteed pain.”

What Matthew keeps coming back to is compassion. Everyone who ever treated him badly was probably dealing with something tough. He just did not know it yet. The lesson: consider before you decide who someone is.

“We really need to have real talk about how we’re supporting each other through very difficult decisions.”

Humans make the business. They make the big decisions. And who is it all for? Humans. We just keep forgetting that.

This article is adapted from a transcript of a conversation recorded by Grounded for "It Shouldn't Be This Hard," the podcast that dives deep into the messy, meaningful work of responsible business and conscious leadership.

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