Business: force for harm or good?
Karen, Richard, and Matt are professional relations: business partners who are also family members. This issue, Karen interviews her husband Richard about Foggy Outline’s forthcoming course, Doing Business on a Sick Planet, with editing by their son Matt.
“This course is one I’ve always wanted to write.”
Karen: We’ve created quite a number of courses now, all related to climate breakdown. What makes this one different?
Richard: This course is one I’ve always wanted to write. It’s aimed at an audience I’ve never really talked to before: it’s directed specifically at owners and managers of businesses.
It’s encouraging them to make changes in the way they think about the environment, or the way they make business decisions. So it’s not specifically a climate breakdown course or an environmental course. It’s a course about business decision-making.
I’ve always felt there is an issue with the way people do business. That business does business for the sake of generating profit, not thinking about the wider issues that business has an effect on. Business can be a force for good, but it can also be a force for incredible harm, as we see in some of the examples we use in the course.
Karen: In our previous courses we’ve always said “everybody needs to know this”. Has your writing process been different in going for a more targeted audience?
Richard: Yeah, the writing process was quite different for this one. It started off as a short presentation, just to trial the idea. That morphed into a slightly longer presentation I was intending to do at the Learning Zone back in September last year. And it developed on from there – it became a different sort of course.
The other thing was that we’ve never intended this course to go on our usual platform of Udemy. We’ve always intended this course to be put on our own website, to sell it directly.
“Business can be a force for good, but it can also be a force for incredible harm”
Karen: So what are the pros and cons of that decision?
Richard: The main reason we went for Udemy is that we don’t have an audience. We didn’t have our own mailing list. We don’t have people we can send a course out to and expect them to buy it.
So we always assumed that we would put our courses on Udemy, who have the marketing reach, who have the audience. We would forgo some revenue for them to get the courses out to a bigger audience. Which, to some extent, has been really successful.
What we’ve realised, though, is: we’re getting paid very little. We’re paid a tiny amount for every minute that somebody’s watching the courses. And also: there’s no way of us contacting our learners.
So we’re getting some feedback, from learners saying they enjoyed the course, or giving it 4.5 or 5-star reviews – but we don’t own their emails. We’re not able to go to them and say, “We just put the new course out!” We’ve got to do all that through Udemy.
We’ve been advised by a number of different people that we should be trying to do things for ourselves, so we can build up our own audience for selling other things. The difficulty is we’re having to build our audience from scratch.
I feel it’s an important course to get out there. Whether the intended audience will feel the same, I really don’t know.
Karen: Time will tell, I guess.
Richard: Time will tell.
There’s more to this interview. Buy us a cuppa on Ko-fi to support our work, and you can read the unabridged versions of this and every Professional Relations interview.
🇮🇹 12-14 September, Corato: I Need A Miracle’s first ever festival screening, at Apulia Web Fest. The show is award-nominated in the Fiction Podcasts (Narrative Fiction) category.
🇺🇸 25-28 September, New Jersey: I Need A Miracle’s second festival screening, at New Jersey Web Fest. The show is up for two awards: Outstanding Fantasy Scripted Audio Fiction, and Best Leading Performance in a Scripted Audio Fiction for Saffron Coomber.
👕 30 September, Elsworth at the Mill: Richard’s launching Doing business on a sick planet with a talk at the Skipton Business Social called A tale of two tee shirts – and why it’s important for your business. Tickets £14.
🪙 For everyone who buys our ebook What do we mean by climate breakdown? in August, we’re donating 50p to Friends of the Dales. For everyone who buys it in September, we’re donating 50p to Action on Climate Emergency.
🚲 Karen and Matt talked about technofeudalism last time; Josh Meissner adds ‘komooting’ to the 21st-century tech behaviour lexicon in an article that goes deeper into similar issues.
📖 Since Matt highlighted Dr Julia Shaw a couple of issues ago, she’s announced a book that’s right up our street: Green Crime, a look at six environmental crimes that reveal how the people killing our ecosystem think.
⛲️ Karen and Richard made their Merely Roleplayers debut in an interview about the world after climate breakdown. Follow the podcast to hear Matt, Alexander Pankhurst, Natalie Winter and Chris Starkey bring that world to life with their roleplaying.
🌳 Matt joined Ellie, Strat and Alex on Fiona Howat’s What Am I Rolling? for part 2 of Babes in the Wood, playing a tree child in an acorn cup hat.
🃏 Matt’s playing Spindlewheel, the tarot-like interpretive roleplaying game by Sasha Reneau, @merelymatt on Bluesky, Tumblr and Instagram throughout August as part of the #RPGaDay2025 challenge.
Let's play #RPGaDay2025 Solo Spindlewheel.
— Merely Matt (@merelymatt.bsky.social) 2025-08-01T14:24:57.006Z
🔬 Matt published No way out, chapter 6 of Camera Obscura. What do you do when the biggest threat to the integrity of your data might be you?
Richard highlights Patrick Grant:
Patrick is an award-winning designer and a strong critic of fast fashion and synthetic fabrics. He’s also the force behind Community Clothing, a clothing brand that makes good clothes while creating and sustaining skilled textile jobs in the UK.