Joining me on this week’s episode of Ethical Voices is Mike Farber, the co-founder of GreenStory, an environmental storytelling agency partnering with companies and organizations taking on the climate crisis. He discusses a number of important ethics issues, including:
- Why the most important ethics decision happens before you hire a person or client
- Why “It’s legal” is one of the most dangerous phrases in communications
- Why comms leaders must reclaim the truth
Tell us more about yourself and your career.
We’ve known each other for a very long time from back at sort of the beginning of both our careers.
We were both at Schwartz Communications. Before that I went to Boston College undergrad as a communications poli sci dual major, and then I picked up a law degree from Penn. So, I got that sort of legal training and as you’ll hear those two things combined for some of my worldview on ethics issues.
After a really nice, long stint at Schwartz, I became a founding partner in Boston for an agency that’s still cranking along, doing wonderful work called LaunchSquad. After a combined 20 plus years, my partner Carolyn and I just took a break.
Our kids went off to college, and we reassessed where everything was and thought about what we’re doing in terms of our professional and personal lives. I realized I really wanted to bring my professional skills to the issue I care most about, which is climate. So I co-founded a boutique agency with a remarkable business partner named Megan Mayhew Bergman called GreenStory.
What is the most difficult ethical challenge you ever confronted?
I’m going to do a classic comms thing here where I’m going to reframe the question a little bit. Any kind of challenge, particularly ones that can be a little bit dicey, like an ethical one, are best addressed by not having to deal with them in the first place.
I find the best way to do that with agencies and companies is to be super aware during the hiring process for people and during the selection process for clients as to whether or not there is an ethical match.
My undergraduate experience at Boston College, a Jesuit school, helped me learn a lot about was right and wrong and how to bring that to all parts of your professional and personal life.
That, together with my upbringing, really developed a core that made me recognize that the most important thing you can do in anything, including work, is to work with people that you respect – people that share your ethical views. Now, candidly, it’s close to impossible to really suss that out in a client.
It’s easier when hiring. So early on, I always wanted to be involved with hiring. Steve and Paula Mae, super ethical people, my LaunchSquad partners, super ethical people.
There starts to be a DNA piece where you find people who have a sort of approach to things so that when there is an issue, it’s actually not an issue because it can be navigated very easily.
Where it gets trickier is the client part, right? Because there’s an inevitable dance between wanting to have the kinds of clients that motivate your teams, that you’re going to be able to make a real difference for, and will make a difference in the world.
And then the fundamental reality of the fact that you’re running a business and you have to generate revenue. There are certainly situations where there were things about the interaction with the potential client during the new business process that gave us pause. And a lot of it times it just had to do with that sort of soft fit issue.
It could just be things that are discussed in the meeting where they talk about certain expectations or a view of what public relations and communications is. They use words like spin or discuss shaping stories in a way that is inauthentic.
That’s not our work. Our work is to help organizations figure out who they are and authentically bring that forward with a voice across different sorts of channels that reach all their different audiences and tell the truth.
Think at your core what your makeup is and then use your influence to help shape your organization and the clients of your organizations choose to work with.
One of the things I talk about a lot when I speak is we need to make ethics part of the hiring process. We ask many questions about how they would handle something professionally about and about past work. But most do not ask ethics questions and that’s where you can get into trouble. If you want to hire an ethical person, you need to understand. What are their ethics? How do they approach things? Or do they not even realize something is an ethical issue?
Patrice Tanaka talked about this a lot. She said she’d always ask people in interviews, what’s your purpose in life? And she said half the people were looking at her like a deer in the headlights and she’d just move on. But the others…it would her see their focus – self, family, company, community or society. It’s a really interesting tell.
Absolutely. Whenever I hire, I’m looking at character and makeup first.
I’m going to assume that virtually everyone, except maybe people at a very senior level, can figure out how to do the work. It’s more what kind of human are you, what are your values? Can you work in the sort of team structure that we’re setting up? Can we work together easily in a way where we can have creative tension, but ultimately, we have the same values.
That then gives you a really strong backbone when you wind up in a situation, usually on the client side, which needs to be addressed in a very precise way.
Occasionally, clients will make missteps. What’s your recommendation when a client does make an ethical misstep or asks you to do something unethical? How do you recommend professionals address that?
The first thing I would say is it would depend on what the misstep is, right? There are different levels of ethical missteps, if someone is embezzling money…
Luckily that’s an easy scenario though, nobody agrees that embezzlement is good.
…Yep. Although, you would be surprised because some practitioners would probably try and come up with a strategy to make it look better. So that’s a situation in which you and I are agreed.
It’s very absolute, right? Sometimes it just becomes a little bit more problematic. What I would say is first, and this is where the lawyer comes in, is what are the actual facts.
Do not cloud it with trying to create a narrative while you’re getting facts, you are strictly in fact-finding mode. Try and figure out, first did they break the law? And then and I think this is really important, I learned this in law school too. Just because it’s legal doesn’t mean it’s right.
That’s where having shared DNA with your own company can be really helpful. Trying to assess what’s happening with the client situation and then helping the client navigate that candidly will depend partially on their reaction.
I am always going to be saying, you need to tell the truth. You need to be transparent. You need to own it. And if that is counsel they are not willing to take, then I would say we’re at a crossroads. And that to me is a situation in which you can walk away and probably should walk away from a client because they are not representing your collective organizational values.
What do you personally see as the key ethics challenge for today and tomorrow?
Telling the truth.
It is mortifying to me that the answer has to be that obvious, but everything that’s happening at a political level, and then you see it trickling down to companies and community where all of a sudden, it’s okay to lie.
How is that a thing?
Part of what I think public relations and communications professionals have the opportunity to do in this situation is show leadership around truth and recognizing that we have the responsibility to be truthsayers at a time where the truth isn’t necessarily something that is always placed at a premium.
There are many ways I could go with that, but what do you do when your clients say all our competitors are inflating claims. If we tell the truth, we’re going to be at a competitive disadvantage.
Run your lane. That’s one of the things I’ve always told my clients. It’s one of the things I tell people I mentor. I understand that there are competitive pressures. It’s a competitive, capitalistic world, but the companies that have succeeded the most have their own North Star. They know what they’re doing.
They don’t get in the muck. They work towards what they think should happen and they have a corporate culture and a value set that aligns with that while understanding that other companies will be doing other things. You just have to recognize that’s going to be noise. Candidly, if that’s going to knock you off kilter and make you not succeed, then you probably weren’t good enough to succeed.
What about the case when people are not telling the truth about you and your organization? There’s a lot more misinformation, disinformation bias, partisan advocacy in every direction. How do you counteract the untruths?
It’s unreal. There’s just so many ways to, to slice that. But there’s a couple things that instantly come to mind. The first thing is to not object too strenuously, as weird as that sounds.
When you aggressively address an untruth, then all you’re doing is elevating the untruth. I am a big fan of show, don’t tell. Do what is core to your DNA and continue doing it.
Of course, you’re going to have to acknowledge this other stuff that’s happening. But what you don’t want to do is you don’t want to get in a name calling scenario.
There’s a whole other answer for this in the political realm, but for companies it is important to stay who you are. Then also remember your own audiences. This is something I think a lot of times comms professionals don’t always prioritize. You forget who your audiences are. People speak very generically about doing this and this, but every company has very specific audiences that they should be addressing.
If you’ve done a good job at creating the narrative and understanding your own DNA, you have a firm understanding of who your audiences are. And you can speak to them appropriately.
Let me give you an example that’s maybe a sidestep from your question, but I think relevant.
At GreenStory, we work with all sorts of companies and organizations. If you are the Conservation Law Foundation, which is literally the tip of the spear against the Trump administration with regards to litigation around climate issues, you are aggressive. Because you are literally the leading guard in the courts to protect against everything that’s happening, right?
So, you’re thinking about your audience. Your audience are your donors? Your audience are people who are angry about everything that’s happening. Your audience are different lawyers, so boom.
But say that you are more of a consumer company that has, maybe you were created because of what you can do from a climate perspective.
One of the wonderful things about climate and sustainability is there are benefits way beyond the climate benefits. For instance, EVs. They’re better vehicles. They’re faster, they’re easier to maintain. So, you start leaning more because your audience is different on some of the benefits. They’re almost climate adjacent.
So that’s again, a sidestep towards audience, but I think that audience is something you always think about regardless of what you’re doing from a comms perspective.
I love how you said show it rather than tell it. The Page Principles make it very clear…prove it with action.
What is the best piece of ethics advice you ever received?
Tell the truth.
And then the other one is just because it’s legal, doesn’t mean it’s right.
Ultimately, I think communications needs to be super simple to be effective. It’s easy to come up with these long answers but it’s really that simple.
In this day and age, it’s even more critical to tell the truth and recognize just because something is legal, it may not be right.
Is there anything I didn’t ask you that you wanted to highlight?
I would emphasize a point I made before, which is a lot of times people in communications roles don’t necessarily see themselves as people that can advocate for a certain point of view, particularly when it comes to potentially coming at loggerheads with what a company’s trying to do to navigate through a very difficult situation.
It’s important for comms professionals to have that backbone, but then also be able to make the case to senior management. In the long term, the right thing to do is always the right thing to do because it’s going to appeal to all your different core constituencies, starting with your people, which for many companies is their most important asset. People want to work for companies that are aligned with their values that inspire them.
It’s very easy to feel like you can take a shortcut on that because at the highest levels of government, the truth is not being told.
But we get the opportunity as comms people to tell the truth and help companies stay the line.
Listen to the full interview, with bonus content, here:
- Climate, Truth, and the Ethics of Saying No - January 12, 2026
- This Week in PR Ethics – 1/7/26: Robots, Start Ups and Oh So Many Failures - January 7, 2026
- Somebody Has to Ask the Question: Mentorship, AI, and Ethical Courage - January 5, 2026
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