Heli explains how her early work grew out of the resource-based view of the firm. Highly firm-specific resources, including employees' specialized skills, create competitive advantage but also expose both the firm and its stakeholders to risk if conditions change. That interest in stakeholder risk led her to corporate philanthropy, which she approached as a strategic activity that builds goodwill, trust, and relational capital rather than simple gifting. It also led to her influential 2011 AMJ paper on philanthropy, financial performance, and stakeholder response, which showed how philanthropy can open political access in China and helped shape the non-market strategy field. Her later CSR work moved from testing the CSR–performance link toward looking inside the "black box" of what companies actually do, in areas such as donations, the environment, and employee welfare. She and Anita agree that CSR does not directly raise financial returns but supports legitimacy, access to resources, and a firm's license to operate.

In the second half, Heli discusses the current backlash against ESG and DEI, especially U.S. state-level anti-ESG legislation. She argues that companies with real commitments, such as investments in facilities, operations, and innovation, generally don't reverse course. Many change how they communicate their efforts rather than what they do, and she is optimistic that a significant number of firms stay committed to their core practices. For her current work, she describes a field experiment on how NGOs influence corporate environmental compliance. It compares confrontational pressure with collaborative help, and finds that engaging a company's other stakeholders works better than approaching the company directly. She is also writing a conceptual paper on "CSR externalities," where a well-intentioned action helps one group but harms another, as in the example of a school-attendance program reducing family income. She argues these externalities are harder to address than classic ones because moral ambiguity makes it difficult to hold companies accountable.