This month’s program featured “Civility in Business & Politics” with guest speaker Nolan Finley, author and journalist for The Detroit News.

 

Nolan Finley, longtime Detroit News editorial page editor and columnist, was then introduced to discuss his new book, Civility, co-written with Stephen Henderson, as well as current politics ahead of the midterm elections. He opened by describing himself as politically “homeless”—a lifelong Reagan conservative who feels abandoned by the Republican Party while still rejecting the Democratic Party—and argued that neither party is truly righteous, since both are driven primarily by the pursuit and retention of power, which he sees as the root of America’s political instability.

 

He then explained the origins of his civility project with Henderson (the former liberal editorial page editor of the Detroit Free Press), begun over 15 years ago, describing how their public “battles” on TV and radio masked a genuine friendship. He illustrated this with an extended anecdote from a 2011 Mackinac Island Republican conference, where two conservative women who claimed to hate Henderson ended up warming to him after a 45-minute conversation, despite neither side changing their opinions—illustrating his point that mutual understanding can replace hatred even without agreement.

Finley explained that he and Henderson turned these ideas into their book last year, built on the premise that good people arrive at their beliefs by filtering shared information through their own personal experiences, and that these principles apply as much to business and family relationships as to politics. Drawing on a Martin Luther King quote about fear and lack of communication, he argued that people should seek to understand others’ life experiences before judging them, sharing a personal example of a falling-out with a cousin over the 2016 election to underscore how political disagreement can needlessly fracture relationships. He closed by introducing the book’s “four pillars of civility,” starting with avoiding snap assumptions based on group labels, and emphasizing that the goal of civility is mutual understanding and coexistence, not necessarily agreement.

 

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Event Details:

• Date: Thursday, September 17, 2026

• Time: 11:00 AM – 1:30 PM

• Location: Capital Region International Airport (LAN), Friendship Room near TSA

 

If you didn’t catch the previous  webinar last event with Michigan Future Business Index results, here’s that YouTube video: