{"id":81895,"date":"2022-05-03T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-05-03T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=81895"},"modified":"2022-05-02T20:44:34","modified_gmt":"2022-05-03T01:44:34","slug":"signal-to-noise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=81895","title":{"rendered":"Signal To Noise"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I’ve spent the majority of my career in the employ of Fortune 500 corporations, including my current employer. In the early years, those companies would sometimes make a show of their social goodness but they weren’t particularly wedded to a lefty agenda. That’s changed in the last 10-15 years, but recent events have some\u00a0C-suite grandees thinking twice<\/a>:\u00a0<\/p>\n

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The fallout from the recent political spat between Disney and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has alarmed leaders across the corporate sphere, according to executives and their advisers, and heightened the challenges for chief executive officers navigating charged topics.
At many companies, vocal employees have in recent years pushed bosses to take public stands on social and political issues. Florida\u2019s pushback against Disney has raised the stakes.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Yeah, it certainly has. You have to wonder why a company would choose to make their appeal, ahem, more selective, but the instinct is strong:<\/p>\n

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\u201cThe No. 1 concern CEOs have is, \u2018When should I speak out on public issues?\u2019 \u201d said Bill George, former chairman and CEO of Medtronic PLC and now a senior fellow at Harvard Business School. \u201cAs one CEO said to me, \u2018I want to speak out on social issues, but I don\u2019t want to get involved in politics.\u2019 Which I said under my breath, \u2018That\u2019s not possible.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It’s not possible. Put more simply, it’s dumb. A CEO who spends more than a passing moment thinking about social issues isn’t paying attention to what really matters. Younger employees, who have gone from participation trophies to believing their opinions are probative without much active contradiction, are difficult to manage, so the urge to mollify them is strong.<\/p>\n

My current company has a full range of employee groups that cater to the constellation of grievances of the modern Left. These groups regularly get a moment to hold forth in the latest Zoom Town Hall or on the company intranet page. There’s not a lot of evidence these groups actually improve the conditions they decry, but never mind that. It’s a chance to wave the freak flag, and as an overall strategy it makes sense:<\/p>\n

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Some executives say they have learned to monitor issues that could consume public attention and increase pressure for some response. Some use employee affinity groups to help flag potentially troublesome issues. \u201cYou make it a safe forum where people feel comfortable talking about concerns or whatever, and out of that, there\u2019s really a kind of responsibility on our part to pick up on things that really do demand some attention,\u201d said Nancy Langer, CEO of Transact Campus Inc., a financial- technology company based near Phoenix. \u201cI look at that as a feedback loop for us.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The challenge, as always, is to ensure the loop doesn’t become a noose.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve spent the majority of my career in the employ of Fortune 500 corporations, including my current employer. In the early years, those companies would sometimes make a show of their social goodness but they weren’t particularly wedded to a lefty agenda. That’s changed in the last 10-15 years, but recent events have some\u00a0C-suite grandees […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":358,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,24,434,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-81895","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economy-and-the-market","category-culture-war","category-mr-d","category-pc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81895","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/358"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=81895"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81895\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":81902,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81895\/revisions\/81902"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=81895"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=81895"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=81895"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}