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 C-suite grandees thinking twice:
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’s pushback against Disney has raised the stakes.
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:
“The No. 1 concern CEOs have is, ‘When should I speak out on public issues?’ ” said Bill George, former chairman and CEO of Medtronic PLC and now a senior fellow at Harvard Business School. “As one CEO said to me, ‘I want to speak out on social issues, but I don’t want to get involved in politics.’ Which I said under my breath, ‘That’s not possible.’ ”
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.
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:
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. “You make it a safe forum where people feel comfortable talking about concerns or whatever, and out of that, there’s really a kind of responsibility on our part to pick up on things that really do demand some attention,” said Nancy Langer, CEO of Transact Campus Inc., a financial- technology company based near Phoenix. “I look at that as a feedback loop for us.”
The challenge, as always, is to ensure the loop doesn’t become a noose.
I saw this coming back in 2010. I was taking extension classes at UH. I saw what the universities were up to — not the activist students, but the faculty. They were teaching the kids that their lives were meaningless outside of radical social activism. Their job, as human beings privileged with a university education, was to leverage whatever position they found themselves in to fiercely promote a radical left agenda. The academics would provide them with intellectual justification.
There is no desire to actually help living human beings. It is all rage, all of the time. Leftists need conservatives because leftists need someone to hate and blame for their unhappiness. The reason why Larry David’s parody of Bernie Sanders never took off is because Sanders is almost uniquely without humor. There is no joy in the man.
The HR execs and the public school teachers are the worst of the lot.
My thought is that companies need to be sure they’re all in before making political statements. For example, when IBM told North Carolina that a facility there would come only after Jim Crow was gone, they already had a long record of extending opportunities to all. They were all in. Other companies, when they say “keep taxing and regulating us, and we’ll show up as an empty building in your community”, are all in by necessity.
Some of these other things, like the “trans” and such? Are they really all in for this, really? I just got an add from a shoe company that traditionally caters to businessmen and such presenting their wares on a host of “diversity” wearers. OK, is there really enough business in these areas to change the marketing approach?
Some use employee affinity groups to help flag potentially troublesome issues.
Why is it that these affinity groups almost always invariably represent libturd issues? Why is it they have so many troublesome issues?
Bikebubba wrote:
I just got an add from a shoe company that traditionally caters to businessmen and such presenting their wares on a host of “diversity” wearers.
Look at the person who actually controls how the company spends its advertising dollars.
When a company makes one of these tone deaf, politically correct decisions, we would learn quite a bit if you could see who chose to make this issue important and who had to sign off on it. I know in some cases some lowly intern charged with running a company’s twitter account takes it onto themselves to invent company policy.
We saw the process in the leaked Disney Zoom meeting video. It is ugly and bullying. People you would not trust to escort your child to and from the bathroom believe that they are better parents than you are.
The function of a corporation is to make money for shareholders while shielding them from risk. The function of a Board of Directors is to oversee employees who make that happen.
I have some sympathy for Directors who feel they must make politically correct changes as Danegeld to the Left, to avoid massive unfavorable publicity toward their brand. “That’s a nice company you got there; be a shame if anything bad happened to it” can justify small changes to protect shareholder profits, such as updating the image of Aunt Jemima or removing the Land O Lakes Indian maiden. I hate it, but I understand it.
I lose my sympathy when the changes appear to be heartfelt political activism. Twitter and Facebook are the poster children for that. I understand that and I hate it even more.
The hard part is deciding which is which. The Brandon Administration created an Office of Censorship to go after Conservatives. Duck Duck Go re-wrote its search algorithms to de-emphasize Conservative sources. Coincidence or coordination? Defensive tactic or political activism? Hard to tell.
Unhappy employees demanding political action? Not the Board’s job. Fire them.
Disney’s chief executive Bob Chapek’s ‘Don’t Say Gay’ drama is a crisis of his own making.
I think it should be said that certain employees and individuals now expect companies to take the exact positions they have, without question, regardless of the desires of other consumers, employees or stakeholders.
But, Joe Doakes, these people, many or most of them, have protected status. An organization emptied of its woke warriors would be whiter and more male than before.
Another reason why today’s titans of corporate activity are private equity firms who don’t have to deal with the growing grievance industry, beyond adult management of risk and opportunity. The number of public companies is already shrinking dramatically and that trend is not set to stop any time soon.
I’ve sat through a few of these internal corporate kumbaya sessions for initiatives with acronyms my mind has automatically blocked. They all have very long and torturous reasons for how these actually have anything to do with our core mission.
Yesterday, during one such call with the marketing team, the words of David Ogilvy kept coming back to me: “But how much soap does it sell?”
Disney was an extreme case. “Don’t support grooming children for degenerate sex and genital mutilation when parents are your target market” seems like something anyone short of an 80 IQ leftist, degenerate could figure out.
Imagine that you are a minority female HR manager.
You make company policies. You decide what is “best practice.” If your wokeness gets you fired, you know the weaknesses that will allow you to successfully sue your employer, because you created them.
The boardroom has good reason to fear the woke HR manager.
MP, woke HR flunkees who aspire to be managers know this as well. It is a concerted infiltration much like academia and entertainment.
They’re just not so woke that they refuse to work for THE (wo)MAN.