Claire was looking forward to the long holiday weekend. After two brutal weeks of Afghanistan Email Address late nights and early mornings getting ready for a new product launch dealing with supplier disruptions in China and managing a sudden labor shortage in Germany. The Fortune 500 CEO was ready to catch her breath and spend some quality time with her family. The plan was to leave first thing Saturday morning to beat the traffic headed to the shore. Instead of the alarm though Claire awoke to her cellphone buzzing. It was her company’s general counsel. The night before one of the company’s top executives had been recorded drunkenly berating a waiter. Posted to Tikor within minutes the video had already amassed more than 2.5 million views and was spreading like.
Delta Air Lines and Coca-Cola eventually came out against
Social media commentators were demanding action, institutional investors were calling, and requests for comment gulf email list were flooding in from major news outlets. “Claire, how do you want to handle this?” asked the lawyer on the other end of the line. Although it sounds like a nightmare this scenario has become all too real for many CEOs. In the past few executives might have considered addressing social issues as part of their job description. Now in an era when a single tweet can obliterate US$4 billion of a company’s value. It’s become even more important for leaders to understand how to negotiate this sensitive territory. it’s a business imperative. Executives need to know how to make sense of and engage with these issues. So they can simultaneously deliver business results.
Morals are an individual’s standards for right
that satisfy shareholders build trust with their employees and meet the expectation many have that organizations are responsible for driving more equitable outcomes for society. And the issues on the table are expanding rap idly. We saw this when North Carolina passed a bill in 2016 banning transgender people from using bathrooms in public buildings that did not correspond with their birth sex. Payments firm PayPal responded by curtailing its investments in the state and performers canceled concerts and events. Amy Cooper an employee of financial services firm Franklin Templeton was summarily dismissed by the company in 2020 after social media channels exploded with outrage over a viral video of her racially charged altercation with a Black bird-watcher in New York’s Central Park.
