C.E.O.s Revolted Against Trump. Now Comes the Hard Part.

New York Times (Op-Ed) 

C.E.O.s Revolted Against Trump. Now Comes the Hard Part.

By JEFFREY A. SONNENFELD

August 18, 2017

New Haven — This week the American business community did something virtually unprecedented in its history: It shunned the call to national service by the commander in chief. In the wake of President Trump’s horrifying, un-American equivalence of neo-Nazi storm troopers with the peaceful counter-demonstrators at their weekend rally in Charlottesville, Va., first one, then another, then a flood of chief executives quit his business councils. Now they need to do more.

The courageous Ken Frazier, Merck’s revered, high-performing C.E.O., was the first to speak out. In his resignation letter on Monday, he wrote, “As C.E.O. of Merck and as a matter of personal conscience, I feel a responsibility to take a stand against intolerance and extremism.” Mr. Frazier is something of a modern-day Joseph N. Welch, the Boston lawyer who in 1954 punctured the demagogy of Joe McCarthy by asking the senator in a hearing, “Have you left no sense of decency?”

Mr. Frazier is the epitome of the American dream, having grown up in gang-infested North Philadelphia, the son of a well-read custodian, to become one of three black Fortune 500 chief executives at the time. President Trump predictably attacked him, which immediately backfired; over the next several days, C.E.O.s who had once shunned politics came to his vocal defense, including the heads of Walmart, Intel, BlackRock and IBM.

Chief executives, we’ve been told, long refused to criticize the president because of overlap between his supporters and their customers, and because of the president’s vicious Twitter game. But the real problem was that no one wanted to go first; once Mr. Frazier stepped forward, he gave cover to the rest.

Now that America’s business leaders have refused their ornamental role, is their work done? No. In fact, the hard part has only begun.

As Ginni Rometty of I.B.M. said, they must still work with the president: “IBM will continue to work with all parts of the government for policies that support job growth, vocational education and global trade, as well as fair and informed policies on immigration and taxation.” There is bipartisan agreement that America desperately needs tax reform, health care reform and trade adjustments, none of which can happen successfully without input from the business community. Like it or not, a failure in the White House is a failure for America.

One way to do this is through a reinvigorated Business Roundtable. Two hundred top chief executives founded the Roundtable in 1972 after years of watching the business community’s public image decline. Working sometimes with Washington but often on its own, the Roundtable tackled problems like improving global workplace conditions, retraining, diversity and environmental sustainability.

I came to know many of these noble business leaders while writing a book called “The Hero’s Farewell.” They understood that their jobs went beyond their office walls. Reginald Jones of G.E. was one of the first chief executives to champion the term “corporate social responsibility.” In fact, their lofty missions were so virtuous that G.E.’s Jack Welch, a generation later, complained to me that they had taken their eyes off the ball of their own firms’ competitiveness, preferring to work on social issues instead of parochial commercial concerns.

Sadly, by the 1990s the Business Roundtable had become cynical and distant. And as public trust in the business community plummeted in the wake of Enron and other scandals of the early 2000s, the group pulled back. When support for financial reform did come from the business world, it was usually from a previous generation, from men like William H. Donaldson, a Korean War veteran and financier who led the Securities and Exchange Commission under George W. Bush.

Today the Roundtable is at a crossroads. In recent years it has seen new, strong leadership from people like Ivan Seidenberg of Verizon, James McNerney of Boeing and Randall Stephenson of AT&T. Jeff Kindler of Pfizer worked valiantly to try to build a consensus during the creation of Obamacare. Others dug in on the budget wars of the early 2010s. At the same time, these leaders often championed state and local social justice causes below the national radar.

But Mr. Seidenberg, Mr. McNerney and Mr. Kindler have all left their positions, and today many chief executives — including 90 percent of those polled at a recent C.E.O. conference I helped organize — are unhappy with the Roundtable’s performance (they are encouraged by the Roundtable’s new leadership, Jamie Dimon of J.P. Morgan).

These executives, either separately or through the Roundtable, need to continue to recapture their community’s old spirit of social engagement. They need to support mayors and governors trying to navigate the difficult issue of Confederate monuments. They need to speak clearly to the president, on this and other issues. Whatever he says publicly, he still admires them and needs their expertise as well as their influence.

It is not enough for them to take a stand or leave a ceremonial post. As the industrialist George Weyerhaeuser told me in 1978: “We have a license to operate from society, and if we violate its terms, it can be withdrawn. Citizenship is part of that contract.”

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld is the senior associate dean of leadership studies and a professor of management practice at the Yale School of Management.

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