Corporate Leaders Need to Keep Their Mouths Shut

New York Times

29-01-2025

After more than a year of exhausting controversies over free expression at colleges and universities, America's business leaders would do well to take a simple lesson from embattled leaders in higher education:
Keep your mouth shut.
The lesson has become even more important with the recent gravitation of some corporate leaders toward President Trump. Such public fawning, which would have been unthinkable just a few years ago, demonstrates how unprincipled and fickle corporate political positions have always been.
Increasingly, universities have adopted neutrality policies to recommit to their core mission. So can corporations. The key is committing to institutional neutrality, which requires leaders to stay silent on social and political issues that do not directly affect their operations. This means reining in corporate political statements — progressive and conservative — as well as the political activity of chief executives like Elon Musk and political flip-flops by companies like Meta. Our own university, the University of Chicago, committed to this ideal in 1899 and restated that commitment in the seminal Kalven Report of 1967. This has freed individuals in our community to express their own opinions and ideas in lively debate.
For decades, few other universities have made this commitment. But its value for them — and for business corporations — has become clearer over the past year. The Gaza war created a no-win situation for university leaders accustomed to speaking out on political issues. On the one hand, bland institutional statements on current events have no impact, satisfy no one and relegate the institution to a role as a second-rate political actor. On the other, statements with real substance threaten to alienate and silence those who disagree. As a result, more than two dozen schools, including Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania — whose presidents resigned, in part, after stumbling at a congressional hearing on campus antisemitism — have now adopted neutrality policies akin to Chicago's. More are in the works.
Corporate leaders in the private sector can benefit from these hard lessons.
Along with students and faculty members, some employees, shareholders and customers take the view that 'silence is violence.' They demand that management take positions on issues outside the remit of the company, even if there are other stakeholders — older employees, customers of a different political affiliation — who would disagree. Corporate boards and chief executives have increasingly given in to the demands, creating a virtue cascade. As more companies speak out, it creates competitive pressure on others to join in. They have taken to issuing vanilla statements conveying no real information about their culture or purpose. And predictably, the few times when statements veered away from the mainstream, the corporations were pressured to backtrack.
Notoriously, Disney's now former chief executive Bob Chapek drew criticism from employees and a furious response from Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida with his reaction to the state's Parental Rights in Education legislation, also known as the 'Don't Say Gay' bill. Waffling from silence to explaining that silence to a firm statement of opposition, Mr. Chapek's approach was a fiasco that alienated almost everyone, including Mr. DeSantis and the Disney employees who opposed the bill.
While some other corporate leaders may be enjoying the favor they have found in taking sides, they would be wise to heed the lesson of Ivy League schools that discovered the benefits of institutional neutrality a little too late. These corporations would benefit from adopting a formal policy that guides their leaders on when, if ever, they may speak out.
A policy of this sort should have two foundational components.
First, there must be a commitment by the corporation and its leaders to refrain from speaking. This is valuable because it allows one to assert that silence is a considered (and consistent) policy. In fact, institutional silence should be the default assumption. With regard to individual chief executives like Elon Musk, this default policy should require silence in any context where their speech, like that of university presidents, might be attributed to the entire company. Mr. Musk may present a unique case because his pervasive policy influence, for now, on the Trump administration, and because its regulatory activity could actually benefit Tesla and Mr. Musk's other companies. But for most chief executives, political advocacy that is unrelated to the corporation's core operations tends to be self-defeating. It remains to be seen whether Mr. Musk's political gambit will be an exception or prove the rule.
Of course, there will sometimes be a compelling business case for corporate speech. Ben & Jerry's, for example, has adopted a strong social justice branding that does not seem to hamper its bottom line. Other times, a unified or crucial employee bloc or customer base may have such strong views that the corporation adopts a formal policy of speaking on a specific issue.
In 2020, the commissioner of the National Basketball Association issued a statement on racial injustice and police brutality that was consistent with the positions and boycotts taken by a unified bloc led by its marquee players.
The recent policy flips that Mark Zuckerberg announced at Meta — ending its fact-checking program and loosening content moderation — may constitute another gray area. On the one hand, these are operational decisions. On the other, their original adoption and more recent recission were undoubtedly related to politics. And a company or university's need to backtrack — just as in the cases of Mr. Chapek at Disney and the presidents at Harvard and Penn — powerfully demonstrates the no-win nature of playing amateur politics.
For large corporations, such operational exceptions should be rare. In a world of diverse viewpoints, the decision to favor one constituency over another is fraught and should not be made lightly. With varied employees and customers — young and old, liberal and conservative — meaningful statements are more likely to alienate than to satisfy. At the very least, the decision to speak on political issues should be part of a deliberate corporate governance policy.
Second, there must be a clearly stated — and ideally, narrow — exception for statements that are necessary to maintain or defend the company's ability to operate. Boards should think about exactly which types of circumstances warrant an exception and then leave it to the judgment of management about how to apply the policy. One could imagine a company saying, 'It is our policy that Best Widget Inc. will not make institutional statements on political matters that do not directly affect our ability to operate. We influence society through producing the best widgets.' This would allow speech on widget regulation, as well as on policies implicating the business's direct relationships with employees and customers. But it would not include a corporate policy extrinsic to its business interests.
Without neutrality policies, we can expect many of the same chief executives who have been currying favor with Mr. Trump to turn back left with the next political wind.
In both the business and university contexts, silence often takes courage and a commitment to institutional modesty. For a corporation, a general policy of silence can remind stakeholders that the business of the business is, well, business.