As someone called Stuart Kirk notes in the FT this morning:
The silence of CEOs in the face of Donald Trump's tariff chaos is one of the biggest failures of leadership in corporate history. Where are they when we need them? In the corner shuffling their shoes.
The irony is that most of our supine CEOs have been through some sort of leadership training. Almost 40 per cent of S&P 500 bosses have an MBA. Worldwide there are currently 160 management programmes specialising in leadership.
And don't forget the shelves of corporate leadership books published every year. Amazon lists more than 30,000, urging CEOs to Start with Why if they want to go from Good to Great. Lame to average would be nice.
That is a totally fair comment. With scarce exceptions, across the USA, the UK and beyond, the world's CEOS are not saying a word about Trump.
They are putting their heads down and are either enjoying the ride (which is unlikely) or are too frightened to speak (probably).
Either way, leadership is totally absent.
And we have to entertain the possibility that a descent into theocracy or autocracy might actually suit many of them quite well. Are they that far removed from the attitudes of Silicon Valley, in most cases?
When the reckoning for this era arrives, as it will, they will be amongst those having to answer for their actions.
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Big business did pretty well out of fascism in Europe in the 1920s-30s – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_collaboration_with_Nazi_Germany – and indeed Chile in the 1970s. Why would they complain this time ?
Maybe because there is a higher level of psychopathy amongst CEO’s than in the normal population. I would imagine narcissists are also high. Neoliberalism rewards them, and Trump is an epitome of the dog eat dog system.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S135917892100104X
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy_in_the_workplace
The silence is a symptom of the existing relationship between government and private corporations and the fat contracts that are issued to them by the state.
Oh, of course the CEOs are quiet. Why wouldn’t they be? They’ve got their MBAs — those shiny diplomas that supposedly make them “visionary leaders,” but seem to come with a built-in mute button for moments of moral crisis. You’d think, with the world teetering on the edge and Trump tossing grenades at global order, someone in a boardroom might say, “Hey, maybe we should take a stand.” But no. They’re too busy running simulations on shareholder value while the house burns down.
Stuart Kirk nailed it — this isn’t just a failure of leadership. It’s a full-blown exhibition in how to watch history happen from behind a frosted-glass conference room door. “How to Influence Absolutely Nothing (While Earning a Bonus).”
Let’s just be honest: these people aren’t leading. They’re waiting. Watching. Calculating. They’re corporate weather vanes, spinning in whichever direction the next quarterly return might blow. Trump could set the world trading system on fire, and they’d still be there saying, “Let’s not rush to judgement. Let’s stay… pragmatic.” Pragmatic? Really? While democracy is being bulldozed and repackaged as “efficiency”?
Sure, maybe some of them are scared. Trump is the kind of guy who’d sue a toaster if it made him look bad in the polls. But it’s not just fear. For some, let’s be real, this is the dream. No regulations. No pesky labour laws. No climate rules. Just the raw freedom to squeeze as much as possible out of everyone and everything. To replace workers with AI, turn pensions into tech bets, and call it innovation. For some CEOs, authoritarianism isn’t the threat — it’s the business model.
And what makes it worse? These are the same folks who’ve read all the books. Start With Why. Lean In. Good to Great. The Art of War (which, honestly, they quote like it’s scripture while clearly missing the bit about “knowing yourself”). They’ve mastered the TED Talk. They’ve perfected the performance of purpose. But when something actually matters — when people need courage, not jargon — they vanish.
And Silicon Valley? Well. They’re already halfway through building a digital autocracy with better UX. “Don’t be evil” was retired somewhere between the fourth funding round and the first government surveillance contract. These guys aren’t just silent — they’re complicit, coding authoritarianism into the infrastructure of everyday life and calling it progress.
Still, when history knocks, they’ll have their talking points. “We were staying neutral.” “Navigating uncertainty.” “Disrupting politics.” One day, someone’s going to teach a business school case study on this era — how an entire generation of corporate leaders met the moment with spreadsheets and silence.
Meanwhile, the rest of us are left watching — people trying to protect their rights, their communities, the planet — while those with power choose not to use it. It’s not just frustrating. It’s heartbreaking.
We’re not asking for heroism. Just humanity. Just a voice. Just one person in a corner office somewhere standing up and saying, “This isn’t okay.”
Until then, we get this: a world on fire, a democracy in crisis, and CEOs quietly uninstalling their moral compass like it’s just another outdated app.
God help us — they’re the grownups in the room.
Very good. Thank you.
Well said.
Vulture capitalists are circling.
Big Business is bad for business, as our local economies know.
They always knew the ‘free market’ shtick was covert class warfare, and are happy with a more open, authoritarian form of it.
They may start commenting when their profit margins shrink. Maybe by the next Davos meeting in January they will be bolder
Intervention into politics by rich capitalists? Hell no! I want them to keep their meddling fingers out and leave politics to elected politicians and those that elect them.
I think of the court of Henry VIII. The nobles flattering the king and watching each other carefully. Fall out of favour and your estates will be confiscated and distributed to your rivals. Then I look at the row of smiling billionaires at inauguration. Did they really want to be there? Or was it just too risky to be the one not standing and applauding?
They might like to get rid of Trump, but Trump’s greatest asset is that JD Vance is an even nastier piece of work.
Your comparison of Trump and Vance has credibility.
There is a story Charles II was on a balcony with his brother James Duke of York.
James said. ‘have a care, brother, standing here someone may shoot at you.’
‘No,’ he replied, if am dead, you become King. They won’t shoot me.’
James became king in 1685 and the Monmouth Rebellion took place. In fact the rebels walked through my village. It was put down with great barbarity.
Three years later he was deposed with no one willing to fight for him.
Let’s hope history repeats itself-sooner.
Interesting post by Robert R…………..
Henry Mintzberg I think said that ‘MBA’ stood for ‘Maybe Best Avoided’.
I had to deal with this as I did my MBA part time over 7 years.
Mine was at an emerging new university in the East Midlands that used to deliver a leadership course for the city’s council.
I actually found the course quite stimulating and ended up doing a dissertation on KM – knowledge management – which gave me an intellectual basis/architecture from which I could take on a new role. If you organised knowledge sufficiently I argued with myself, you could do just about anything. The course gave me lots of resources as well as helping me to evaluate myself as a manager and leader, assessing my strengths and weaknesses. I learnt too that, the team was the most important thing and that I should support the team. I did not have all the talents to do everything – I needed to get the people the task needed. I was resource supplier; a conductor.
However, I am heterodox by nature which means that my application of the learning was not uniform because I could not see how that benefited many of the problems I faced. It was more about trying and evaluating rather than just blindly painting by numbers,or mixing approaches. I also learnt a lot about how the operation differs from the strategic side. Work is a balancing of process and output. Not enough capacity is put into process and output will always trump process sometimes with sub-par results. Managers like results, not plans. Yet my MBA had an emphasis on process and its TLC that I retain to this day unlike many of my seniors.
The crisis in MBAs is of course in the MBA themselves to a degree perhaps, but also because the institutions where the learning is supposed to be exercised – companies, councils and corporations – do not function properly anyway especially with regard to knowledge and accountability. The workplace is just like any other market: it is a place of imperfect, asymmetric information and decision flows, where some know more than others, where vested interests will impair aims and objectives, innovation and other functions.
These days the CEO – even with an MBA – knows who he is responsible to:- his shareholders. Because the law favours them above anyone else, sod the other stakeholders. This external, more informal power – an equivalent can be seen in the political interference by councillors and MPs in local government – is often ignored in MBAs I find.
Where modern MBAs go wrong is that there is no questioning of this distorted relationship between external capital/politics and the organisation. MBAs tend to treat the work place as a closed system under the aspirant MBA holder’s control. That is bollocks. My MBA at least encouraged us to look at systems thinking which does pick up the externals that influence matters (it introduced me to John Seddon for example who came to talk at the Uni on a number of occasions, and Peter Checkland’s Soft Systems Methodology which I find for want of a better word ‘world-real’).
But to blame it all on MBAs and even undergraduate degrees is a bit unfair and not the complete picture. Frankly, the way capitalism is set up remains the big problem. My MBA course came back to me a couple of years later and asked for my feedback on an economics module they wanted to do. I panned it to be honest, it did not ask enough questions, which at Masters level you should be asking. By that time the funky new Uni I had known was going the way the others were going because of a quality system they all have to perform to and the best lecturers started to leave. It became just another MBA provider and according to the lecturers who left, did not practice what it preached especially as the status and pay of its chancellor started to go up and power was more concentrated.
The remit of our capitalist mode is not wide enough. Capitalism should benefit the widest number of people possible and cause as little degradation to living space for life. The capitalism we have does the entirely the opposite, benefiting the few, making life harder for the many and makes a mockery of expensive learning to boot because only making money is what works apparently.
Thanks
Aah the MBA.
Business for dummies as I call it.
I remeber going down to Dublin (from Belfast) to visit my brother when I was studying. We went to Trinity to meet up with a friend of his, who was doing an MBA after graduating in law.
The poor fellah was struggling with a statistics assignment, so I asked if I could help him. He arrogantly replied along the lines of “I’m a masters student, how could you possibly help me?”
Erm, I did exactly the same assignment in the first year of my degree…
Might the reluctance to speak out against the madness of tariffs be partly down to threats of harm to themselves and their families as was happening during Brexit? There was an awful lot of fence sitting back then from people who knew how much harm it was likely to do to their business and the economy.
Add in 300million or so guns and potential for less than subtle verbal and social media attacks attacks from the regime and the threats have to be taken seriously. I was surprised that Stuart didn’t consider this.
CEOs certainly in the UK don’t normally feel omnipotent rather the contrary. Their hold on the highest office in the firm is often short.
They are also in my experience very focused on short term results. Normally very inward looking.
We absolutely shouldn’t expect much from them at all. The FT has a point only if you believe the hype and personally I don’t.
I’ve been up close to a few in my time they are just ordinary folk who have no great urge to lead in a social or political sense.