American Business Response to Trump’s Candidacy
The reality of Donald Trump's election to the U.S. presidency has reached every corner of the globe and economy -- including the corner offices of U.S. companies. In the aftermath, corporations and their CEOs grappled with how to respond. Some sent carefully worded letters of congratulations and calls for unity and commitments to diversity, urging employees to "put our differences aside," as J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon wrote to his employees. Or to remind them that "our company is open to all ... regardless of what they look like, where they come from, how they worship or who they love," as Apple CEO Tim Cook told workers. Others opened up about how unprepared they were for the result: Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini said in a New York Times conference that "if you were to look at our game board of all the possible outcomes of the election, this one wasn't even on the sheet."
Plenty see opportunity -- last week, the president of Business Roundtable, John Engler, told OnLeadership "they awakened a week ago and said, 'Wow, what was not possible is possible.' " And some have even had advice for Trump. General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt said in a CNBC interview last week: "I think what the president will learn is that as he travels the world, trade deals give him power…. If the president of the United States travels around the world and has nothing to offer from a standpoint of economic connection, you lose half of your negotiating power. This guy is a negotiator, he's a dealmaker. So I think let's just wait and see what he does."
Meanwhile, the still explosive emotions from a darkly divided campaign are prompting calls for boycotts from consumers over comments made by the CEOs or other executives of PepsiCo, New Balance and Grubhub. Then of course, there's the extremely successful Broadway production "Hamilton: An American Musical," which some Trump supporters are calling to boycott after an uproar over the weekend about a cast member's remarks to Vice President-elect Mike Pence, who was in the audience. (Pence said he "wasn't offended" by the remarks, yet President-elect Trump took time out of his busy schedule to tweet several times that the cast should "apologize.")
Meanwhile, in a kind of reverse-protest, Starbucks found itself ensnared in a campaign by Trump supporters to buy coffee there and have baristas write "Trump" on their cups after a video surfaced of an employee refusing to do so. The coffee giant, in a statement, called it a "fun ritual," yet said "rarely has it been abused or taken advantage of. We hope and trust that our customers will continue to honor that tradition. We don’t require our partners to write or call out names."
* A scramble to assess the dangers of President-elect Donald Trump's global business empire (The Washington Post)
* Obama reckons with a Trump presidency (The New Yorker)
* The nearly invisible president-elect: Trump's work keeps him mostly out of view (The Washington Post)
* A leadership historian on the U.S. presidential election (The Harvard Business Review)
* Donald Trump elected president: The historians' verdict (BBC History)
* Reince Priebus, normalizer in chief (The New York Times)
* Donald Trump’s binder full of white men (The Washington Post)
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