Chief executives: pipe down. Your public posturing and noisy lobbying is not winning your battle to restore trust in business. In fact, you may even be helping to lose it.
On the eve of the World Economic Forum in Davos, a safe space for many chief executives to opine on the state of the world, their credibility is under fire. Repeated scandals (Volkswagen was back in the dock last week); protests over excessive pay; incidents of day-to-day disrespect of employees: all take their toll on a CEO’s image.
And this is nearly a decade after the first ominous rumblings of the financial crisis that torpedoed trust in business, and in spite of multiple well-meaning, top-down efforts to salvage confidence.