Liz’s view
“We can say ‘retard’” again, one unnamed banker told the Financial Times last year.
With trigger-warning culture on the wane and a brutish permissiveness creeping back into society, corporate scolds have lost much of their power. Except in one place: sex. Intolerance of CEOs sleeping with their subordinates has come through the manosphere media turn intact.
Nestlé yesterday became the latest big company to fire a CEO for canoodling. Even as websites are scrubbed of diversity language and environmental targets quietly languish, the societal reckoning with gender, power, sex, and consent of the late 2010s and early 2020s appears to be holding fast in boardrooms.
Laurent Freixe, just a year into the Nestlé job, joins a list of CEOs fired for having office affairs long after the #MeToo movement made that grounds for firing: Brian Krzanich at Intel, Steve Easterbrook at McDonald’s, Jeff Zucker at CNN, Ed Tilly at Cboe, Alan Shaw at Norfolk Southern (after reporting by my now-colleague, Rohan Goswami), Bernard Looney at BP, and, of course, the Astronomer CEO who was outed on a jumbotron. HR consultant Challenger, Gray, & Christmas has tracked 14 corporate chiefs fired under such circumstances since 2016 through July of this year.
Most of those affairs seemed consensual and not especially appalling when cast against the original ousters of #MeToo, which helped launch the corporate world into its ultimately short-lived warm-and-fuzzy era. Companies have tended to sidestep the propriety of such relationships entirely and say, as BP did, that executives were “not fully transparent” when questioned. Looney and others were fired for lying about sex, the one thing everybody lies about.
Conservative activists have yet to mount an attack on corporate prudishness, but I do wonder what it would look like. Will Chris Rufo defend Freixe as a red-blooded male canceled by boardroom puritans more worried about gender scolds than about executing a needed turnaround at Nestlé?
Perhaps not: Rohan actually asked Rufo’s fellow traveler, Robby Starbuck, and his answer surprised me: “CEOs should run companies with their brains, not with their penis or their personal politics.” But it’s odd that his movement has glommed onto fringe issues while ignoring the most relatable casualty of corporate progressivism: office romances.
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Room for Disagreement
Companies have a strong business case to fire CEOs who blur the lines. “Boards see these kinds of relationships, especially extramarital, as signs that the operation of the organization isn’t tight,” Amy Nicole Baker, a professor at the University of New Haven who studies workplace relationships, told Bloomberg. One study — admittedly small and enabled by the hack of affair-arranging app Ashley Madison in 2015 — found that companies whose CEOs or CFOs were paying users of the site were twice as likely to have had a financial misstatement or involvement in a securities class action.
Notable
- “Corporate puritans want to kill off flirting,” Melanie McDonagh argued in The Spectator in 2018.
- Le Monde criticized Easterbrook’s firing from McDonald’s as having wandered from “the actions denounced by the #MeToo movement” and were “far from the French custom.”
- Political economist Max Weber credited America’s puritanical bent (he called it “Protestant asceticism”) with its capitalist success.