A client emailed me at 6:40 on Monday morning with a subject line that read "are we saying anything." No question mark. That is how the week started for most of us in this job.
By Monday night Ken Frazier had stepped off the manufacturing council. Kevin Plank went next. Then Brian Krzanich. Every other company still on that list spent yesterday in a conference room doing arithmetic nobody wanted to call arithmetic.
What I hear in those rooms is always the same three sentences. We are not a political brand. Our customers are on all sides of this. Let us see where it lands.
Which is the part that gets misunderstood. The question on the table was never whether to take a position. It was whether to take one on purpose.
Silence reads as neutrality only when nobody expected you to speak, and this week everybody expected you to speak.
Frazier did not give a speech. He wrote four sentences about standing against intolerance and then he left, and the four sentences did more work than any campaign his company will run this year. Under Armour is the more instructive case, because Plank has spent since February trying to walk back calling this administration a real asset for the country while Steph Curry and Misty Copeland said in public that they did not agree with him. His resignation is not a new position. It is a repair.
Here is the part that gets lost in the crisis meeting. Your employees are the first audience and by far the fastest one. They do not wait for the press release. They have your internal channels, they have Twitter, and they have the same list of council members that everyone else has. The recruiting cost of this week lands in six months and nobody will connect it back.
The second thing is timing, and timing is downstream of conviction. Patagonia does not convene a working group before it says something about public lands. It already knows what it thinks, so it can say so on a Tuesday afternoon without a legal review that runs to Thursday. If your company needs nine hours and outside counsel to decide whether it opposes violence, that delay is your actual brand position, and it is legible to everyone.
If your company needs nine hours and outside counsel to decide whether it opposes violence, that delay is your actual brand position, and it is legible to everyone.
I got home late and found Truffles asleep across a printed positioning framework, which is roughly the respect that document earned this week. Barnaby had already pushed the rest of the stack onto the floor. They are the only two in my apartment with no view on the manufacturing council. I envy them and I would not trade.