I keep a spreadsheet. It started in August, the week the Business Roundtable put out its statement and a hundred and eighty one chief executives agreed that a company exists to serve customers, employees, suppliers, communities, and shareholders, roughly in that order. I wanted to see how many of them still agreed in a year.
There are fourteen months of pledges in it now. Pay equity audits. Supplier diversity targets. Board composition. Donations with a number attached and donations with no number attached, which are two entirely different products.
Most of the rows are blank on the right hand side.
The right hand side is where the follow through goes.
A commitment with no public number, no date, and no named owner is not a commitment. It is a press release with a conscience.
There is a moment in Alien where the crew finally pulls up the company's actual orders and learns that the specimen was priority one and that they were listed, in writing, as expendable. Nobody lied to them. The stated mission was real. It was just ranked, and nobody had shown them the ranking. That is what most of these pledges are. Every value in the deck is sincere, and every value is also sitting somewhere on an internal list, and the only thing that matters is what sits above it when the quarter goes sideways. Publishing the pledge without publishing the ranking is how a brand ends up sincere and useless at the same time.
So the sheet has four columns. What was promised. By when. Who owns it internally. What has been reported since. The fourth column is the entire exercise, and it is empty for roughly seventy percent of what I have logged.
The brands filling it in are not the loudest ones. Patagonia publishes numbers that make Patagonia look bad and then publishes them again the following year. Ben & Jerry's names specific legislation, which is harder than naming a value, because legislation either passes or it does not. Neither of them needed a statement in August. They already had a record.
If you are drafting one of these, the test is simple enough. Would the statement survive being read back out loud in eighteen months by somebody holding the receipts? If it would not, do not publish it. Silence is recoverable. A broken public promise is a permanent asset for anyone who wants to use it against you.
Silence is recoverable. A broken public promise is a permanent asset for anyone who wants to use it against you.
It has been raining since Thursday and I have been updating the sheet at Ovation with a coffee going cold beside me. I would genuinely love to be wrong about the seventy percent. The columns stay open either way.