The Conservative Cave
Current Events => General Discussion => Topic started by: Ptarmigan on July 03, 2016, 01:02:12 PM
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CEOs are getting more political, but consumers aren't buying it
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-on-leadership-ceo-activism-20160630-snap-story.html
Starbucks Chief Executive Howard Schultz has spoken out on gun control, race relations and the "cynicism, despair, division, exclusion, fear and yes -- indifference" in America today.
Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at a developer conference this year that "I hear fearful voices calling for building walls and distancing people as they label others," even if he didn't directly mention GOP nominee Donald Trump.
And Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff has become a "ringleader," in the words of one state senator, of big-business executives who have opposed state legislation that limits gay rights.
The more leftist CEOs are the less people are going to buy.
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I remember 1992, when several high-flying Silicon Valley companies' CEOs - Tandem Computers, Silicon Graphics, Sun Microsystems - brought Bill Clinton in to speak in various companies' functions. Not familiar company names?
Tandem missed customers' desire for non-proprietary OSs, got bought by Compaq, which was bought by HP. Tandem was already in its death spiral when it brought in WJC ... maybe its manglement should have been minding their company's business instead of politics.
A little later in the 1990s, makers of Unix-based specialized workstations had their lunch eaten as the performance of WIntel machines improved to the point that they could do what customers needed, more easily, at a quarter of the price. Silicon Graphics was an early casualty (though going out of business entirely took a while); Sun Microsystems kept going long enough to attempt to switch from desktop workstations to computer room servers to ride the 90s Internet boom, which soon went Dot-Bomb. Eventually, Sun got bought by Oracle Corporation.
I'm not saying WJC caused these companies' demise, only that they should have known and responded to their customers' needs and wants better - they should have paid attention to their business instead of dabbling in national politics.
Nearly 25 years later, the CEOs cited in the article may well be making the same stupid mistake. Having been an employee at Tandem until 1993, having watched Silicon Graphics' fall while working at Sun Micro, having been a casualty of Sun's unsuccessful attempt to switch to servers, and having been laid of from another company, courtesy of the 2000-2002 bursting of the tech bubble, these CEOs, in 2016, owe their employees and customers better than getting sucked into national politics!
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I have no problem with CEOs that want to donate or publicly support a candidate or a cause, but when they denigrate their customers as some liberal CEOs have done, they're only hurting their company and shareholders.