Chris MacDonald

I think Nike’s recent move to feature Colin Kaepernick in their ads is strategically very clever, and more generally I’m supportive of Kaepernick’s kneeling as a form of protest, and so by extension I’m supportive of Nike’s support of Kaepernick. And no, I don’t think there’s any need to decide between those two analyses: a given business decision can be both strategic and ethical, opportunistic and morally laudable. But buying a pair of Nikes I don’t need would be almost as silly as burning a pair. Should lefty consumers really stick to buying shoes (or cars, or broccoli) from lefty producers, and should right-wing consumers stick to buying from right-wing companies?

A friend-of-a-friend of mine runs a mid-sized construction company in Latin America. As many readers will know, that industry in that region has a reputation for a relatively high degree of corruption, and in particular bribery

Should Starbucks care more about the homeless, or its employees? Should it care about them equally? Should it even be in the business of balancing such interests? More generally, how should a company prioritize its stakeholders? Should a company try to do the most good, or try to do the most good for those most intimately involved in the company? These questions came to mind recently following a random interaction on Twitter. Someone tweeted the story about Starbucks trying to figure out just how welcome the homeless are in its stores, and in particular in its bathrooms

This arguably makes the leader into a kind of whipping boy, which, in the historical sense, was a boy who could be punished by a prince’s tutor for the transgressions of the prince who, as royalty, was himself immune to being punished personally. A third approach would be to understand ultimate responsibility in terms of motivation: when you know that you’re going to be held responsible if things go badly, then presumably you’re going to work hard to make sure that things go well. If that’s the case, it’s worth spelling out the structural features of leadership that make attribution and acceptance of ultimate responsibility make sense. We need to look at whether the leader in question actually had (in theory and in practice) the power to hire and fire, the power to shape policy (which is sometimes constrained by legislation, collective agreements, and so on), and the power to shape culture (which often takes a very long time).