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Staring Down the Anti-Diversity Influencer · Communication Breakdown

• 0:00
  Welcome back to Communication Breakdown, a new podcast from the Observatory on Corporate
• 0:07
  Reputation. Thanks for joining us. I'm Steve Dowling in Silicon Valley.
• 0:12
  And I'm Craig Carroll in New York City. Each week Steve and I take a look at strategies
• 0:16
  companies are using to shape headlines and sometimes save their skins.
• 0:21
  It's the post game show for PR pros. This week, staring down an anti-diversity bully.
• 0:28
  It's been well over a month since our last episode on the broad-based retreat from corporate
• 0:32
  diversity initiatives. That was in the wake of targets capitulation to internet provocateur
• 0:37
  Robby Starbuck. And the same week Costco shareholders voted overwhelmingly to support
• 0:43
  diversity efforts. Since then, it's been a tale of two retailers who took very different
• 0:48
  paths and some customers seem to be voting with their feet. The trade publication retail
• 0:54
  brew and other industry watchers reported shift in traffic and in market share from target
• 1:00
  to Costco. While correlation may not be causation, Target's foot traffic fell for six consecutive
• 1:07
  weeks following their DEI reversal. While visits to Costco were up in February.
• 1:12
  Elsewhere on the diversity front AT&T became the latest Fortune 50 company to buckle under
• 1:17
  pressure from Robby Starbuck, dialing back diversity training and notably cutting off funding
• 1:24
  to pride events and even a suicide hotline at RAN in partnership with the Trevor Project.
• 1:30
  And like most other Starbuck targets, they let him break the news and of course take a victory
• 1:34
  lap.
• 1:35
  "I have a great announcement. They are no longer going to have a Chief Diversity Officer
• 1:40
  at AT&T. In addition to that good news, I have even better news. There are no more DEI
• 1:46
  trainings from this day forward at AT&T across the entire company. And one more exclusive
• 1:51
  for you guys that I'm very happy to bring you, there will no longer be pronoun pins. That
• 1:55
  is right. They are cancelling their pronoun pins. That is no longer going to be something
• 1:59
  that employees have in their style guide."
• 2:02
  A really stuck it to them on those pronoun pins.
• 2:05
  Robert Starbuck Newsom, then swung through New York for audiences with Bloomberg and Wall
• 2:11
  Street Journal. One of the key takeaways, a new threat to companies who simply renamed
• 2:16
  diversity programs to belonging or some other word that just doesn't begin with the E or
• 2:22
  I.
• 2:23
  Starbuck told Bloomberg these companies are still in this crosshairs. Steve, we've been seeing
• 2:27
  the same strategy play out at AT&T in some 20 other companies since last summer. A piece
• 2:32
  Robbie with easy gives like pronoun pins and maybe some other changes already in the works.
• 2:38
  Let him take credit to his followers into a short cycle press and watch as he moves onto
• 2:44
  his next target. But have we learned anything from his recent press or that may give us better
• 2:50
  insights into how we can guide companies moving forward?
• 2:53
  Yeah, we're learning more definitely about what companies are dealing with here. And Robbie
• 2:58
  Starbuck is pretty transparent in his methods. He's showing us his cards. I watched his interviews
• 3:05
  with the Wall Street Journal and on Wall Street Week, which is produced by Bloomberg.
• 3:10
  And at first I was really frustrated that they gave him a platform because a lot of what
• 3:15
  he says is really vague, hand wavy and in a lot of cases just unsupported by the facts.
• 3:20
  But then as I watched, I was really glad they had him on because he just laid out this entire
• 3:26
  playbook and we can learn a lot. And his credit, Alan Murray at the Wall Street Journal challenged
• 3:32
  Starbuck in front of an audience of CFOs and it did not go well for Robbie Starbuck.
• 3:38
  My takeaways were his position hinges on a few assumptions that he presents as facts.
• 3:44
  First is that all diversity programs are just virtue signaling, just their just PR in
• 3:48
  Robbie Starbuck's world. There's no business case for diversity. Yeah.
• 3:53
  Also, he told Bloomberg that more than half the country finds DEI to testable. Well, that's
• 3:59
  just not supported by the data we've seen. And then importantly, I think, and telling
• 4:04
  him, he claims that DEI is somehow inclusive of everyone but Christians. And he says his
• 4:10
  researchers could not find one employee resource group for Christians at all the largest corporations
• 4:15
  in America. Well, that's not true or they just didn't look very hard. So everything seems
• 4:21
  to come down to this overly simplistic framing of zero sum left versus right where anything
• 4:26
  other than pure capitalism is socialism and communism. So if I were Robbie Starbuck's
• 4:33
  PR manager, I would not be thrilled with the media tour he did last week in New York because
• 4:37
  on the plus side, he got in front of a lot of smart, influential people and got a platform
• 4:42
  to share his ideas. But on the downside, he got a platform to share his ideas and showed
• 4:47
  pretty clearly that they don't hold up to scrutiny at all. So Robbie Starbuck is enjoying
• 4:52
  his 15 minutes of fame, but Robbie Starbuck, I think is also out over his skis, at least
• 4:56
  when he has to face any scrutiny at all.
• 4:59
  I thought it was very interesting the way he, I want to call it a heads a little bit, right?
• 5:04
  So he referred to, you know, the road of hell is paid with good intentions. So he's trying
• 5:09
  to play a little bit into DEI being a good intention. He also talked a little bit about
• 5:16
  DEI strategy and how it looks differently in practice. And then of course, it gave, you
• 5:22
  know, the real strategy behind his argument. But you know, Robbie Starbuck wants to make
• 5:28
  DEI sound like it's a failed experiment. Something has started with good intentions, but one
• 5:32
  off the rails. But here's the problem. Intent isn't what matters, outcomes or what matter.
• 5:37
  And the company that actually measure outcomes know that diversity isn't a PR stunt. It's
• 5:42
  a competitive advantage. And you know, so if the road of hell is paid with good intentions,
• 5:47
  the road to relevance is paved with fear driven retreats.
• 5:51
  Fair point. I was struck in that interview the way. And this is, you know, he's not the
• 5:56
  only one who does this, but just dropping statement as though it were fact. And I thought that
• 6:03
  Alan did a really good job challenging him in the places where where he really needed
• 6:08
  to the the craziest one for me was this idea that the executive class as he calls it CFOs
• 6:15
  and CEOs have veered left and that they vote Democrat more often than Republican clearly
• 6:21
  was working off his talking point and not aware of the audience here. Yeah, it was just
• 6:25
  that it just is another one of these sort of outlandish things that comes back to everything
• 6:31
  as you find with as we see him making these pronouncements on Twitter. We don't see anybody
• 6:36
  pushing back on him. And when you have, you know, an actual journalist pushing back on him,
• 6:41
  he can't really cite facts to defend anything. Yeah, I'll look out just go and say it. He
• 6:46
  calls CFOs a bunch of liberals, right? Yeah, that somehow that top leadership in the four
• 6:52
  to five hundred companies have veered left over the past 20 years. I just that just doesn't
• 6:58
  resonate with the day to day experience in the conversations that I'm having given so
• 7:03
  many companies are on board with with Trump's business direction there aside from the tariffs,
• 7:09
  right? That the tariffs are pretty bad. But for the most part, I think they were anticipating
• 7:14
  a favorable business environment moving into into Trump's second term here. Yeah, he
• 7:21
  doesn't have a lot of facts, a lot of actual facts. And there's a lot of this we're investigating
• 7:26
  or we're not we're going to reveal something or we were going to reveal something, but the
• 7:30
  company made changes. So it's kind of a shell game with him, but it's and it's unfortunate
• 7:35
  to see companies, you know, giving into this over generalization and then conflating of issues
• 7:41
  and then that leads to fear mongering and intimidation. And I think when dealing with
• 7:47
  a Robbie Starbucks, the tactics are really important, really important for me. This was a very interesting
• 7:54
  moment to hear Starbucks talk to an audience of chief financial officers. It, you know, I,
• 8:00
  I mean, I don't know how much attention and how much opportunity that we should be giving
• 8:05
  in because it does further legitimize this cause. But I think on the other hand, as communicators,
• 8:11
  we have to be aware of what's out there in the environment. And you're not going to
• 8:16
  be able to respond unless you are aware of what his, what his positions are and what his
• 8:21
  arguments are. So, you know, it might be outlandish. He might not have any data, but I think
• 8:26
  all of us still need to be aware of what his point of view is. Yeah. And his followers
• 8:31
  may not care, but the problem is that companies who are capitulating to him and then letting
• 8:35
  him tell the story for them, they are essentially broadening his platform and giving him a
• 8:43
  greater audience, I think. I mean, you can look at this approach that AT&T and other companies
• 8:48
  took and that most of the companies who deal with them have been taking. And it's hard to
• 8:52
  argue that things have generally gone as well as can be expected for them. The, the cycles
• 8:57
  are short and then he moves on to the next company. Targets and outlier, I think, but they're,
• 9:02
  they're still dealing with it. I suspect McDonald's feels it could have gone better for them.
• 9:05
  But by and large companies, they take a modest PR hit and then they move on. That's one
• 9:11
  way to define success in this situation, but I don't think it feels very good. It's convenient
• 9:16
  and it's pragmatic, but it's not a win. Yeah. Well, you know, part of it is that embarrassment
• 9:22
  is just a bait, right? Part of his power is what comes from what happens next. You know,
• 9:27
  viral post turns into shareholder backlash or government scrutiny or internal panic.
• 9:33
  The companies that survive aren't the ones that, you know, who react fascists are the
• 9:36
  ones that refuse to play this game. So I'd say, Starbac doesn't need the truth. He just
• 9:41
  needs traction, a single post or an opportunity for airplay turns into, you know, a headline.
• 9:48
  And then a headline turns into some segment on cable news and then suddenly routine HR policies,
• 9:53
  national controversy. So the more companies, he panics, the bigger the firestorm gets.
• 9:59
  Yeah. And companies, I think, are in these situations giving him traction. Like in, in
• 10:06
  isolation, company by company, they're giving him what he wants or some version of what he
• 10:11
  wants. They're letting him tell the story and then they're moving on for individual companies.
• 10:16
  That's your definition of success. That's fine. But in the broader context, he's getting more
• 10:21
  traction and he's now, now he's getting access to, you know, Bloomberg's editorial team and
• 10:28
  not that they're necessarily buying it. But I think they are, to your earlier point, they
• 10:33
  are giving him this legitimacy and he's also got real momentum. So if we go back to the
• 10:40
  more commonly taken approach, it's based on the assumption that the issue will actually
• 10:46
  go away. And maybe it does. But, you know, Costco stood up to the shareholder proposal and
• 10:51
  was lauded for that. Next thing, you know, there's CEO got a letter from these 19 state attorneys
• 10:56
  general, all of them Republican saying maybe their policies are illegal. And Robbie Starbac
• 11:02
  is already talking about revisiting some of the companies in his trophy case because he
• 11:06
  just realized they still support diversity. So if Robbie Starbac has to come back at you,
• 11:12
  well, you may be your extra woke or something worse. And I don't know what the penalty is
• 11:16
  going to be then. So it's working for these companies in the short term because he moves
• 11:20
  on. But I feel like in the long term, if they're not taking a stand, if they're not making
• 11:25
  a contribution, really, to an effort to define this, I don't want to call it a debate,
• 11:31
  and to define this issue, I worry that he just gets more and more momentum and it's going
• 11:36
  to come back on these companies and probably many others.
• 11:39
  Here's the real problem. If Robbie Starbac does come back, you know, you're not just a company
• 11:45
  with the E.I. policies anymore. You're a company that lied about them now the attack escalates.
• 11:51
  Right? The company's playing defense right now need to realize that this is not a one-time
• 11:55
  game. You know, the goal posts are going to move. The definitions are going to change
• 11:59
  in the fight, doesn't it? Just because you changed words or you said that you have changed
• 12:03
  your policies. And what point does getting out of the line of fire become an illusion? If
• 12:08
  you're on a list once, you're really never off it. And so I think the question is not just
• 12:13
  how do we survive this round, but it's how do we prevent the next one?
• 12:17
  I agree. And we are seeing companies who have to deal with this over a long period of
• 12:23
  time, even after making moves to appease them. I think one thing that went largely unnoticed
• 12:28
  was at the end of last month, end of February, deer and company, you know, the John Deere
• 12:33
  equipment maker. They were one of the first to make changes last year or last summer under
• 12:39
  pressure from Robbie Starbac. But in February, their shareholders rejected a shareholder
• 12:44
  proposal from the National Legal and Policy Center. Those are the same folks who brought
• 12:48
  the shareholder proposal at Costco. And just like Costco, deer shareholders crushed them
• 12:54
  like 98.7% voted no, right? So two things. First, Robbie Starbac, you know, they gave into
• 13:02
  him, but they still faced more pressure from the right. And I found it interesting. You
• 13:08
  read the deer proxy, which mentions diversity, by the way, over 30 times. They're pretty clear.
• 13:14
  And it's a good proxy, I think, from a comms perspective, I would encourage people to read
• 13:18
  it. They talk about diversity 31 times. They use the word never just once. And that's
• 13:24
  an align I came across and it reads the existence of diversity quotas and pronoun identification
• 13:28
  have never been and are not company policy. That's the Robbie Starbac hangover nine, ten
• 13:34
  months later. Those are claims that he was making about John Deere in his video on Twitter.
• 13:39
  And I think they're still trying to shake it. But he put out his video first and they've
• 13:44
  been playing catch up, even though they apparently gave him what he wanted on diversity.
• 13:49
  But they really gave him was what he's ultimately after, which is credit for punishing, you
• 13:54
  know, a hundred billion dollar company for being to woke and they're still dealing with
• 13:58
  it. Yeah. Based on everything that you've seen and you're, you know, you've certainly been
• 14:02
  in the driving seat before, how would you respond here? What, like, what are some ways that
• 14:07
  you would recommend that that company's respond here? Yeah. I think it's again about tactics
• 14:13
  and you need to gain a tactical advantage over this guy because that's where he is exercising
• 14:19
  this intimidation and fear mongering. So the first thing I would do is control his access.
• 14:26
  Yeah. Keep him at arm's length, keep the engagement really selective and proportional to I think
• 14:33
  he's out there talking about meetings with CEOs. I find it hard to believe that anybody
• 14:37
  would put this guy in front of their CEO or that he could hold his own in a meeting like
• 14:41
  that after what we saw. So people are already probably already doing this, but I would be
• 14:47
  limiting his access to any executive. Make the guy file a shareholder proposal or whatever.
• 14:52
  Make him do the work, make him write it down. I've never seen Robbie Starbuck write an op-ed
• 14:57
  or anything longer than a social media post. Maybe I've missed it, but bottom line force
• 15:02
  him into your process, not the other way around. And when whoever is dealing with him, you've
• 15:08
  got to be in information collecting mode. If he's got a list, he's not shy about these things.
• 15:13
  He wants to get something out of you. So let him tell you what he wants to change. I would
• 15:18
  not offer him a single thing beyond that. That's that's step one. Yeah. Yeah. I would say I
• 15:24
  mean, I don't know how many I don't think any companies have done that, but it's very clear
• 15:28
  that that needs to be rule number one. Don't grant anyone on one time with this CEO or executive
• 15:34
  meetings. I would almost say, you know, I'm not sure how much you'd want to engage with
• 15:39
  him on social media if he reaches out to you on LinkedIn. No, zero. You follow your process,
• 15:45
  right? He's got a follow structure process there. So I like the fact that you're laying that
• 15:49
  out very clearly. Yeah. It has to be the same as anyone else, right? They need to be directed
• 15:53
  to legal or investor relations, but not to executives. Yeah. So once you know what he wants
• 16:00
  or what's you understand, like what is on his list, I think the next thing is to overwhelm
• 16:07
  him with your response, except ideally it's not a response because you front run him and he
• 16:13
  says he's going to expose you on Tuesday. I go out on Monday or Sunday night and burn him.
• 16:20
  Like no heads up. You write a blog post or choose your platform, whatever. I would not do it
• 16:25
  on Twitter or any other social media platform. Maybe LinkedIn. I don't know, but it's you
• 16:29
  get your message out and be very clear and use your language. But you maybe even explain
• 16:35
  how this guy operates, like which programs he finds objectionable. What are you complained
• 16:39
  about? And then you explain it, demystify it, use plain English, make it ordinary, right?
• 16:46
  Own it and defend it where it deserves to be defended. And yet maybe you're going to
• 16:51
  make changes or maybe there are changes that were already in the works as we've heard more
• 16:55
  than once from companies in this saga. He's going to embarrass you because some of your
• 17:00
  employees were pronoun pins. You get out ahead of that because it will all sound as petty
• 17:06
  as it is if you frame it the right way. Yeah. Speaking of frame, my thought is we should
• 17:12
  actually back up and look at a different frame. I think part of it is that we know how much
• 17:18
  time, energy and attention that he's already taken from companies and a lot of companies
• 17:22
  are talking about their various responses here. But it set it up in a way that we are engaging
• 17:28
  with him when really we need to be about our business. And this is one of the things that
• 17:33
  we do in the process of carrying out our business. We listen to our stakeholders, we listen
• 17:38
  to voices that are out there. But as we've just said, right, we should lay out a process
• 17:42
  of, okay, here's how if you want to engage us. If you have a question, if you want to discuss
• 17:46
  something with us, here's our process laid out. Here's the channels there. But about
• 17:52
  responding the day before the night before, I'm not sure if I'm there yet. I think simply
• 17:59
  being focused on where your businesses and what your priorities are, the more important
• 18:05
  part is making sure that you have your story laid out and that he's not controlling it. And
• 18:10
  so my turn is if everything is about getting out the day before, we're still responding
• 18:15
  too much to him instead of giving him too much control or too much agency. Yeah, but I
• 18:20
  really do think the tactics are important here because you as the comms lead as the executive
• 18:27
  team, whatever you need to remember that you are the experts on your business. And so you
• 18:35
  are empowered to define this, this issue. And I think, you know, some of the things that
• 18:41
  he's, he's considering wins, it would seem a lot less impactful if a company were announcing
• 18:50
  them and framing them. And you know, it could be as simple as, you know, we came at this with
• 18:57
  his words, good intentions and nobody's perfect. So we're dialing a couple of things back, but
• 19:02
  we still believe in diversity for all the right reasons. Our hearts are in the right place.
• 19:07
  We're not discriminating against anybody. You need to separate fact from fiction and then
• 19:12
  draw a bright line. Robbie Starbuck is asking us to do things that would weaken our business.
• 19:18
  Our employees know this in that process of him asking us to do things that are weakening
• 19:22
  our business. That based on you already having a list. I mean, if you've already explained
• 19:27
  him what the process is and he's written it, is this your day before response? Is that
• 19:32
  already hinging on the fact that you've asked him to write things down? Whether he's written
• 19:37
  things down or not, he's, I don't think he is writing things down. If we're looking at
• 19:41
  the way he has, he's, he's been dealing with these companies. He's apparently getting
• 19:45
  phone calls at some level because he's getting the memo and he's, he's taking the victory
• 19:51
  lap on things that he asked for. At least that's what he's saying. This comes back to this
• 19:55
  point of like, they're letting an outsider tell the story and position these changes that
• 20:01
  they're making with the companies can be doing that and it will go much better for them.
• 20:06
  These are the things that we are changing. These are the things that we are not changing
• 20:10
  and here's why. I mean, one of the ways that he gets away with naming and shaming companies
• 20:15
  in their policies is he's the only one with the information. He's the one who gets the
• 20:19
  memo. So this is why I focus on the tactics on this. It seems so much more mysterious,
• 20:24
  more scandalous because he's supposedly, you know, gotten inside to fight the wokeness
• 20:30
  or whatever. If you could say the same thing about the changes as a company, it can seem
• 20:35
  really boring. It's like, it's like, you know, when you build up the courage to complain
• 20:39
  about something and then once you do, you realize it seems kind of silly now that I'm saying
• 20:43
  out loud, right? It's kind of it's kind of the approach. So, you know, I think that's key
• 20:49
  is that it's got to be not reactive. It's got a sound like this is so boring. It's a routine.
• 20:54
  It's a it's a non issue, but we're just going to get it all out there. There's one other
• 21:00
  aspect going back to his talk with Alan Murray and the CFOs that he played into and he
• 21:06
  was referring to something he said it was off the record, but it's interesting that he
• 21:11
  mentioned Jamie Dimon's name. So I don't know if he's referring to Chase or some other
• 21:15
  CEOs there, but he said that when he engaged CEOs and of course I don't think he's engaging
• 21:21
  him directly, okay? But somehow one of the points that he was making was that CEOs seemed
• 21:26
  to be unaware of the DEI practices that were going on inside of their companies. And
• 21:32
  for me, true or not, that I think is one of the flags here that any senior leadership
• 21:39
  team, you want to keep them away from an argument like that in the stage of misinformation
• 21:45
  and disinformation. That's where he so's division and confusion because no senior leadership
• 21:52
  team and certainly no chief comms officer wants to have the word out that their senior
• 21:57
  leadership team is unaware or that you are unaware and you've not brought those issues
• 22:02
  to your senior leadership team. Yeah, I think there's two things going on there. First is
• 22:06
  he actually the one who is exposing these sort of fringe efforts to a shocked CEO, I doubt
• 22:13
  it. But are there programs that have gone a little too far afield? Are there was a
• 22:21
  camera with Jamie Dimon's quote, but it was something like the silly stuff or things
• 22:24
  that maybe were again well intentioned, but didn't work out the way we expected. Like
• 22:29
  I think that a company positioning the same thing that Robbie Starbuck is he's going
• 22:34
  to make it sensational. A company can say, yeah, nobody's perfect. So we're dialing
• 22:38
  a couple of things back, but it doesn't have to be, it doesn't have to be a capitulation
• 22:43
  or concession. It doesn't have to be a name and shame situation. But would you acknowledge
• 22:47
  when any of his claims have any substance at all? I mean, if you want to concede that
• 22:52
  something wasn't the silver bullet that you had hoped it would be, I think that you conceding
• 22:57
  that is is going to take a, you know, is going to take an arrow out of his quiver, you know,
• 23:04
  you put out a memo, memos are boring. Like it, it, it, it, it sets the tone and Robbie Starbuck's
• 23:09
  only real weapon is embarrassment, the threat of embarrassment. And to embarrass you, he
• 23:13
  has to make things sound sinister. But if you get out ahead of him, you get first mover
• 23:18
  advantage, you frame the issues. And this is one of those situations where you can use
• 23:23
  transparency as a weapon. And for those things that were on the fringe, that whether your CEO
• 23:29
  did or didn't know, like you had an initiative that was maybe over the top or didn't produce
• 23:34
  results, just own it. And then, you know, it's like PS, maybe the pronoun pins weren't super
• 23:39
  popular. Anyway, just take the weapon out of his hand, I say.
• 23:43
  That's certainly important. You got to take the weapon out of his hand. You got to disarm
• 23:47
  him. The concern for me is finding some way that we can make the entire engagement look very
• 23:53
  boring, very routine and not tit for tat where he's accusing us of something and then we're
• 23:58
  responding with, okay, we either agree with you or you're wrong and not turning into a,
• 24:05
  you know, to a conversation where he's controlling the narrative part of regaining control.
• 24:10
  Here's staying in the position of business as usual. This is how we engage our stakeholders.
• 24:15
  This is how we engage our voices.
• 24:17
  No, I agree with you there. And I think that's why in this scenario anyway, which is just,
• 24:23
  as soon as I get extrapolating the pattern that he's established with other companies, if
• 24:27
  you've engaged with him, you've decided to get ahead of it, you're making a definitive
• 24:31
  statement about this. I think you need to make sure that that statement in whatever form
• 24:36
  it comes, the statement has got to be comprehensive. It's got to be transparent and then it's got
• 24:42
  to be over. Shut the door. Conversation over. We're going back to work, serving our customers
• 24:48
  which we do and we understand how to do better than, you know, these critics. And if anybody
• 24:54
  has questions, we just answered them. Like you have something that is, I feel like Costco
• 24:59
  did that, you know, with an economy of words and their strategy worked. They made a statement
• 25:04
  and they said nothing more and the shareholder proposal went down to defeats.
• 25:10
  As communication leaders, you know, our job isn't just to manage the external narrative.
• 25:14
  It's to make sure that our executives are not blindsided. So your CEO, your CFO should
• 25:19
  never be in a position where they're saying, holy poo, like, I like, I didn't know this
• 25:24
  was happening. If they're learning about DEI policies or missteps or even just confusion
• 25:28
  from Robbie Starbuck before they're hearing it from your own team, to me, that's a failure
• 25:33
  of internal communication. You don't want your leadership reacting to a controversy they
• 25:37
  didn't see coming. And to me, that's when companies make rush decisions that get defensive
• 25:43
  or worse, they seed control of the narrative entirely. So, you know, you say, get ahead of
• 25:48
  it. That's sort of important. Getting ahead of it is also auditing your programs, identifying
• 25:54
  what your block, what your weak spots are, making sure that your senior leadership team
• 25:59
  knows what's happening at all levels so that they're never caught saying, wait, what? We
• 26:03
  did what? So finding out from an activist instead of you, you've already lost your
• 26:07
  block control of the story anyway.
• 26:09
  For sure. And I've got to believe that we're now, what, nine months into this saga, I've
• 26:15
  got to believe that there are, you know, leaders, probably at every company with a diversity
• 26:21
  program that are looking at this going like, well, this company got, you know, raked over
• 26:25
  the coals for supposedly, you know, making employees sign, all I pledges or whatever, or
• 26:31
  you know, things that sound, you know, you know, a little over the top, or do we have
• 26:35
  pro, do we have pronoun pins? Is how's that going over? I got to believe that people have
• 26:39
  a good handle on things that are working and are not working because, you know, there's
• 26:43
  a lot of, how much you can pass up, right? I mean, you know, part of this strategy supposed
• 26:48
  to be big picture, you're not caught up on all the, the details here.
• 26:53
  But we keep hearing from companies after they make these changes. And I mean, these are
• 26:58
  things that sort of get out there publicly. Well, this change was already in the works
• 27:02
  or we've already been looking at this stuff. So I again, saying that proactively is so much
• 27:08
  better than then sort of using it as an explanation after the fact, well, no, I know it sounds bad
• 27:15
  that we, you know, changed all of our diverse or eliminated diversity training or whatever,
• 27:19
  but we were already going to do that. Like if you were to get out there proactively and
• 27:24
  explain it, I don't think we're telling people anything really radically new. I think it's
• 27:30
  just, it's hard right now to look at this pattern and go, ah, number one, I don't want to be
• 27:35
  next on the Robbie Starbucks list. And there's this, here's this tried and true thing where
• 27:40
  we just, you know, let him do his thing and then it really doesn't resonate too far beyond
• 27:45
  his audience. But that's again, as we said earlier, like that's so far, but, you know, this
• 27:51
  is, this is, you know, the appeasement and bullies and we see how these things play out.
• 27:55
  I suspect they're going to be back for more. And in some cases where, you know, we may
• 27:59
  already be seeing that. I would think it of a hybrid approach, right? So when you first
• 28:04
  hear from Robbie Starbucks, part of it is, you've got to find out, okay, what, what is the
• 28:09
  after here? What, you know, if he's teasing a vague expose, they can go first internally
• 28:14
  and get his answers on paper, right? And once this argument is out there, then you can
• 28:19
  respond strategically, not, not emotionally. Certainly you got to act fast when the narrative
• 28:25
  is gaining momentum, but there's also a question of, okay, well, if he's saying he's getting
• 28:31
  his sources internally, right? Maybe somebody else has already got a piece of the story here.
• 28:37
  I don't know. How do you handle that? I mean, how do you, are you worried about like cutting
• 28:41
  off leaks or things? Well, I think that's, I think one of the issues here is we got to think
• 28:46
  about, okay, he's, he's whether true or not, he has, well, I'm going to say it has to
• 28:52
  be true, right? He's set up various channels on his own website for employees of companies
• 28:57
  to expose practices of their, of their companies or to question practices there. Yeah. And again,
• 29:04
  the, the value in that for him, the newsworthiness, the sensational part of that is when he's the
• 29:10
  one who's telling the story first and therefore it feels like he's exposed something is, you
• 29:16
  know, do you have something benign that someone doesn't know about that doesn't necessarily
• 29:20
  mean it's newsworthy. So it is, there's a lot of this is in the setup. I think yes to your question,
• 29:27
  leaks are frustrating, disgruntled employees. Of course, nobody wants disgruntled employees.
• 29:33
  You want to keep them happy. So I think when you see complaints going out to external voices,
• 29:40
  I got to believe that there was some effort at some level for people to resolve that internally.
• 29:47
  Maybe not, maybe in this, in and if you, if you believe probably Starbucks people are so silently
• 29:52
  feel or they're feeling silenced because of these diversity pressures. And again, this is
• 29:57
  an issue that we, you know, have been dealing with now at one level or another for five years,
• 30:03
  internally and externally in big companies. So I've got to believe that companies can get
• 30:09
  a handle on what's working and what's not. And, you know, there should be forums inside
• 30:15
  of companies for people to express things that they're concerned about, how you are, if you
• 30:22
  are dealing with them, you know, satisfactorily or not, I think that's kind of on you. And there
• 30:26
  are going to be some things that, you know, you're not going to be able to make everybody
• 30:29
  happy all of the time. But I think that gets, that gets back to this sort of umbrella, you
• 30:34
  know, argument here, which is, do we try to appease a narrow audience and sort of tell
• 30:41
  them one thing in one way while sort of either directly or with a wink, letting everybody
• 30:48
  else know, like, we're not really changing anything. That's a really difficult position to
• 30:52
  be a problem. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, out with it, I say.
• 30:56
  For me, I think out of all this, it's really important that we pack way up here. I mean,
• 31:02
  everything over the past six months is, it's still, no matter how much we say, you've
• 31:07
  got to find a way to take control of the narrative. I got to say, I haven't seen enough examples
• 31:13
  of what that looks like in practice. And I think part of it is that we're so focused
• 31:18
  on beating Robbie Starbucks as opposed to just doing our business, if you will.
• 31:26
  Well, I think that, yeah, I understand what you're saying, but the problem with this gets
• 31:31
  back to my point about tactics being important here because he's not coming at this issue
• 31:37
  constructively. His, I think, a lot of his expectations are unreasonable, certainly at the
• 31:45
  most basic level in that they are, they run counter to, I must say, it's universal, but
• 31:50
  the very broadly accepted fact that diversity has been, it has business benefits. And so he's
• 31:58
  not engaging at a level where you're going to win on, on reason, right? If you want to
• 32:05
  get out of this pattern of just sort of like taking your beating and then moving on to the
• 32:10
  next person, again, it just doesn't feel good to me. And reputationally, my gut says it's
• 32:16
  not a positive over the long term. I think that you have to understand how to deal with
• 32:22
  someone who comes out, you like that. And for me, it comes down to tactics.
• 32:26
  Yeah, no, that's great. Part of what I'm thinking here is what's a strategy or lens that we
• 32:32
  can look at that's going to help us and help companies that are facing is moving forward.
• 32:38
  And I'm wondering if giving them that much attention by being the focus of the discussion
• 32:43
  is already setting him up to win. So here's a way I'm thinking about it is that beating
• 32:49
  him is maybe not the right frame, no matter what it's always going to keep companies
• 32:54
  in a reactive state, not proactive. It's going to turn the issue into a battle and not
• 33:00
  a business decision or a series of business decisions. Your habits and routines and what
• 33:06
  you're all about. And I think it's going to create more unintended consequences. So part
• 33:12
  of that is certainly no matter what, we've got to be owning the story and shaping our own
• 33:18
  narrative. And part of that is staying true to your purpose, staying true to what it is
• 33:23
  that you're trying to accomplish, meeting the needs of your stakeholders. It means building
• 33:27
  a resilient internal culture. If employees understand why a company has certain policies,
• 33:33
  they're less likely to feel blindsided and to leak internal information to external critics.
• 33:40
  So internal line is a much better defense than a PR strategy is I think.
• 33:46
  Yeah, it doesn't feel good to say we're going to beat somebody. But I think it's how do
• 33:51
  you define success for yourself and how is he defining success for himself? And I think
• 33:57
  you look at it and you got to go, I don't care how he defines success because how we define
• 34:03
  success is being to your point, being true to our purpose, being true to our values as
• 34:08
  a company, operating with integrity and not creating more work for ourselves by allowing
• 34:15
  two contradictory storylines to exist out there that at some point, like I think dear,
• 34:21
  somewhere down the line, we feel like we have to continue to put effort into reconciling
• 34:26
  these two messages that people maybe continue to hear. So I think it comes down to some
• 34:31
  pretty basic concepts and the one that stands out the most for me is tell your own story.
• 34:37
  You have a right to tell your own story. You tell your own story when you release a new
• 34:40
  product, you tell your own story when you name it. In every other instance, I think the
• 34:46
  PR instinct is to say we are going to be the ones who tell the story. And this is one
• 34:53
  where we are breaking our own rules and we have to ask ourselves why?
• 34:57
  So you know, there is a saying that we judge others by their actions but ourselves by our
• 35:01
  intentions. That is human nature. And in corporate DEI, that is exactly where companies are
• 35:07
  finding themselves getting in trouble. Then once diversity initiatives are the best of
• 35:11
  intentions, but you know, employees, customers and critics don't always experience the intent,
• 35:17
  they experience the impact. So if your leadership team assumes we meant well is enough, well,
• 35:22
  they are missing the point. You know, you don't get credit for what you hope would happen.
• 35:27
  You are accountable for what actually happens. And if you are not paying attention to that
• 35:30
  reality, somebody else, whether it is an employee and activist or politician is going to
• 35:35
  point it out for you. And that point is when you are reacting instead of leading. So I would
• 35:40
  say here is the challenge. We got to stop judging our programs by intent and start measuring
• 35:46
  them by outcomes. Companies put DEI programs in place for the best intentions, but that is
• 35:51
  how it determines success. What matters is how those programs actually function in the real
• 35:56
  world. And sometimes there is an inverted consequences. You know, a policy that is designed
• 36:02
  to promote inclusion might unintentionally create resentment. A training program meant
• 36:07
  to foster understanding might, alienate employees instead. And if you don't know how these programs
• 36:12
  are actually playing out on the ground, then you are leaving yourself vulnerable, not just
• 36:16
  the critics like Robbie Starbuck, but to internal discontent and external scrutiny.
• 36:20
  Yeah. And I think what a storyteller, what a communications professional can do for a company
• 36:27
  is link the outcomes with those intentions. And you do that when the outcomes are as you
• 36:33
  intended and you do that when the outcomes are not as you intended and you take responsibility
• 36:38
  for those things. But you can't do any of that if you are not telling your own story.
• 36:45
  Craig, a great conversation this week. Really appreciate all the thought and we wish the
• 36:49
  best of luck for whoever is next on Robbie Starbuck's hit list. We will be watching. That's our
• 36:55
  show for this week. We want to thank Shawn P Neal and the people forward network for making
• 37:00
  our podcast possible. If you like to tell us what you think, we would love to hear from
• 37:05
  you. Our email address is podcast@ocrnetwork.com. Communication breakdown is a production of
• 37:12
  the observatory on corporate reputation. I'm Steve Dowling.
• 37:15
  And I'm Craig Carroll. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next week.
• 37:22
  #corporatereputation #diversity #RobbieStarbuck #Target #Costco #corporatecommunication #DEI #publicrelations #corporatestrategy