Corporate Values: the Death of ESG Pokémon, and the Birth of a New Litmus Test
Between Disney getting jawboned by the government into taking Jimmy Kimmel off the air last week and the annual corporate ESG gabfest surrounding the UN General Assembly, there’s a confluence of events bringing corporate values to the fore this week. That makes this a valuable moment to examine how they get defined and are (or aren’t, as the case may be) lived.
We’re watching the death of what I call ESG Pokémon, that peculiar corporate game where companies tried to catch ‘em all, indiscriminately collecting endorsement cards from every possible constituency without any real material commitment to any underlying principles. Gotta support this community! Gotta advocate for that cause! But don’t ask for too much from us!
The game worked well enough when the stakes were low and the societal playing field was relatively consensus-driven. But that world is gone.
The Problem with Anodyne Values
Companies have always needed to articulate their values, if only to give employees some North Star for decision-making. The problem is most corporate values are meaningless pablum. “We value teamwork and transparency.” “We believe in excellence and innovation.”
A former colleague once shared a brilliant test for corporate values: if the opposite of your value could be an equally valid business strategy, then it’s a real value. But if the opposite is absurd—”We value working alone and opacity”—then you’re just stating table stakes, not values.
This tendency toward the anodyne got turbocharged during what we might call in shorthand the Obama Era of corporate communications. Companies didn’t just pick safe values, they started collecting causes like baseball cards. Every heritage month, every awareness week, every social movement got its corporate acknowledgment. Pride logos in June. Black squares on Instagram. Land acknowledgments in email signatures. Just don’t ask too many questions.
It was all very surface-level, but hey, at least companies were on the record, right?
The Bud Light-Dylan Mulvaney controversy was probably the zenith of this approach and as well as its mortal wounding. Here was a brand that thought it could simply add trans advocacy to its collection of supported causes without understanding that some audiences aren’t additive, but substitutional. Bud Light discovered that when your values are just demographic arbitrage, both sides can smell the cynicism. The trans community saw tokenism. Traditional customers saw betrayal. Nobody saw conviction.
Values aren’t free anymore, if they ever were. They come with costs, trade-offs, and very public tests of commitment. Disney is learning this right now. You can’t proclaim yourself a bastion of creative expression and progressive values while simultaneously muzzling your biggest star’s political commentary.
The CEO Marching Test
I think it’s time for a new litmus test for corporate values and advocacy: Would your CEO march for it? Not tweet about it. Not issue a statement. Would they physically show up, in public, and march in support of that value, issue, or cause?
Because that’s essentially what you’re asking your company to do when you take a stance today. You’re not just checking a box or updating a website of nice-sounding virtues. You’re entering an arena where values are coming into genuine conflict—intellectual, economic, and cultural conflict—at an increasing pace and intensity.
This isn’t an environment where you get to just sound nice. You have to actually live your stated principles. And we have collectively developed incredibly effective mechanisms—social media primary among them—for detecting and calling out bullshit.
Pick the hills you’re actually willing to die on. Be radically honest about what you care about and what you don’t. And understand that in today’s environment, every value you proclaim will eventually be tested.
Credit where it’s due: Brian Armstrong and Coinbase figured this out back in 2020. While every other tech company was issuing statements about every social issue under the sun, Armstrong said, essentially: “We’re here to build crypto infrastructure. That’s it. We’re not going to advocate on other issues.”
Many people (myself included) found it spiritually hollow for a company devoted to reinventing the financial system from the ground up. But it was intellectually honest and clear in a way that Google and Meta’s cultures at this juncture in time could never be. Current and potential employees could make an informed decision about what kind of environment they were opting in to. Say what you want about the tenets of Coinbase’s culture, at least it’s an ethos.
Contrast that with an extreme outlier like Patagonia, which presents something of a third way. Rather than collect causes, founder and CEO Yvon Chouinard picked one and went all in and put $3 billion where his mouth was. Yes, they’ve alienated conservative customers and told people who don’t like their politics to buy their jackets elsewhere. But everyone knows exactly what Patagonia stands for. They’d fail my CEO marching test because Yvon would already be getting arrested at the protest before you could organize the march.
One of the things I’m proudest of from my tenure at Twitter was our bedrock commitment to defending and respecting the user’s voice, particularly when those voices came into conflict with power both at home and abroad. I was inspired to go to work every day knowing our badass legal team (who are still personal heroes of mine) were fighting for speech rights globally in ways that other peer companies chose not to. I know I wasn’t alone in that.
Looking around the tech landscape right now, it’s difficult to identify that kind of courage and commitment to values in action against government coercion.
The reckoning is underway. But at least what’s in its wake will be real.