The Business Nightmare of Navigating Geopolitics
Summary
If one considers the extraordinary backlash that has hit Anheuser-Busch and its Bud Light beer brand over a marketing campaign with a transgender influencer, imagine the perils if a corporation puts its head above the parapet to express opinions of geopolitical importance. Martin Wolf, the chief economics commentator of the Financial Times, argues in his recent book “The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism” that the two work best for business when each complements and constrains the other. movement — shorthand for prioritizing environmental and social factors — is stimulating (and reflecting) a more enlightened approach, acknowledging many responsibilities besides the bottom line and shareholder return, politics has grown coarser. In 2019, when Herbert Diess, the chief executive of Volkswagen at the time, told a BBC reporter that he did not know about re-education camps where millions of Uyghurs have been interned in Xinjiang, the video clip went viral. Ian Cheshire is the former boss of Kingfisher, a multinational retailer, and a member of the board overseeing the Cabinet Office, a government department that supports the British prime minister.