CHATTERJI AND TOFFEL
rights of LGBTQ individuals. On the socially conservative side of
the spectrum, Chick- fi l- A’s CEO, Dan Cathy, has denounced gay
marriage.
In some cases, several CEOs have worked together to raise
awareness. For example, days before the United Nations climate-
change- agreement negotiations took place in Paris in late 2015, the
CEOs of 14 major food companies— Mars, General Mills, Coca- Cola,
Unilever, Danone Dairy North America, Hershey, Ben & Jerry’s,
Kellogg, PepsiCo, Nestlé USA, New Belgium Brewing, Hain Celes-
tial, Stonyfi eld Farm, and Clif Bar— cosigned an open letter calling
on government leaders to create a strong accord that would “mean-
ingfully address the reality of climate change.” Similarly, nearly 100
CEOs cosigned an amicus brief to encourage federal judges to over-
turn Trump’s executive order banning citizens from seven Muslim-
majority countries from entering the United States.
Collective action can have greater impact than acting alone. Take
what happened with Trump’s economic councils. Though Merck’s
CEO, Kenneth Frazier, received a lot of press when he resigned from
the president’s American Manufacturing Council in response to
Trump’s remarks blaming white supremacists and counterprotest-
ers equally for the violence in Charlottesville, it was only after CEOs
jumped ship en masse from that group and from Trump’s Strategic
and Policy Forum that the president disbanded both councils— a
move that was widely viewed as a defeat for Trump.
Leveraging economic power
Some of the more powerful cases of CEO activism have involved put-
ting economic pressure on states to reject or overturn legislation. For
example, in response to Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration
Act (RFRA), which some viewed as anti- LGBTQ , Bill Oesterle, then
the CEO of Angie’s List, canceled its planned expansion in Indianap-
olis, and Benioff threatened to halt all Salesforce employee travel to
the state. Other leaders joined the protest, including the president
of the National College Athletic Association, Mark Emmert, who
suggested that the bill’s passage could aff ect the location of future
tournaments and that the association might consider moving its