THE NEW CEO ACTIVISTSheadquarters out of Indianapolis. Under pressure, then- governor
Mike Pence approved a revised version of the law, which forbade
businesses from denying service to customers because of their sex-
ual orientation.
In response to North Carolina’s bathroom law, Schulman canceled
PayPal’s plans for a new global operations center in Charlotte, which
would have created more than 400 skilled jobs. As many other CEOs
followed suit, the potential damage mounted: The Associated Press
has estimated that the bathroom law controversy will cost the state
more than $3.76 billion in lost business over a dozen years.
Companies and their leaders also wield economic power by
donating to third- party groups that promote their favored causes.
To help fi ght Trump’s immigration ban, for example, the car- sharing
company Lyft pledged $1 million to the American Civil Liberties
Union, which is challenging the ban in court. In response to the
Charlottesville protest and Trump’s reaction to it, James Murdoch,
the chief executive of 21st Century Fox, donated $1 million to the
Anti- Defamation League, a group that fi ghts bigotry.
How eff ective are these approaches? The trend of corporate lead-
ers taking a public stand on issues not necessarily related to their
businesses is relatively new, so there’s little empirical evidence of its
impact. But we do have limited anecdotal evidence that it can shape
public policy— as it did in the case of Indiana’s RFRA. When legisla-
tors passed a similar religious freedom bill in Georgia, threats to stop
fi lming in the state from leaders of many studios and networks—
including Disney, CBS, MGM, and Netflix— and similar kinds of
warnings from Benioff and other CEOs were seen as instrumental
in moving the governor to veto it. And leaders of the National Bas-
ketball Association, NCAA, and Atlantic Coast Conference have been
credited with forcing North Carolina to revise its bathroom law.
To move beyond anecdotal evidence, we set out to investigate in
a scientifi c, rigorous way whether CEOs can help win public support
for policies, thus aff ecting legislators’ votes and whether governors
sign or veto bills. Our fi ndings demonstrate that CEOs can indeed
play an important role in shaping the public’s views on political and
social issues. (See the sidebar “Our Research: Does CEO Activism