The Politics of Business: A Playbook Emerges
SHORTLY AFTER MIDNIGHT ON MAY 30, 2018, less than 24 hours after a racist tweet had led ABC to strip Roseanne Barr of her popular TV show, the actress took to Twitter once more and blamed Ambien, the sleeping pill made by French pharma company Sanofi, for her lapse of judgment. Soon thereafter, the company tweeted its blockbuster response: “People of all races, religions and nationalities work at Sanofi every day to improve the lives of people around the world. While all pharmaceutical treatments have side effects, racism is not a known side effect of any Sanofi medication.”
This short statement was retweeted almost 100,000 times and featured prominently in leading news outlets like CNN, USA Today and the New York Times. “This one tweet generated more kudos internally than anything I have been involved in in my professional career,” Angie Bechan, vice president and head of communications for Sanofi North America, told us. “It was different from the norm — a company taking a stand to defend its values. We saw it as an egregious attack on our values and we stood up for our employees and patients. It generated tremendous pride and people still tell our employees how amazing that tweet was when they find out that they work at Sanofi.”
Conventional wisdom has held that business should keep a low profile on divisive political issues. Why risk drawing the ire of politicians, pundits, customers, shareholders or employees by wading into non-business concerns? And yet, Sanofi’s leaders reached the opposite conclusion. “This went so blatantly against our values,” Bechan explained, “that the risk of not saying anything and letting it stand out there was far greater than any backlash.”
Sanofi is not alone. Consider sports retailer . Two weeks after, announced that Dick’s stores would no longer carry assault rifles or high-capacity magazines, or sell guns to anybody under 21. “To think about the loss and the grief that those kids and those parents had, we said, ‘We need to do something’,” Stack explained.
