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      ‘They’ve lost my trust’: consumers shun companies as bosses kowtow to Trump

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      In late January, Lauren Bedson did what many would likely find unthinkable: she cancelled her Amazon Prime membership. The catalyst was Donald Trump’s inauguration. Many more Americans are planning to make similar decisions this Friday.Bedson made her move after seeing photos of Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder, sitting with other tech moguls and billionaires, including Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Sundar Pichai, just rows behind Trump at his inauguration.“I just couldn’t stand to see them so cowardly,” Bedson, of Camas, Washington, told the Guardian. “I lived in Seattle for over a decade. I was a fan of Amazon for a long time, I think they have a good product. But I’m just so disgusted. I don’t want to give these billionaire oligarchs any more of my money.”It’s a sentiment that many Americans have been feeling since Trump entered the White House. Companies and business leaders who were once passive or vocally critical of Trump are now trying to cozy up to him, leading consumers to question the values of the brands they used to trust. A recent Harris poll found that a quarter of American consumers have stopped shopping at their favorite stores because of shifting political stances.Many are being inspired by calls to boycott coming from social media. One boycott has gone viral over the last few weeks: a “blackout” of companies that dropped some of their diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) goals, including Target, Amazon and Walmart, is planned for 28 February with protesters planning to halt all spending at these corporations for the day.View image in fullscreenBut people are also making the decision to boycott at their kitchen tables, trying to figure out how to resist Trump, and perhaps corporate capitalism at large, within their own communities.The Guardian asked readers how their shopping habits have changed over the last few months, as the political climate started to shift after Trump’s win. Hundreds from across the country said that they have stopped shopping at stores such as Walmart and Target that publicly announced the end of DEI goals. Dozens like Bedson had cancelled long held Prime accounts. Others have shut down their Facebook and Instagram accounts in protest of Meta.“I’m just trying to do little things that make me feel a little bit empowered, to stake my claim against what’s happening and how companies are acting in ways that are opposed to my values,” said Kim Wohlenhaus, of St Louis, Missouri, who cancelled her Prime membership, deleted her Meta accounts and has stopped shopping at Target. “It feels good to be able to do something.”Erica Bradley, of Reno, Nevada, said she stopped shopping at Target because of their changing DEI policies.“I don’t plan on going there ever again, just because I feel like they’ve shown that they’re not really committed to these things,” Bradley said. “They’ve lost my trust.”View image in fullscreenFor many consumers, the shift away from the big companies has revealed how much they have come to rely on them. As of last spring, 75% of American consumers had Amazon Prime memberships, a total of 180m Prime accounts, according to Bloomberg.Bedson said cancelling her account made her aware of a culture of consumerism in American where “in some ways, it feels like we don’t have a choice”.“Amazon is so convenient,” she said. “I think we all have become very complacent or complicit, and it’s hard to make these changes. But on the other hand, what else can we do?”It’s been a year since Bradley cancelled her Prime account, after she saw Amazon’s union busting. She recalls a transition period as she was adjusting to life without Prime, but it ultimately led her to spend less overall.“I just decided I don’t really need a lot of these things. Like I don’t need more clothes, I don’t really need more house decorations, which are things I used to spend a lot of money on,” Bradley said. “It’s not retail therapy anymore.”The Harris poll found that a third of Americans are similarly trying to “opt out” of the economy, cutting down on overall spending as the political stances of corporations have become murky.View image in fullscreen“It’s like a Whac-a-Mole now,” Wohlenhaus said. “You could really look in any direction and find something you dislike about the way corporations are caving to this administration.”Wohlenhaus said she has started to prioritize shopping at local businesses. She kept her Costco membership, since the company affirmed its DEI policies.During Joe Biden’s presidency, many of the boycotts against companies actually came from conservatives who felt corporations were caving to a “woke” mob. But boycotts didn’t amount to any serious consequences – with two exceptions. Bud Light saw a drop in sales after it sponsored a post by a transgender influencer and Target removed some of its Pride merchandise after conservative backlash.It’s unclear what the consequences of the current backlash will be. But Wohlenhaus and others voiced optimism that consumers are thinking critically about the choices they’re making at checkout.“Hopefully if thousands of other families are doing what we’re doing, I think they’ll start to feel it,” she said. “We don’t care about your products as much as we care about those values that we cherish.” More

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      China promises ‘countermeasures’ after Trump threatens additional 10% tariff

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      Donald Trump has threatened China with an additional 10% tariff on its exports to the US, prompting a promise of “countermeasures” from Beijing and setting the stage for another significant escalation in the two governments’ trade war.The US president also claimed he planned to impose tariffs on Canada and Mexico starting next Tuesday, having delayed their imposition last month after talks with his counterparts.Posting on Truth Social on Thursday, Trump said illicit drugs such as fentanyl were being smuggled into the US at “unacceptable levels” and that import taxes would force other countries to crack down on the trafficking.“We cannot allow this scourge to continue to harm the USA, and therefore, until it stops, or is seriously limited, the proposed TARIFFS scheduled to go into effect on MARCH FOURTH will, indeed, go into effect, as scheduled,” the Republican president wrote. “China will likewise be charged an additional 10% Tariff on that date.”If Trump makes good on this latest threat, the move would further strain relations between the US and its largest trading partners.In response, China’s commerce and foreign ministries on Friday vowed to retaliate if Chinese companies were affected by the tariffs, accusing the US of using fentanyl as a “pretext” to threaten China.“Such behaviour is purely ‘shifting blame and shirking responsibility,’ which is not conducive to solving its own problems,” a commerce ministry spokesperson said. “If the US insists on proceeding with this course of action, China will take all necessary countermeasures to safeguard its legitimate rights and interests.”Canada and Mexico have promised to retaliate if the US imposes tariffs on their exports. China hit back swiftly when Trump imposed a 10% tariff on its exports earlier this month.The Trump administration has repeatedly raised the threat of tariffs, vowing to rebalance the global economic order in the US’s favor. A string of announced measures have yet to be introduced, however, as economists and businesses urge officials to reconsider.The duties on imports from Canada and Mexico have been repeatedly delayed; modified levies on steel and aluminum will not be enforced until next month, and a wave of “reciprocal” tariffs, trailed earlier this month, will not kick in before April.This week, the US president vowed to slap 25% tariffs on the EU, claiming the bloc was “formed to screw the United States”, although details remain sparse. Duties will be applied “generally”, Trump said, “on cars and all other things”.The prospect of escalating tariffs has already thrown the global economy into turmoil – with consumers expressing fears about inflation worsening and the auto sector possibly suffering if the US’s two largest trading partners in Canada and Mexico are slapped with taxes.The prospect of higher prices and slower growth could create political blowback for Trump.Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      Do Trump and co want a world reclaimed by straight white men? It’s not certain they’ll get it | Andy Beckett

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      For people who believe that the world should be run by straight white men, these are heady times. Probably the most powerful social conservative on the planet occupies the White House again, and seems determined to drive “immoral” and “discriminatory” diversity policies out of American life.Two years ago, the US supreme court banned the use of affirmative action in university admissions. A growing list of American and British companies, from Ford to BT to Goldman Sachs, appear to be reducing their commitment to the once fashionable corporate principles of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). Meanwhile, Reform UK promises to “scrap DEI rules that have lowered standards and reduced economic productivity”. In politics, commerce and education, a huge, potentially lasting counterrevolution seems to be under way.“The death of DEI is finally here,” wrote the columnist Michael Deacon in the Telegraph last year, “and it’s a joy to behold … A radical progressive ideology that, in recent years, has held countless western institutions in its miserable grip … is finally loosening.”For many companies, promoting diversity has only been a priority for a few years, since the surge of anti-racist activism set off around the world by Black Lives Matter in 2020. And in some ways the inclusive values of DEI and the winner-takes-all ethos of capitalism have always been an awkward fit. For all but the most ethical businesses, hiring and employing people in a more egalitarian way is less fundamental than maximising profits.In many supposedly diverse companies, progress towards a truly representative workforce, especially in senior positions, has been slow and far from complete. From rightwing and leftwing perspectives, it can be argued that diversity policies have just been a cynical experiment: yet another attempt to polish corporate capitalism’s increasingly tarnished public image. Now that the political climate has changed, the experiment is being unceremoniously abandoned.But is the situation really that clearcut? One of the key features of current rightwing populism is a desire to escape complicated social realities, and so it is with the revolt against diversity. Thanks to globalisation, immigration and trends in birthrates, Britain and the US, like most other rich countries, are much more multicultural than they were in the 1980s – the last time there was a big conservative pushback against diversity policies. Between 1980 and 2019, the minority ethnic proportion of the US population doubled to 40%. In England and Wales, the proportion of people who didn’t describe themselves as white British doubled between 2001 and 2021 alone: from one in eight to one in four. During these decades of flux, there were also profound shifts in how millions of Britons and Americans thought about feminism, gender, sexuality and disability.None of these socially embedded trends is likely to be completely reversed, however much rightwing populists rail against them. In a speech last week, Kemi Badenoch described diversity policies as “poison”, but the Conservatives have their own equal opportunities policy, with her face on the document’s first page. It commits the party to being “a supportive and inclusive environment where … the diversity of people’s backgrounds and circumstances will be positively valued … [and] where the party will also continue to work towards its dedicated goal of encouraging and promoting equality and diversity”. It’s easy to see these commitments as insincere or hypocritical, but they are also a sign of how far DEI ideas have spread.Back in the 1980s, the last transatlantic campaign against diversity policies was led by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Her government caricatured Labour councils that helped minorities as “loony left”, and then took many of their powers away. Meanwhile, in the US, Ronald Reagan aimed to abolish the federal government’s affirmative action programme, which he saw as “bureaucratic” social engineering. He also reduced funding for the agency that enforced equal opportunities employment law, drastically reducing the number of cases it brought against companies.But his counterrevolution got no further. Strong opposition – hard to imagine now – came from relatively liberal senior figures in the Republican party. More relevant to today, further support for diversity policies came from big business. “When Reagan sought to tear down affirmative action,” wrote the American sociologist Frank Dobbin in his 2009 book, Inventing Equal Opportunity, “corporate America stood together to oppose the [president’s] idea.”Businesses argued that diverse workforces made the best use of the country’s range of talent and were more creative and productive, and more able to understand a broad spectrum of customers at home and abroad. Shrewdly, businesses also rebranded affirmative action in more neutral, less political language, as “human resources management”. Reagan’s attempt to abolish affirmative action was quietly abandoned.Might today’s war on diversity fail in a similar way? The forces of white male supremacy have a more relentless rightwing media on their side than in Reagan and Thatcher’s day. Donald Trump and other reactionary populists also seem less likely to compromise in culture wars than their more pragmatic conservative predecessors.Yet with multiculturalism now deeply entrenched, rooting out diversity policies will be harder than Trump’s confident executive orders suggest. Legal opposition is building, and there are already signs that business is hiding its diversity programmes behind euphemisms again. On Tuesday, Apple shareholders voted against ending the company’s diversity programme. “DEI is being rebranded – not disbanded,” complained the rightwing New York Post recently. It pointed out that some companies widely thought to have dropped DEI continued to promote it on their websites in slightly modified language. If diversity policies increase profits – and according to the president of the British Chambers of Commerce, Martha Lane Fox, “Businesses that embed diversity have 25% higher financial results” – then even the most determined anti-DEI campaign is unlikely to totally prevail.Moreover, what the reactionaries want is less clear and coherent than it first seems. Do they want to restore a society utterly dominated by straight white men, which is almost certainly impossible? Or do they accept the existence of a diverse society, as long as it isn’t actually shaped by diversity policies? On these questions, conservatives are divided.Even Trump sometimes acknowledges American diversity’s permanence and importance. In his inauguration speech, he boasted of his “increases in support from … young and old, men and women, African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans …” Social conservatives around the world may be feeling triumphant now, but their revolt against diversity has probably come too late.

      Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist More

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      Apple shareholders vote against ending DEI program amid Trump crackdown

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      Apple shareholders voted down an attempt to pressure the technology company into yielding to Donald Trump’s push to scrub corporate programs designed to diversify its workforce.A proposal drafted by the National Center for Public Policy Research – a self-described conservative thinktank – urged Apple to follow a litany of high-profile companies that have retreated from diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives currently in the Trump administration’s crosshairs.After a brief presentation about the anti-DEI proposal, Apple announced shareholders had rejected it without disclosing the vote tally. The preliminary results will be outlined in a regulatory filing later on Tuesday.The outcome vindicated Apple management’s decision to stand behind its diversity commitment even though Trump asked the US Department of Justice to look into whether these types of programs have discriminated against employees whose race or gender are not aligned with the initiatives’ goals.But Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, has maintained a cordial relationship with Trump since his first term in office, an alliance that so far has helped the company skirt tariffs on its iPhones made in China. After Cook and Trump met last week, Apple on Monday announced it would invest $500bn in the US and create 20,000 more jobs during the next five years – a commitment applauded by the president.Tuesday’s shareholder vote came a month after the same group presented a similar proposal during Costco’s annual meeting, only to have it overwhelmingly rejected.That snub did not discourage the National Center for Public Policy Research from confronting Apple about its DEI program in a pre-recorded presentation by Stefan Padfield, executive director of the thinktank’s Free Enterprise Project, who asserted “forced diversity is bad for business”.In the presentation, Padfield attacked Apple’s diversity commitments for being out of line with recent court rulings and said the programs expose the Cupertino, California, company to an onslaught of potential lawsuits for alleged discrimination. He cited the Trump administration as one of Apple’s potential legal adversaries.“The vibe shift is clear: DEI is out and merit is in,” Padfield said in the presentation.The specter of potential legal trouble was magnified last week when the Florida attorney general, James Uthmeier, filed a federal lawsuit against Target for allegedly failing to properly disclose the financial risks of its DEI programs to stakeholders.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut Cook conceded Apple may have to make some adjustments to its diversity program “as the legal landscape changes” while still striving to maintain a culture that has helped elevate the company to its current market value of $3.7tn – greater than any other business in the world.“We will continue to create a culture of belonging,” Cook told shareholders during the meeting.In its last diversity and inclusion report issued in 2022, Apple disclosed that nearly three-fourths of its global workforce consisted of white and Asian employees. Nearly two-thirds of its employees were men.Other major technology companies for years have reported employing mostly white and Asian men, especially in high-paid engineering jobs – a tendency that spurred the industry to pursue largely unsuccessful efforts to diversify. More

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      Trump is using tariffs as a blunt-force tool. It won’t work | Mike Williams

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      Last week, Donald Trump revived a trade war from his first term, implementing a 25% tariff on all imported steel. In doing so, he’s using tariffs as a blunt-force tool under the assumption that they’ll be sufficient to jump-start the American steel industry.But that’s not the case.Tariffs are important, but they’re far from enough. Thanks to decades of disinvestment and terrible trade policies, the steel industry has grappled with decline and stagnation for years. It now faces grave threats as China continues to flood the global market with artificially cheap steel, manipulating prices in its favor. Meanwhile, the global market has begun a shift towards “clean” steel produced with electricity and hydrogen, a process the United States has only just started to support.To survive, the steel industry must modernize. To support that effort, the federal government should be implementing targeted tariffs alongside investments and incentives that help the industry grow and transition.Strategic tariffs can help protect steel manufacturing from excessive overcapacity and unfair price manipulation by foreign competitors. They can also be used to account for other effects, such as the impact of high-emissions steel production on health and the environment. For example, a tariff that considers carbon emissions in the production of a given unit of steel would help protect the domestic steel industry from foreign competitors’ cheap, high-emissions steel. The European Union is already implementing this kind of tariff, called a carbon-border adjustment mechanism. Revenue from this tariff – and others – could help our steel industry transition to clean technologies and accelerate the industry’s modernization.When tariffs are used for negotiation without being combined with other government tools, they can backfire. Already, Canada and the EU are preparing reciprocal tariffs on American steel and aluminum, which will make American steel even less desirable in those markets. Steel is a critical material in countless supply chains, from cars and planes to housing and infrastructure, and across-the-board increases in steel prices carry widespread economic risks. Trump’s 2018 tariffs on steel provide a roadmap for what we can expect: while production temporarily ticked up, exports declined almost 25% between 2018 and 2020, and after retaliation from China and Mexico, economists downgraded growth estimates, and business investment slowed.Tariffs are necessary for correcting distortions in global trade but are a poor tool for catalyzing the kind of investment needed for the long-term viability of the American steel industry, which needs to transition to clean technology to remain competitive globally. While tariffs can protect existing production capacity from being undercut, they won’t necessarily yield large infrastructure and modernization investments from domestic steel companies already operating at slim margins.But just as it has started to do for our domestic semiconductor industry, the federal government can combine fortified trade policies with structural support for the steel industry’s transformation. This could include investment tax credits for revamping steel-production facilities to use clean technologies and production tax credits for making domestic clean steel, spurring private investment across the steel industry.The federal government could leverage existing policies as well. For example, expanding the Biden administration’s “Buy America” requirements for federally funded projects, such as highway and bridge construction, to include domestically produced, 100% clean steel would strengthen demand for US-produced steel. Reviving “Buy Clean” standards for steel used in federal projects could also accelerate the industry’s modernization. These structural supports could be funded by the revenue from targeted, well-designed tariffs.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump has claimed his tariffs will create a “manufacturing boom”, turn America into a manufacturing “powerhouse” and “make America rich again”. But going all in on tariffs alone is an unsteady foundation for industrial policy. Unless Trump expands his strategy to include incentives and investment for the steel industry, his approach will be like a game of Jenga: eventually, it will all come crashing down.

      Mike Williams is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and former deputy director of the BlueGreen Alliance More

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      Trump threatens 25% tariffs on foreign cars and semiconductor chips

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      Donald Trump stood firm against warnings that his threatened trade war risks derailing the US economy, claiming his administration could hit foreign cars with tariffs of around 25% within weeks.Semiconductor chips and drugs are set to face higher duties, Trump told reporters at a news conference on Tuesday.The White House has repeatedly raised the threat of tariffs since Trump returned to office last month, pledging to rebalance the global economic order in America’s favor.A string of announced tariffs have yet to be introduced, however, as economists and business urge the Trump administration to reconsider.Duties on imports from Canada and Mexico have been repeatedly delayed; modified levies on steel and aluminum, announced last week, will not be enforced until next month; and a wave of so-called “reciprocal” tariffs, also trailed last week, will not kick in before April.Tariffs are taxes on foreign goods. They are paid by the importer of the product – in this case, companies and consumers based inside the US – rather than the exporter, elsewhere in the world.Asked on Tuesday if he had decided the rate of a threatened tariff on cars from overseas, Trump said he would “probably” announce that on 2 April, “but it’ll be in the neighborhood of 25%”.Upon being asked the same question about threatened tariffs on semiconductors and pharmaceuticals, Trump replied: “It’ll be 25% and higher, and it’ll go very substantially higher over the course of a year.”The ramp-up, he explained, was designed to lure manufacturers to the US. “When they come into the United States, and they have their plant or factory here, there is no tariff.”Executives have cautioned that the administration’s plan for tariffs risks harming the US economy. A 25% tariff on Mexico and Canada “will blow a hole in the US industry that we have never seen”, Jim Farley, the Ford CEO, told an investor conference in New York last week. More

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      The Guardian view on Trump’s diplomacy: when the US knows the price and ignores values | Editorial

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      The Trump administration did not take red lines on Ukraine to its talks with Russia in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday: it cares about the bottom line. The secretary of state, Marco Rubio, underscored that when he said the two sides would create a team, not only to support Ukraine peace talks but also to explore the “incredible opportunities” to partner with Moscow geopolitically “and, frankly, economically” that might result.Kyiv and other European capitals are still reeling at the full extent of Donald Trump’s cynicism when it comes to world affairs, and callous disregard for the people caught up in them. But it should be no surprise that business dealings were high on the agenda. Vladimir Putin would dearly love to end his country’s economic isolation. Russia is making the case that American energy firms and others could profit handsomely by doing business with it again.For Mr Trump, his two key interests – money and power – are not only interrelated but fungible, just as US goals and his personal interests often appear indistinguishable to him. (This is a man who launched his own cryptocurrency token days before returning to the White House, and as he sought to ease regulation of the industry).When he talks of the future of Ukraine or Gaza, he speaks not of human rights and security, lives and homes, but of laying US hands on $500bn of minerals and a “big real-estate site” respectively. He believes in cutting deals, not making peace. At the heart of his foreign policy team is Steve Witkoff, not a diplomat but a billionaire real-estate developer and golf buddy. Mr Witkoff was first appointed as Middle East envoy and then dispatched to negotiate with Moscow. The head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, Kirill Dmitriev, was also in Riyadh – while Ukraine and European allies have been denied a seat.Mr Trump’s merging of wealth and strength were obvious even before he took office the first time. He suggested he could use Taiwan as leverage with China on issues including trade. John Bolton, who became his national security adviser, later said (though Mr Trump denied it) that the president pleaded with China’s leader, Xi Jinping, to ensure he would win the next election, “stress[ing] the importance of … increased Chinese purchases of soybeans and wheat in the electoral outcome”.Mr Trump’s Middle East policy is not only pleasing to his evangelical Christian supporters. His repugnant proposal to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Gaza, allowing the construction of an American-owned “Riviera”, is shocking but in many ways builds upon ideas long held by businessman friends as well as Israeli settlers. His son-in-law, Jared Kushner, a former real-estate developer charged with overseeing Middle East policy in Mr Trump’s first term, suggested last year that Gaza’s “waterfront property” could be “very valuable”. (Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, incidentally, became a major investor in Mr Kushner’s private equity firm after he left the administration.)Volodymyr Zelenskyy tried to capitalise on Mr Trump’s economic transactionalism by offering access to Ukraine’s resources, notably minerals, in exchange for security. He got Mr Trump’s attention – but the terms of the resulting US demand make it look less like diplomacy than extortion. The US president prices up everything and knows the value of nothing. Others must now endeavour to show him that his plans will not come as cheaply as he believes.

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      To the CEOs who’ve joined Trump’s fight against diversity, I say this: you’re making a big mistake | Stefan Stern

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      The mask has slipped and the gloves are off. A company which in 2022 boasted that it had exceeded its target, “spending $1.26 billion with US certified diverse suppliers”, is now ending diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.That company is Meta (formerly known as Facebook), whose chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, announced DEI dismantling shortly before he had a prominent seat at Donald Trump’s recent inauguration. Perhaps from that privileged spot he was able to imbibe some of the “masculine energy” he says he wants to see at work.Meta is not alone in signalling a shift from its previous position. Amazon, McDonald’s, Accenture, Google, General Motors, Pepsi, Walmart and Boeing are among the corporate giants who are downplaying or removing altogether references to DEI and public commitments to it. The consultancy Deloitte used to declare that “diversity, equity and inclusion are core to our values”. But, the FT reports, the page those words appeared on has been wiped from its website.It is possible these decisions were taken partly on legal advice. Zuckerberg seems to have pre-empted the attorney general, Trump’s Florida favourite Pam Bondi, as she recently declared that there should be an end to what she called “illegal DEI” and “accessibility” discrimination. You can imagine that in-house counsel had anticipated legal trouble and so were moved to suggest caution on DEI issues. Zuckerberg is not merely being cautious, however. He has moved Maxine Williams, former chief diversity officer, to a role concerned with “accessibility and engagement”. Whether that restructuring will be enough to satisfy the Maga overlords remains to be seen.Some of the changes at other companies may be merely symbolic or presentational. And not everyone is backing down. The investment bank Goldman Sachs stated: “We strongly believe that organisations benefit from diverse perspectives” – although this belief has not stopped them from removing one of their former requirements for diversity in their clients. Goldman Sachs is still “committed to operating our programmes and policies in compliance with the law”, it says. Jamie Dimon, the boss of JPMorgan Chase, dared anti-DEI activists to challenge his bank’s pro-diversity stance. (But he is taking a hard line on forcing people to return to the office, despite remote working being key for modern diverse workforces.)All the same, the overriding effect of seeing that array of (newly) admiring CEOs lining up in Washington to salute the incoming chief was to recall the timeless Marxist dictum (Groucho, not Karl): “Those are my principles and if you don’t like them … well, I have others.”View image in fullscreenMaybe the pressure has finally got to some of these top bosses. A recent article from senior partners at McKinsey noted that “CEOs are on the job 24/7, responsible for addressing an ever-shifting array of problems and threats”.But perhaps part of the problem is feeding already narcissistic CEOs the sort of grandiose advice offered by the blue-chip consultants in their article. Likening the boss to an “elite athlete”, the authors argue that CEOs need to use their time purposefully (like LeBron James, the basketball star), “perfect the art of recovery” (like the footballer Cristiano Ronaldo), keep learning (like the golfer Bryson DeChambeau), embrace data and analytics (like a Formula One grand prix driver) and be adaptable and resilient (like the gymnast Simone Biles and … Muhammad Ali).The end product sounds like a remarkable person indeed: “This is how leaders can … build their resilience muscle, and become … ready to thrive in the 21st century, while staying humble, celebrating noble failures, and always helping team members.” Yep, nobody I know, either.In fact, bosses risk being cut off from the everyday concerns of their staff. An academic study into this phenomenon looking back decades, published in the American Journal of Sociology and called The Great Separation, draws on evidence from a dozen countries. The highest earners inhabit the same narrow terrain, and have limited contact with lower earners, the researchers found. This can affect how elites engage with the rest of society, and how in turn lower earners see them. This “great separation” may have had an impact on “the key social and political challenges of our time”, the study says. Brexit, Trump, populism and the rise of the new right may all be symptoms.Can the media do anything to help? The new media business Semafor has just launched a weekly newsletter called The CEO Signal, available (for free!) to bosses running companies with annual turnover of at least $500m (£400m). Its editor, Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson, says there is a need for such a specially targeted publication: “There’s a place here in the market for something that’s much more tightly focused to the people at the very top of the org chart – who are actually trying to run exceedingly complicated organisations, at an increasingly complicated time,” he told the Press Gazette.“And there’s nobody in any organisation who faces the same list of challenges as the CEO does,” he added. “It’s a cliche to say that it’s lonely at the top, but there is something to that.” The venerable Harvard Business Review is also about to launch a new service specifically for the “C-suite” – that is, for people whose job title begins with the word “chief”.How these new publications will help to mitigate some of the problems highlighted by the “great separation” study is not immediately clear. I am, however, reminded of what Laura Empson, a professor at Bayes Business School in London, has observed: that if a leader complains it is lonely at the top then they “are not doing it right”.Rather than an ever-narrowing elite of CEOs becoming more and more detached from their workforce, we would do better to try to reconnect. Companies and workplaces should be vibrant and cohesive communities of people.The ghastly alternative could be seen at the White House last week, when Elon Musk cavorted around the Oval Office firing off wild and unsubstantiated accusations against public officials, while Trump looked on calmly. Musk confidently asserted, without offering any evidence, that some officials at the now gutted USAid had been taking “kickbacks”. This is not model CEO behaviour. And this is not the leadership we need.

      Stefan Stern is co-author of Myths of Management and the former director of the High Pay Centre. His latest book is Fair or Foul: the Lady Macbeth Guide to Ambition
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