For companies and high-profile executives, speaking out in times of national crisis carries risks. But so does staying silent.
In the wake of Alex Pretti’s death at the hands of federal officers in Minneapolis, a growing number of corporate leaders, employees and Minnesota-based companies are speaking out. Some are condemning the fatal shooting and Donald Trump’s broader immigration enforcement in the state.
But the response has also exposed a familiar tension in corporate America: Powerful executives and public-facing companies often stay quiet until internal and external pressures converge — and until they believe speaking out together matters more than speaking loudly.
“What’s really interesting is that the CEOs do engage when they get to a tipping point, and we’re at one again,” said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a Yale School of Management professor and author of the book “Trump’s Ten Commandments.”
Eat their cake and have it too.
That order always made more sense to me, but it’s a shoddy idiom in the first place. What value is there in having (i.e. keeping) cake? It’s meant to be eaten and goes stale otherwise.
The logic as it’s always been explained to me has been that you can’t have what you’ve already had. To have a cake and then eat it makes sense. To eat a cake and still have it does not. It’s one of those sayings that people have fucked up for so long it’s in the same realm of “I could care less.” We know what you mean but the phrasing is incorrect.