Here’s my observations of working at Fortune 500 companies for over thirty years. The people who rise to the top isolate themselves. They park in special parking lots. They often have their own entrances. Their offices are often located far away the lower-level employees or are in separate buildings. They often eat in a separate dining room, often with wait staff. They seldom if ever walk out into the common areas. They almost never attend an event where they can be approached by anyone not of their rank. As they gain seniority and get more power, their decisions often become disassociated with the reality in the plant and the world. In the 1980’s when the rest of the world was accepting PC’s and everyone was doing their own typing, Honeywell bought Wang whose only product was office automation based on mainframes. When we employees heard about this, we were flabbergasted. A year later Honeywell took the largest write-down (loss) in the history of the United States.
As far as backing liberal causes, probably half of these people are not liberals. But their company has been hiring liberals in HR for decades and those people eventually get high enough up to associate with the people running the show every day. Therefore, the only voices the highly placed people hear are from the liberal left. The halls of senior leadership become an echo chamber. True, there are other things going on, like making the stock attractive to Blackrock and Calpers who require a high ESG rating in order to buy it. Then there are the banks requiring a high ESG rating to extend short term credit. But overall, I’d guess their liberalism is a product of being isolated from the great unwashed MAGA forces around them.
You are spot on.
I believe you.
HR has become the KGB of the corporate world. Everyone fears being called in by them so they follow whatever insanity proposed even though they disagree with it privately.
The one thing CEOs and other top company execs pay the most attention to are the stock price, profit and growth numbers. They are obsessed with them. The owners of companies like CNN, MSNBC, the NYT, Target, AB, etc. SEE their numbers crashing and they know why. Some of the media companies have been operation at a loss for years. The owners care more about spreading leftist garbage than making money. They are so rich that spending a few 10s of millions of $/yr is worth it to them to promote their ideology. Why did Zuckerberg pay $400 million to rig an election? ESG is certainly a consideration for many companies but may not be the most important.