Misleadership and its Consequences: Why Business Is Being Forced to Wake Up

BY CHRISTIAN SARKAR and PHILIP KOTLER

We are entering a moment that business leaders have long tried to avoid.

For years, corporations have told themselves a comforting story: that they can remain “apolitical,” that stability is neutral, that values can be expressed quietly while power does whatever it does.

That story is now collapsing—especially in places like Minnesota, where state violence, political intimidation, and community fracture have become impossible to abstract away.

What we are witnessing is not yet leadership.It is subtle resistance. The distinction matters.

Subtle resistance is what institutions do when silence becomes more dangerous than speech—but courage still feels too costly. It appears in carefully calibrated statements about “community safety,” “de-escalation,” and “employee wellbeing.” It avoids naming Trump, avoids naming ICE, avoids naming authoritarian drift. It spreads risk across coalitions. It protects internally while hedging externally.This is not hypocrisy. It is defensive governance under misleadership.

An incisive critique comes from Andrew Winston’s recent analysis of the statement issued by more than sixty Minnesota CEOs in response to escalating federal enforcement and violence. Winston notes that while the corporate letter was important because it broke weeks of silence, it was woefully inadequate for the moral test of the moment. It invoked “de-escalation” and cooperation among officials—but did not name the violence or uphold fundamental rights unequivocally, even as families directly affected called for moral clarity and justice. In Winston’s view, this is not leadership; it is insulation disguised as neutrality—a refusal to confront reality when moral stakes are high.

Businesses understand—better than politicians—that unpredictability is corrosive. Trumpism thrives on volatility, intimidation, and spectacle. For companies embedded in real communities, employing real people who live where violence is occurring, the chaos has become materially destabilizing. Employees are frightened. Trust is eroding. Normal operations are strained. Silence now signals complicity, not neutrality.

So corporations speak—but softly.

This is particularly visible in Minnesota, where companies are not abstract global brands floating above place, but deeply rooted employers whose workers are neighbors, parents, immigrants, citizens. When enforcement violence arrives at the doorstep, when employees feel unsafe coming to work, when communities fracture in real time, the old strategy of “staying out of it” collapses.

Subtle resistance is a warning sign: the system is stressed.

It is also misleadership: instead of naming the disease, it blathers about – creating confusion, instead of setting an ethical path forward.

But there is a second, more consequential force now entering the equation—one business leaders are only beginning to acknowledge: Labor is rediscovering its leverage.

For decades, the threat of a general strike was treated as historical memory—something belonging to the industrial past. Today, it is re-emerging as a mainstream offensive weapon, openly discussed across sectors, platforms, and generations. Not as ideology, but as necessity.

Employees are no longer merely disengaged.They are politicized by lived experience.When workers see their communities destabilized, their safety threatened, their democratic voice eroded, the employment relationship itself changes. Work becomes contingent. Loyalty dissolves. And the logic shifts from negotiation to disruption.

A general strike is not simply about wages or benefits. It is a system-level response to misleadership. It signals that legitimacy—not compensation—has broken down. And unlike symbolic protest, it directly targets the one domain political chaos cannot survive without: economic continuity.

This is what business leaders now fear—but rarely say aloud.

Subtle resistance is not only about values. It is about preventing escalation. It is about keeping operations running. It is about ensuring that frustration does not cross the threshold from dissent into coordinated withdrawal of labor.

Yet here again, subtlety has limits.

Leadership is not coded language.Leadership is not risk dispersion.

Leadership is not waiting for consensus while legitimacy erodes.

Leadership is moral agency exercised in public.

Genuine corporate leadership begins when businesses stop asking, “How do we survive this moment?” and start asking, “What monsters are we helping create?”

It requires naming threats clearly: authoritarianism, state violence, democratic erosion, ecological and social collapse. It requires drawing hard lines about what a company will and will not comply with—even when compliance would be easier or more profitable.

This is why genuine leadership remains rare. It costs money. It invites retaliation. It disrupts comfort. It demands a longer time horizon than quarterly earnings. But the alternative—permanent subtlety—is not stability. It is decay.

History shows us that societies do not slide into silence overnight. They do so gradually, as institutions adapt rather than confront, normalize rather than resist, optimize for short-term continuity rather than long-term legitimacy.

Subtle resistance can slow harm at the margins, but it cannot regenerate trust—nor can it hold back a workforce that no longer believes the system works for them.

At some point, risk management becomes moral abdication.

The phrase “get woke or go broke” trivializes what is actually happening. This is not about ideology or signaling. It is about systemic self-preservation. Businesses are beginning to realize that there is no economy on a dead planet, no market in a collapsed society, no productivity in a workforce that has withdrawn its consent.The deeper choice facing business is not whether to speak, but how to lead.

Will corporations continue to operate inside misleadership—adjusting, hedging, surviving? Or will they accept responsibility for the social and ecological conditions from which they profit?

The ground is shifting. The rise of strike power tells us patience is ending (it’s been 80 years since the last general strike in Minnesota). Leadership will determine whether this moment becomes a rupture—or a regeneration.

If businesses do not stand up now—not rhetorically, but structurally—they will not be silenced by force. They will be silenced by irrelevance.

And history will remember not what they feared—but what they failed to defend – we, the people.