And last week, former McDonald’s chief executive Ed Rensi launched The Boardroom Initiative to push for shareholder revolts against corporate giants promoting political campaigns over profits. Since Rensi is the man who created the McNugget – for which some of us at least are eternally grateful – he is not to be trifled with.
His group has already started mobilising shareholders in Bank of America to organise against it pushing critical race theory training on its staff, and it has a range of other companies in its sights. That comes on the back of companies such as Coinbase banning political discussions at work; its boss Brian Armstrong even offered generous severance terms to any staff who felt uncomfortable with that.
Put it all together and one point is clearly emerging. The fightback against woke capitalism has finally begun. And now the fightback has started, it is only going to grow and grow. Of course, there is nothing wrong with companies keeping up with the times.
Everyone agrees that they should be sensitive to all the different views among staff, customers and suppliers, that they should develop talent regardless of background, open recruitment to a wide variety of different people and make sure that the board and senior management is not only filled with middle-aged white guys. That is just being good at running a company.
But there are three big problems with the version of ultra-liberal, activist capitalism that has emerged over the last few years. First, small groups of staff within companies have hijacked what started as mainstream corporate social responsibility departments and pushed them towards more and more extreme positions.