An interesting piece by Paul Brown in the New York Times today suggests that "maybe senior executives really do not have a clue." He reports that a study in the McKinsey Quarterly, the business journal of McKinsey & Company, found “a trust gap between consumers and global corporations, as well as a lack of understanding among business leaders about what consumers really expect from companies.”
As an example he cites the finding that, while 68 percent of executives said that large corporations made a “generally” or “somewhat” positive contribution to the public good, fewer than half (48 percent) of consumers worldwide agreed. The number was just 40 percent in the United States.
The study also found--no surprise here as far as I'm concerned--that executives were out of touch with people. For example, when asked what three concerns would be most important to them over the next five years, “Executives predicted consumers would put job losses and offshoring first, followed by privacy and data security, and the environment...[whereas]...almost half of the consumers picked environmental issues, followed by pension and other retirement benefits, and health care.”
I wonder how the average annual compensation of the 4,000 global business executives interviewed for the survey compared to that of the 4,000 consumers they failed to understand. So, when asked to rank different institutions in terms of being trusted to act in the best interest of society, consumers not surprisingly placed large global corporations below all the other choices, including nongovernmental organizations, small regional companies, the United Nations, labor unions, the media.
I bet those global corporate executives are crying all the way to the bank [off-shore no doubt, in the corporate Gulfstream probably].
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