Preamble to the 2022 Compendium | From Tunnel Vision to Lateral Vision

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Western business leaders and policy makers reacted with shock. But Jeff Sonnenfeld, a business professor at Yale University, got busy: within a couple of days, his students had created a webpage that tracked which Western companies were withdrawing from Russia — and those which did not. It quickly expanded and campaigners started to use the data to demand that recalcitrant companies withdraw. Nestle was a case in point: after the Yale list revealed that it was still operating in Russia, activist hackers launched cyber protests, prompting Nestle to withdraw. “When this list was first published the week of February 28, only several dozen companies had announced their departure,” Sonnenfeld explained on the site, in early May. “[But] we are humbled that our list helped galvanize 1000 companies to withdraw.” Transparency, in other words, had a snowballing effect.

There is a bigger lesson about cultural change here that corporate leaders should note. On one level, this tale is a case study in Western anger about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. On a broader level, however, it also illustrates two crucial points: radical transparency is changing the social contract between companies and society; and this, in turn, is forcing business leaders to become more sensitive to shifts in the wider social zeitgeist.