Hearts & Minds: Is cancel culture impinging authenticity?

The suicide of an Oxford student victim of cancel culture is shocking, but serves to illustrate again, its pervasive and powerful nature. It’s terrifying, resulting in the corporate world, in CEOs always deferring to caution.

Many corporates now have comms strategies in place to deal with an ensuing crisis. Inevitably, this means acting before anything can backfire, which entails checking and rechecking every public utterance, anything that might reach the media and more importantly, social media. Often, the result is blandness, as companies and their managers strive to remain the right side of woke.

By contrast, some appear able to get away with it, to say what they want, without compunction and retribution – think Donald Trump and Elon Musk. What that fuels is a sense of frustration, that CEOs can see what they’re doing, but get away with it, while company chiefs are stymied. That’s not to say corporate leaders are lining up to make offensive remarks and to behave inappropriately, not at all. They ought, though, to be able to aim for somewhere in-between, to be allowed and encouraged to express themselves more confidently.

The solution is to be bolder, to strike a balance between caution and absence of fear, to adopt a position of cautiously unafraid. The first part requires education and drumming home across the company, from the top downwards, the importance of correctness. It’s a constant and evolving process, so it becomes second nature. It’s also knowing that you have a safety net in place should something appear to be backfiring, that you’ve got solutions ready. You’ve got faith in your comms team; you know they will cover your back. The second is built on that strength.

Get the first right and the second enables you to be yourself. You and they know the parameters, where to go and where not, but now you can be assertive and direct. Unfortunately, too many CEOs feel inhibited by the first. Instead of seeing it as providing security, giving them the freedom to lead and to influence, it becomes a reason for hiding. They’re in the house but the door is permanently double-bolted – it prevents outsiders from entering but stops them from going out.

The biggest prize in business is authenticity. By letting cancel culture dictate their actions and wishes, CEOs are sacrificing truth and honesty, they’re ceasing to appear authentic. That is bad for them, bad for their product. They must be allowed to strike that middle ground.

Chris Blackhurst is one of the UK’s foremost business journalists. He was previously Editor of The Independent and City Editor of the Evening Standard.