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Last Monday, when newly sworn-in President Donald Trump announced Although the US government would now only recognize two genders, male and female, a triumph of corporate diversity was loudly applauded in Davos.
It was addressed to a boss who had just told an event on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum about a transgender employee who had long dreamed of adopting a baby girl and buying a house for her mother.
“A couple of months ago, he messaged me and said, ‘I’ve done both,’” the boss said, visibly pleased with the opportunities women now had at a company trying to make its workforce more diverse. and inclusive.
The name of this woke business warrior? Priya Agarwal Hebbar, chairwoman of India’s Hindustan Zinc mining company and non-executive director of the Vedanta mining and energy conglomerate founded by her father, Anil Agarwal.
For the avoidance of doubt, the idea of a woke mining boss makes about as much sense as Trump taking up yoga.
Hebbar was by no means the only leader at Davos to make clear that Maga’s vision of corporate life will be resisted by boardrooms that have found that the environmental and diversity measures they adopted years ago make financial sense.
“We are not going to change course,” Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in an interview with the Financial Times at the Alpine meeting. “We believe that building an employment group that is diverse, that is global, that thinks about all aspects of the business, that is positive, it is just good business.”
Ralph Lauren boss Patrice Louvet said forcefully: “It would be very short-sighted not to represent the consumers we serve, and we serve a very wide and diverse range of consumers.”
However, Davos also showed Trump’s war against what he later called the “absolute “The nonsense” of “discriminatory” DEI measures cannot be ignored. I didn’t hear any chief executive at the World Economic Forum meeting use language as forceful as Trump’s. But the nods to the president’s promise to make the United States a “country based on merit” were evident.
“We need to create an environment where people feel included and It should be a meritocracy where everyone has the opportunity to succeed,” said Rich Lesser, global president of Boston Consulting Group. a forum event.
Trump’s approach may encourage some business leaders to follow Meta, McDonald’s, Walmart and other large American corporations that have already scaled back their DEI programs amid Trump’s return.
And it’s easy to imagine that executives eager to end work-from-home policies might be inspired to act post-Trump. an order for federal workers to return to their offices five days a week.
But things are more complicated when it comes to Trump’s push to make fossil fuels great again.
Wall Street banks had already pulled out of net-zero alliances following Trump’s re-election, sparking speculation in Davos that the future for banking corporations’ sustainability departments might not be bright.
And several executives said privately that they could now talk less about saving the planet and more about increasing “resilience” when it comes to their climate work.
However, 40 CEOs gathered in the Swiss ski town to promote measures in their sectors that support and protect nature. “That suggests there is another side to the ESG backlash,” said Jack Hurd, head of nature at the World Economic Forum.
And other leaders said years of experience had demonstrated the financial wisdom of carbon reduction measures.
“It’s incredibly beneficial from an economic point of view,” Jesper Brodin, chief executive of the Ingka Group, Ikea’s main retailer, told me as Davos drew to a close.
Reducing emissions from supply chains and operations had focused attention on resources and costs, which in turn had helped Ingka’s revenue grow 24 percent since 2016, while emissions from carbon had fallen by 30 percent, he said.
Andrew Forrest, the Australian billionaire determined to turn his Fortescue iron ore mining group into a green industry showcase, had a similar story. Although it is only a third of the way through its decarbonisation plans, it said the economic case for doing so was evident.
Companies that jumped on the anti-ESG bandwagon and said, “Let’s go full speed ahead, screw the icebergs,” would be in for a shock, he said. “You’ll be like the Titanic because the climate doesn’t care about our politics and it’s getting worse.”