Social justice CEOs should be held accountable for any damage they cause to shareholder value, writes JLF’s Jon Pritchett in the Wall Street Journal. In a piece Jon co-authored with Duke University Professor Ed Tiryakian, the analysts look behind the headlines achieved by CEOs who make decisions based on personal views.
Target Corp. shareholders have watched helplessly since last year as another case of political posturing played out in North Carolina, where we work and live. Target’s activist CEO, Brian Cornell, responded to the state’s contentious House Bill 2, also known as the bathroom law, by announcing a new “inclusive” bathroom policy in April 2016. What were the results? Plummeting sales due to a widespread boycott, an erosion of market share and, most important, a 40% drop in Target’s stock price between April 2016 and July 2017. That devastation equated to a $20 billion loss of shareholder value while the market rose 15% in that same period.
Read the entire piece in the Wall Street Journal on activist CEOs by JLF’s Jon Pritchett and Duke University’s Ed Tiryakian here. For those who read the print edition, the piece is on page A15 of Friday’s newspaper.
