Trump’s chilling effect on big business

Adi Ignatius:  Suddenly we can’t criticize the government, right? Because there will be a tremendous backlash, and that’s really sad. You could talk about whether CEOs speaking up on an issue, whether that’s a good idea or not, but the idea that, well, they wouldn’t dare in this climate because it’s too scary, that’s China under the Communist party. I mean, that’s somehow an unintended consequence of where we’re right now.

Bob Safian: That’s Adi Ignatius, longtime editor-in-chief of Harvard Business Review. After 16 years at the helm, Adi recently passed the mantle, but today’s episode is much more than an exit interview. It is an eye-opening strategic examination of today’s unprecedented business climate from AI’s impact, to Elon Musk, to the evolving role of what it means to be a business leader. Adi is refreshingly candid, sharing lessons and unfiltered assessments. I think it’s one of the most important insightful episodes we’ve done. So let’s get to it. I’m Bob Safian and this is Rapid Response. 

[THEME MUSIC]

I am Bob Safian. I’m here with Adi Ignatius, the longtime editor-in-chief of Harvard Business Review, and an old colleague and friend. Adi, great as always to chat with you.

IGNATIUS: Nice to be on with you. Thanks for doing this.

SAFIAN: You and I first worked together at Time Magazine as executive editors. You then ran HBR for more than 15 years before turning over the reins to Amy Bernstein earlier this year. Is it a bittersweet moment passing the mantle, or are you content? I know I had mixed feelings about leaving Fast Company.

IGNATIUS: So, yes and no. I mean, it’s nice to be editor-in-chief. I reached a point in my career though, where I didn’t want to have direct reports. I didn’t want to be sitting in meetings with the board. I realized what I needed at this moment in my life was to get back to the reason we all got into this profession in the first place, to write, to report, to create content. So I definitely have a pep in my step, and yes, I miss some of the trappings of power, but I’m really happy with the shift.

Copy LinkBusiness leadership amidst uncertainty

SAFIAN: You’ve covered so many seminal, tumultuous moments, wars, 9/11, market collapses, regime changes. 2025, the current climate, it feels like we’re at a threshold even though it’s not quite cataclysmic. Do you have a thought, a feeling about what we’ve seen so far in 2025?

IGNATIUS: So, there are some indexes that track fear. And the Fear Index has been off the charts in ways that it had only been during the early peak of COVID and during the financial collapse of 2008. So to the extent we can measure something, yeah, we’re in a strange moment. I don’t mean to make much of a plug for HBR, but we’ve just launched a new product called HBR Executive, which is very much leaning into the fact that it’s always hard at the top, but this is a really difficult moment to lead, partly because AI is out there and it’s going to disrupt us all, and we’re not sure when and we’re not sure how or how much, but it will. So that huge uncertainty there.

And then, so maybe what you’re hitting out, the kind of political and geopolitical uncertainty that is just off the charts and really makes it difficult. So our point is not just to say, “It’s uncertain out there, folks.” But to say, “It’s uncertain out there and there are things we’ve never seen before, but we have lived through moments in the past of enormous uncertainty and there are ways to lead through it and we will try to share some of those best practices.”

SAFIAN: Do you have a framework or a philosophy about how you personally think about change?

IGNATIUS: So, there’re two big uncertainties now, and let’s say technology, but especially AI and then the geopolitics. I think with AI, so I mean, I’m not an expert on anything, but I talk to a lot of people and Karim Lakhani at HBS who’s really an expert on AI, generative AI in the workplace, I mean, his big thought is that CEOs are talking about AI all the time. They’re talking to their boards, they’re talking to their shareholders, they’re sounding knowledgeable, and he says in fact they’re not. Most CEOs are not even remotely knowledgeable, and that it’s really important that they get that threshold of competence and understanding.

Because if you’re in the camp that thinks AI is truly going to change everything, and I am until proven otherwise, then the transformation needs to be driven from the top. So it needs to be understood from the top. So the technological part is you’ve got to get involved and it has to be CEO driven. 

With politics and geopolitics, I mean, in a sense you have to have your own foreign policy, right? Every company needs to really pay attention and think there’s so much baloney coming out of Washington, but then some of it sticks, right? Some of it is not bluster, but is actually significant.

So I think either connecting with people who know or having people on your team who really know and know how to tease out what’s real versus what’s not real, what you need to panic about and what you don’t need to panic about, it’s really essential. So you can’t just sit back and try to follow the news cycle because the news cycles are insane and not helpful. So I think those are a couple things, a couple ways to think about it. I mean, there’s a lot of scenario planning. I talked to a Brazilian CEO today, so they’re suddenly threatened with enormous levels of tariffs that are purely personal. Brazil has a trade deficit with the U.S., and yet Trump is threatening them with enormous tariffs. It’s purely personal, political.

He doesn’t like Lula and he liked Bolsonaro, and he’s trying to manipulate Brazilian politics and how its Supreme Court works. So what do you do with that? So this CEO, they are doing a bunch of scenario planning. If tariffs come in at 50%, if they come in at half, that if they come in at 10% and they’re not sure what else to do because it is just enormously uncertain.

SAFIAN: Well, and I guess all these institutions have to develop the capacity to be more flexible than maybe they’ve needed to be before because things are so unstable, which I guess AI maybe provides an opportunity to do if you can get your organization to handle it the right way.

IGNATIUS: I guess. We live through a… I mean, it’s not like this is the worst time in the history of the world. It’s definitely not. There have been periods that were much more uncertain because there was broader global war, et cetera. But we had a kind of post-World War II order and predictability that obviously had winners and losers, and there were terrible tragedies along the way, but there was a basic, I don’t know, rules-based order, at least in the West, and you kind of knew what to expect. So now you don’t, and the U.S. has a president that doesn’t like rules-based order.

So you’ve lost a certain reliability or dependability on what America, the world’s most powerful country, stands for and will be advocating for. So it’s tough, it’s slippery. And I know the knee-jerk thing is to say, “Well, China’s the big winner.” And I think it’s important to really analyze that. But I think it’s possible China’s the big winner as the global economy and global trade protocol is restructured. I think a lot of this could be to China’s benefit.

Copy LinkMisconceptions about China’s modern position

SAFIAN: For our listeners’ benefit, you spend a fair amount of time in China. You were Wall Street Journal bureau chief in Beijing. You ran Time Asia. You were also a bureau chief in Moscow. So you’ve been inside some of these places that people are trying to figure out right now. Are there ways that you think people understand or misunderstand what’s going on in China, what’s going on in Russia and what the impact is going to be on us?

IGNATIUS: So Americans, I think by and large misunderstand China. Americans by and large are not comfortable with the repressions that exist in China with a sort of strongman government. And that’s all fine. China is booming. I mean, you go to a Chinese city and you feel, “Wow, I’m in the future and America’s not in the future.” Right? I think there’s some people who associate the repression in China with a sense that people are listless and want to overthrow their government or unhappy, and it couldn’t be farther from the truth. I mean, China is booming. If you think about where the U.S. is moving away from sort of cleaner fuels, China has its foot on the accelerator.

I mean, it is really dynamic, not just big cities, big buildings, but developing the future economy and we’re still in the sort of fossil fuels past. So I think there’s a general misunderstanding just how rich and developed and dynamic China is, even though it has enormous problems including unemployment, including fiscal issues. It’s certainly not perfect. But I think that’s a misunderstanding. 

Russia, I mean, God, Russia’s squandered opportunities to develop its economy since the fall of the Soviet Union. I mean, it really has so many resources and the ability to be an economic player, and instead has just fallen victim to corruption and sort of stupid wars. I think that’s pretty well understood.

Copy LinkEvolving business philosophies from Friedman to stakeholder capitalism

SAFIAN: You posted something early this year around the time of the World Economic Forum about Davos Man as compared to what you called Mar-a-Lago Man. Do you remember this?

IGNATIUS: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I was trying to capture… And Bob, you think about this stuff all the time. So let’s say there was 50 years of, Milton Friedman dominated philosophy to management and basically shareholders are what matter and you could just measure that. And if managers are also aligned to benefit if the share price goes up, then that’s great. Then your shareholders and your managers are aligned and the other stuff will fall into place. And then 10 years ago, whatever, suddenly people got more serious talking about stakeholders more broadly, that it’s not enough to worry about share price. You have to think about your employees and your customers and sustainability, the planet.

And that seemed pretty entrenched, although I’d say the world was searching for the kind of theory that was as simple or as easy to grasp as a sort of Friedman-esque focus on the share price. HBR, we wrote lots about stakeholder capitalism, and it became… That’s what they were teaching at Harvard Business School. And that’s what everybody in Davos was talking about. You need to worry more about than just about your bottom line, the share price. And then Trump got elected. So that’s why I wrote this piece on Davos Man. And this is defining Davos Man as elite businessman, but who also gets, whatever, they’re listening to their kids or whatever outside pressure, but they understand, they have to think about the externalities they’re creating.

They have to think about the planet. They have to think about some social issues and not just the bottom line. And then Mar-a-Lago Man is now in ascendance. And in some ways, Marc Andreessen gave an interview, I think, to the New York Times that it’s worth reading because he’s just really articulate in speaking about this new wave, sort of like Mark Zuckerberg saying more masculine energy. And so Andreessen just says things like, “Why would I want people to bring their whole selves to work? Why is that good?” And that’s been such… For a decade, we’d been saying, “You want your employees engaged? Let them bring their whole selves to work.”

So that’s being questioned. So the point of the article I wrote is that to the extent to which… You should have values as a company that don’t flip flop with every election, right? You should figure out what they are, and then you stick to them, hell or high water. And if it’s just performative, then okay, get rid of them. That’s fine. But you have to figure out what your values are. And they cannot just be subject to every twist in the political calculation.

SAFIAN: No, and I think we have seen that because the pressure Trump is putting on leaders to, you’re either committed to this or you’re going to go away, whether it’s DEI or whatever, immigration policy or something else, right? What do you really believe in that is… What Ken Frazier, the former Merck CEO, said to me, “There are principles and then their preferences. And if you’re not going to pay a little cost for something, then it’s really just a preference. And don’t turn it into a principle if it’s not something you’re willing to have it cost you a little bit.”

IGNATIUS: Yeah, no, that’s well put. And look, I feel for CEOs now who don’t want to be in the crosshairs of this administration because they could make life difficult for you as they could make life difficult for politicians to stand in their way. But I mean, there is a search for an alternative. I mean, I talked to a Silicon Valley CEO recently who… In Silicon Valley, CEOs there don’t have the same political belief. There’s certainly a strong libertarian strain there. But this was a guy who said, “You have to understand, we were deep blue, right?” This is this CEO and his cohorts in the tech world, “We were deep blue.”

And then they got pissed off with regulation and didn’t like Biden’s appointments and thought Biden was unfriendly to business and to mergers and things like that. I said, “Okay, fine. That’s a perception.” And he said, “We became deep red and we were excited about Trump. We were excited that Musk was going to be doing the DOGE thing. We were excited about Lutnick and trade. We were excited.” And then the administration began and it was this incredible uncertainty with all this tariff stuff that just made it hard to lead a business. And then more than that, the immigration thing, it made it really difficult to bring engineers in, even from, forget China, but from India.

Copy LinkThe risks and rewards of CEO activism

So these are guys who flipped deep blue to deep red and are now having buyer’s remorse. And the extent to which… Look, I think whoever wins the next election will have to have a platform that is somehow appealing to business. I mean, the Biden administration, I mean, there were parts of it that almost seemed cartoonishly anti-business, they’re bad and rapacious. And look, I believe in regulation of course, but there has to be a middle ground. You cannot lose business and hope to prevail, I think, in this country.

SAFIAN: You mentioned this, that a lot of business leaders just want to keep their heads down right now. Do CEOs wish they could be more outspoken, or is speaking out bravery, or is it just foolishness at this point?

IGNATIUS: I love this topic. Because if you go back a generation, CEOs didn’t talk publicly about political issues and social issues. Why would they? That would be crazy. And then with the rise of the internet, there was this sort of truism, and I feel like I said it many times, that CEOs don’t have the option of not speaking, right?

SAFIAN: Yes.

IGNATIUS: Because their employees want to know where they stand on these important social and political issues. Their customers want to know. If you decide I’m just going to stay silent, the internet, X, will interpret your silence however it wants to and it might be negative. So you have no choice. You have to jump into the fray. And we wrote articles, and I’ve said that that was sort of the new reality. Well, maybe not, right? Target’s problems, Bud Light, I mean, there were attempts to get involved in social issues that really backfired that made, I think, companies think twice about what they’re doing.

I guess where we’ve landed is that, again, figure out what your real values are, and if there are issues that really touch your business directly, or I don’t know, the values that you stand for, then yes, you cannot be silent. But this idea that you have to weigh in or your employees will get mad, I think we’ve rethought that.

SAFIAN: Part of what appealed to me about your framing of Davos Man versus Mar-a-Lago Man, Davos Man is sort of CEO as statesmen in a lot of ways, right? And right now, CEOs and business leaders are a little bit, “I don’t know whether… I want to be a statesman, but not if I have to deal with some of the garbage that goes with being a statesman.”

IGNATIUS: I feel like the United States overnight became China where you have this tremendous ability to do what you want as a business, but suddenly we can’t criticize the government, right?

SAFIAN: Yeah.

IGNATIUS: Because there will be a tremendous backlash, and I might lose my… That’s China, that’s authoritarianism. And I’m not saying anybody has stated that as a policy, but that’s how it’s rippling through, and that’s really sad. You could talk about whether CEOs speaking up on an issue, whether that’s a good idea or not, or whether their statements are good or not. But the idea that, well, they wouldn’t dare in this climate because it’s too scary, that’s China under the Communist party. I mean, that’s somehow an unintended consequence of where we are right now.

SAFIAN: Adi doesn’t mince his words. Some CEOs I’ve spoken to are relieved that there’s less pressure to speak out on things that frankly they weren’t particularly comfortable speaking on in the first place. On the other hand, other CEOs are mourning the loss of exercising their pulpit. As with much of what Adi and I discussed about 2025, it’s an evolution that could progress or regress from here. So what signals does Adi keep his eyes on and how does he feel about Trump’s attack on Harvard where HBR is of course based? We’ll talk about that, Elon Musk and Adi’s most important leadership lessons after the break. Stay with us.

[AD BREAK]

Before the break, Adi Ignatius of the Harvard Business Review shared what Americans most misunderstand about China, why business leaders aren’t speaking out against Trump and more. Now we dig into AI, Elon Musk and Harvard’s response to Trump’s attacks. Let’s jump back in. 

I have to ask you about Harvard’s battle with the Trump administration. You work at Harvard, of course. What’s the feeling at the institution?

IGNATIUS: Yeah, I mean, look, I can’t speak for Harvard. I’m not involved in any of these conversations. There’s soul searching at Harvard, certainly. I mean, if there are charges of, let’s say, anti-Semitism coming from anywhere, you have to take that seriously and not dismiss that and figure out, “All right, have we created a climate for that? And if so, how do we respond?” And any intelligent institution would take that seriously and figure out what to do. As a lay person, it seems like this is more personal and vindictive than fact-based, that from a MAGA perspective, Harvard is the enemy, a bunch of mostly liberal experts telling people what to do.

Harvard’s always been a target. I mean, you look at clickbait in any news thing, and if it’s somebody taking down Harvard or Harvard makes a mistake, I mean, the world loves to read about that because it’s a symbol of greatness or liberalness or both. And so if they slip up, it’s a target. So I will say, having talked to a lot of Harvard alumni, it’s not universal, but by and large, and almost everyone I’ve talked to is really impressed with Alan Garber and with Harvard’s response. When the charges of, okay, Harvard is anti-Semitic came out, there were people who canceled their subscriptions to Harvard Business Review saying, “Look, I don’t want to give money to any publication that’s linked to “anti-Semitic organization”. So that was an initial backlash.

Copy LinkMaking sense of Elon Musk and unconventional leadership

Now, it’s very different. If you don’t like what Trump is doing or if you think he has too much power, it’s king-like and that we’re supposed to have a separation of powers, it’s like, “Well, who will stand up?” And the lawyers won’t stand up, and companies we’ve already talked about are too intimidated to just kind of respond. And so, okay, Harvard’s not caving, and who knows where it goes if it ends up as a positive thing or a negative thing. But I do find a lot of outside support for that.

SAFIAN: If Harvard’s not going to stand up to the president, what other academic institution would, right?

IGNATIUS: Yeah. And look, I know I heard somebody at UCLA just saying, “Good for Harvard. We couldn’t do that.” They can’t even pretend they could do that just with their dependence on federal money to sort of function as an institution. I mean, it’s crazy taking away the grant money for Harvard. I mean, these are grants to solve problems that America has that the government cannot do. So to take away that funding, it doesn’t hurt Harvard… Yeah, it hurts Harvard. But this is meant to be health research or other research that America needs, American citizens need. You’re hurting America. I mean, there’s something truly insane about this particular battle. Again, speaking as a lay person and not as an insider. And I think there are few institutions who could imagine standing up, and that might depend on the big endowment that they have that enables them to survive these kinds of shocks.

SAFIAN: The other king in America, I guess, or potential king, it seemed to be Elon Musk, right? The other guy who seems like he can do whatever he wants with almost no repercussions, although I don’t know whether the departure of ex-CEO Linda Yaccarino means anything related to whatever Grok’s anti-Semitic exchanges. It’s so hard to follow even with Musk sort of what’s going on, his new political foray, he seems to be in the news every bit as much as Trump. Do you have a perspective on Musk?

IGNATIUS: I think Musk has been chasing, I think he’s realized his foray into politics has cost him at Tesla certainly, the damage the business is facing is pretty directly related to some of the perception of what he’s doing, that that was bad for his business. I don’t know why he then came back and said, “I’m going to form another political party.” Because I think that the polls I’ve seen, seems to be contributing to the sort of negative take on him and on his business. So I mean, even when he took over Twitter, right? I mean, it seemed more like he was trolling himself maybe.

I mean, he sort of enjoys playing the role of the troll, it seems like, more than running a business, more than doing DOGE. I mean, that seems to be really sort of fundamental to his identity. So even though I think he’s been chasing and he’s got a board saying, “Can you pay a little attention to our business over here?” I think he seems incorrigible or just seems to have this desire to jump in the most public ways possible. I mean, he’s addicted, it seems like, to his X following and his ability to troll and get reactions.

SAFIAN: I mean, it’s interesting too for me because as a business leader, I think he was and has been admired and extolled about his vision as a business leader and what he’s built and what he sees and this foray into the government work has… It’s undercut some of that too.

IGNATIUS: So I think about should HBR interview Donald Trump, should HBR interview Elon Musk? With Donald Trump, we’ve decided not to pursue that. And that’s a tricky one. I mean, he is the President of the United States.

SAFIAN: Yes.

IGNATIUS: And the President of the United States should presumably have interesting things to say about the economy and about business that would be valuable to readers. But those interviews go off the rails, right? And you’re tempted to kind of fact check him and correct him and try to demand that he answer, that he stay on topic. And none of that’ll happen. So you could end up with a very combative interview. Do I want to do that? Does Harvard Business Review want to do that? It might yield headlines, especially if it got sort of chippy, but would it yield any insight?

So we’ve declined. If Musk agreed to do an interview, I would do that, because I think he has some of the same tendencies to sort of blow up an interview. But as you say, I mean, he legitimately has been an amazing business person, right? He’s created or sustained, however you want to look at it, some really game changing businesses. And I’d like to know what’s in his brain about what’s next in business. I don’t care what he thinks is next in politics and I think he thinks we all care about that.

Copy LinkAI disruption and the shifting landscape of media

SAFIAN: I was looking, you recently wrote a cautionary article about AI and privacy. Are you an AI advocate or more on the concern side?

IGNATIUS: If it’s a binary choice, I guess I’m an advocate more than a, we must stop this because of the unintended consequences. I mean, you just listen to the experts and put your finger in the wind and decide. Okay, the Metaverse, I kind of bought into that for a while, but then I realized, “Nah, that’s not a big deal.” This one I think is, and who knows, right? I mean, we’re not experts, and even the experts obviously don’t know how AI will evolve or how consumer preferences will evolve. But my expectation is we will adopt AI at an enormous scale. Hopefully it doesn’t drive unemployment to scary levels, but it could. I mean, I think that’s a possibility.

So HBR, we’re a content creator. I’m angry that all these large language models felt they could just steal our content and then ask for forgiveness. Or not even. Just sort of say, “Well, it’s different. We’re not really…” That’s crazy. But if you’re not using AI in your work and life, it’s like, start doing it. It’s not perfect. It’s not a fact-generating machine, right? There are flaws. But the ability of this technology to do incredible things is here and I think will get better. So I mean, I guess that makes me an advocate or proponent or somebody who’s in awe at the very least.

SAFIAN: And those of us in the media and news business, the state of journalism, the state of the news business, I mean, it’s in flux, right? Because the ways we’ve been, I don’t know, compensated for the work that is fueling these large language models is under pressure.

IGNATIUS: People use the phrase Google zero now, right? I mean, we got most of our traffic from Google searches, and now Google, especially with AI, it wants to give you an answer, and that’s it. And even if Google provides links, I’m not sure any user wants to follow a link right now, sort of the expectation of how you retrieve information and get quick answers and insight has just sort of changed. So our traffic from Google has just shrunk, shrunk, shrunk. Same with every other media company. And it’s not crazy to talk about Google zero where we’re getting zero referrals from Google, which they don’t owe that to us. But that was the main source of web traffic for a lot of us.

So I would say for us and for other media companies, we’re trying to create new products like the one I mentioned, HBR Executive, and driving new business. But I think longer term, I think we all realize the old model doesn’t hold. We have to figure out how to thrive in a world where AI can do a lot of what we do, where it has… So what does HBR do? We’re trying to give people really smart research-based advice on their careers and on business challenges.

And AI, partly because it’s scraped all of our content could do that pretty well. So we have to figure out, okay, so pretty well is pretty well, we can do things better. What does better mean in an AI world? Marginally better, probably people won’t pay for that. Significantly better, more reliable, that involves more human interaction and contact, the answer is probably there. So we have to know what AI can do and what parts of our business it could fully disrupt, and then figure out how to pivot from there.

SAFIAN: I’ve noticed an irony that in an era where, let’s say, some of the places that you and I may have worked may be referred to as fake news, so that the trust of what journalism does has gone down, but you get that same source scraped and emerged to it from a large language model, and there it’s trusted, right? It’s fake news if it comes from the New York Times, but if it comes from ChatGPT, well, that’s true.

IGNATIUS: Well, that’s interesting. So do you think people have that relationship to ChatGPT where if they read it on ChatGPT, they think, “I can trust this.”

SAFIAN: I think younger people do in the same way that I think people trusted that Google search pointed you to the right places.

IGNATIUS: Yeah, yeah. You didn’t question it.

Copy LinkKey lessons in leadership and the future of business

SAFIAN: So let me take you up to 30,000 feet. Your 16 years of running HBR. Are there lessons that you find yourself coming back to from this experience? Are there things that you think people most misunderstand about business or mistakes that you see business people making over and over again? What do you find yourself anchoring on?

IGNATIUS: I think leadership is real. I do think companies can succeed or flounder depending on the quality of leadership, and that it’s not simply genetic, you’re charismatic or you’re smart or you’re not, that you can learn. You can learn to listen. You can learn to manage your time in ways that take advantage of what you need to do versus what anybody can do. I do believe in that, that there’s an ability to hone your skills as a leader, and whether it’s an aphorism from Jack Welch or a 12 page piece that has a framework for that, that there are ways to learn and really improve your game. So I do believe in that. The search for the kind of purpose of business, what we were talking about before where for 50 years it was all about the share price.

I think we needed a new sort of consensus of the new paradigm. And it may be that the stakeholder stuff was too fuzzy or unclear. I won’t say woke because I don’t think that’s a helpful word ever. But is there a theory of the case that we can all agree on that is the responsibility of a company, of a CEO? 

And I guess the one other thing is that the soft skills. How do you interact with people? I mean, the things that seem sort of basic, they really matter and they matter kind of up and down the hierarchy, from the CEO down to the lowest level. Business is how people interact with one another. So I came to understand that that stuff is really important.

SAFIAN: Are you still feeling optimistic about the future? Are you more optimistic, more anxious or are you somewhere in between?

IGNATIUS: Yeah, that’s a good question for everybody right now. So I find myself giving into this tendency to bury my head in the sand where the barrage of political news is just too much. One result of that is my tennis game has gotten a lot better. I mean, I’m not going to hide it. I’m a relatively liberal guy who is kind of shocked and amazed by what is happening in this country right now. And I believe in the resilience of the American system. I don’t think it’s automatic, though. You can’t just say, “Well, we’ve been resilient for 250 years, so we’ll be fine.” No, I mean, I think at a certain level, all of us have to fight in our own way for what we believe in.

I certainly don’t believe that progress is inevitable. I mean, there is a New Yorker cartoon to be done that basically shows the world blowing up, and somehow a couple of scientists who have survived are saying, “But we were making so much progress.” Right? I mean, I think progress might be illusory in some ways, but I mean, Bob, the generation we’ve grown in has been in many ways the rise of business around the world, the lifting of standards of living and life expectancy, you can’t help but look at some of those things and think, “Okay, there is a positive trend even if there are a lot of potholes along the way.”

SAFIAN: I guess all we can say is let’s hope so.

IGNATIUS: Yeah, that’s the best we could do.

SAFIAN: Well, Adi, this was great.

IGNATIUS: Thank you, Bob.

SAFIAN: I always appreciate the time I have with Adi to talk about journalism, but also for his perspective on business and what it takes to be a leader. I agree with Adi that it feels like we’re on a slippery slope these days as many U.S. institutions capitulate to government demands that until recently seemed unthinkable. I also agree that it’s tricky to know what impact an individual business or executive can have in this environment, but I also think that if we’re going to find a new paradigm in business, as Adi puts it, about the responsibility of a company and a CEO beyond just the stock price, that it’s going to start by standing up for shared values and principles.

I’m Bob Safian. Thanks for listening.