This past weekend, more than sixty Minnesota-based CEOs signed an open letter calling for “immediate de-escalation” and cooperation after unrest connected to federal immigration enforcement operations and two fatal shootings.
The letter is restrained. It doesn’t perform moral certainty. It doesn’t posture as a conscience. It doesn’t sound like the world can be solved in a paragraph. It reads more like an attempt to hold the center of the room while everyone in it is shaking.
And because it is restrained, it may be easy to dismiss as safe.
Yet I believe that may be precisely why it matters.
Because it reveals something we keep trying not to name.
Business is not only an economic engine. It is a social institution. It shapes the conditions of people’s days, their security, their health care, their dignity, their sense of belonging, and their ability to imagine a future. While we can debate – and for decades have debated – the boundaries of that role, we should not pretend it isn’t real.
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So when the civic fabric strains, corporate leaders don’t get to opt out of meaning. No matter how much they may dodge, meaning finds them anyway. It gets assigned, quickly, often without context, and increasingly through the most skeptical lens available.
Which is why the question in front of leaders is no longer whether to speak out.
It’s why to speak, and what they believe their voice is meant to protect.
Every few years lately, corporate leadership has been pulled into moments that reveal more about their companies and their own values than they often intend.
In 2020, it was the murder of George Floyd, followed by a wave of corporate commitments made in the middle of COVID and a national rupture. The immediate question then was, who will step up? Who will they support? What will they say? And the longer term question was, what will they actually sustain once the heat of the moment passes and the trade-offs of their words become real?
Declarations are easiest when consensus is loud. They become harder when consequences show up in budgets, incentives, governance, and power and begin to divide audiences.
In 2022, it was Disney and Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law, and the discovery that trying to stay out of the fray was still viewed as taking a stance. Saying less did not reduce meaning. It created meaning of its own. Delay read as avoidance. Reversal read as fracture. And the public learned again what many employees already knew: “we’re staying neutral” is rarely experienced as impartial.
Different catalysts. The same underlying test.
What leaders choose to signal when conditions are strained, and whether what they signal is supported by anything true and lasting.
So, what is different today, in 2026? Well, it is not only the topic of public pressure. It is the terrain in which corporate voice operates.
Well, Minnesota is a narrative about more than a restrained letter from sixty CEOs. It’s also a story about how as public reaction moved at speed some corporate leaders expressed outrage at what they saw. Others insisted facts weren’t in. And others still defaulted to a law-and-order frame. The range matters because it illustrates the pressure field leaders are speaking into. Brand voice is not heard in a calm room in our current socio-political environment. It’s heard in a room already shouting.
Intended or not, channels that once existed primarily to explain strategy and performance now carry cultural meaning, civic signal, and moral posture. Silence is not empty. Caution does not reliably read as care. Restraint may be interpreted as steadiness, and it equally may be interpreted as evasion. And in an algorithmically polarized social world, leaders have less say than ever before over which interpretation travels, where and to whom.
In this terrain, I see three impulses rising at once.
There is the unglamorous work of sustainability and DEI leaders continuing to move commitments into governance, systems, measurement, and lived experience, even as scrutiny rises.
There is the tightening of language, more legal review, more hedging, more relabeling, sometimes because the system has matured and needs less spectacle, and other times because the perceived cost of visibility has risen.
And then there is the opposite move: escalation, where communications are shaped into worldview, and corporate identity becomes a form of cultural assertion.
These are not isolated behaviors. They are expressions of the same tension: how to hold a long view in an environment that rewards reaction, and increasingly, allegiance. A new type of loyalty.
That’s why Minnesota’s letter matters to me.
Not because it is dramatic. And not because it is radical.
Rather because it represents a civic register: corporate presence in the public square as an attempt at stability, not ideology.
And in 2026, even this is a signal.
A reminder that corporate leaders are being pulled into civic space again, even as many brands have tried to narrow language, lower visibility, and reduce exposure.
Restraint is not always virtue. Often, it’s risk management. And sometimes it’s civic. And from the outside, these motives can look similar.
The deeper point is simpler, and harder.
If business is a social institution, then corporate voice is never only branding. It is participation. It is an act of citizenship. And participation requires bravery because it carries consequences: leaders may be punished by one side for taking a stance and by both sides for silence.
A decade ago, we tried to name this tension before it became so culturally charged.
In 2016, Larry Fink’s call for long-termism in his annual shareholder letter shot out like a flare. His framing was governance, not virtue. Capital allocation, not culture war. He warned against “quarterly earnings hysteria” and argued that companies needed to help investors understand the long-term strategies and ecosystems that shape durable value.
What still stays with me about that letter, since I wrote about it in my book Do Good, is not the surface debate about quarterly guidance. It is the diagnosis beneath it.
When companies fail to educate investors about the systems they depend on, the threats they face, and the long-term investments they are making, investors default to short horizons. And leadership communication becomes retrospective narration instead of forward-looking sense-making. Not story as explanation, rather context as structure.
Long-termism moved into the vernacular after that. It became easy to say. Familiar enough to repeat without changing the behaviors it was meant to challenge.
It is possible to speak the language of long-term value creation while still rewarding near-term wins. It is possible to publish aspirational frameworks while budgeting in ways that privilege immediacy. And in an attention-fractured environment, it is possible to substitute narrative for discipline more easily than most of us want to admit.
And then the world got harder.
Placed beside Minnesota’s restraint is a different move, one that’s been harder for me to unsee once I noticed it.
In late 2025, Alexander Karp’s shareholder letter for Palantir’s third quarter results became a cultural moment of its own. Not simply because it was provocative. Nor because people talked about it. Rather, because it modeled a particular kind of corporate communication: a shareholder letter as a worldview declaration.
In the same way Larry Fink’s 2016 letter became shorthand for a shift in how leaders were expected to talk about time horizon, investment, and value creation, Karp’s letter is a symbol of something else: an investor channel used to assert identity, recruit allegiance, and sharpen edges, treating cultural conviction as part of what the company is selling, alongside strategy and performance.
Please note, I’m naming this as a structural argument, not a political one.
Because once investor communications become a platform for cultural positioning, corporate voice stops functioning primarily as long-term sense-making and instead becomes a signal of social alignment. It invites some people closer while distancing others. In our polarized environment, this can widen the gap, and it can also be pursued as strategy.
Regardless of my bias, my point here is not to judge the worldview.
It is to name what happens when corporate voice becomes identity theater in a place that used to be about time, governance, investment, and, yes, social responsibility.
Here is what I think we never fully answered.
Long-termism was supposed to be a discipline. A way of protecting vision and strategy against the pull of the immediate. A way of holding the long view when it would be easier, and cheaper, to chase the near term.
And now, ten years later, corporate voice has split into competing registers.
- A civic register that seems to be trying, however imperfectly, to keep the center of the room intact.
- A worldview register that treats investor communication as a platform for cultural conviction.
- A register of tightened language that may signal integration, and may signal insulation, and may signal retreat, and often cannot be reliably distinguished from the outside.
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So What Is Corporate Voice For Now?
Is it a stabilizing force that helps people make sense of risk, time horizon, and the systems a brand depends on?
Is it a mechanism for recruiting allegiance?
Is it a discipline of integration that speaks less because it’s focused on building more?
Is it insulation that looks like maturity until you examine the incentives and realize nothing has changed?
Ten years after Larry Fink called for long-termism, I find myself less interested in whether companies say they are long-term oriented, and more interested in whether their choices still hold together when pressure rises.
Credibility is not a posture. It is what remains when there is something to lose by staying the course – and still choosing it. This is how trust is nurtured, not fractured.
And if Minnesota is a signal of anything, it may be this: business is a social institution and cannot avoid the public square. The question now is whether leaders return there as participants in a shared society, as citizens, or as brands auditioning for loyalty.
And whether, after a decade of long-termism, we can finally answer the question hiding in plain sight.
What exactly have we built?
Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by Anne Bahr Thompson, Author, Do Good, Embracing Brand Citizenship to Fuel Both Purpose and Profit.
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