This is the first post here on my consulting blog in some time. I’ve been dedicating all my research and writing time these past three years to my Leaps Project. The idea animating the three-volume work is to inspire the coming generation of business, product and marketing leaders toward a more ethical and equitable thriving for them and their stakeholders. The first two volumes are out via Kendall Hunt and are available here (The Big Leap: An Ethics of Insight) and here (The Bigger Leap: An Ethics of NextCapitalism).
I’m currently deep into research and drafting of the third and final book in the Project – The Biggest Leap: An Ethics of Utopias. The promise of utopia-making felt like a minor stretch when I started work last summer on the book. But the fascist takeover underway in the US has proven a devastating validation of the urgent need for revolutionary change in the work of world-building.
If not now for a new world-building, when?…
The Leaps Project leverages my courses as the incubator for the coming generation of owners and directors as the vanguard charged to fix the world my generation broke. My texts offer the students provocative insights and concepts paired with inspiring IRL business cases. I have developed a lecture series based upon each volume, personalized to the particular course I am teaching. I’m lucky to be able to teach as many as six business/marketing courses across several schools in any given semester.
When the Trump regime first started flooding the zone with its “executive orders” I updated my research paper assignments to ask the students to develop their applied strategies for their semester-long consulting client project in direct response to the vicious authoritarian edicts issuing forth from DC and the daily events of Federal systems take over.
In the midst of this chaos, based upon the papers I have been reading, critiquing, applauding and grading this week, I can report that the 100+ grad school students I have the honor of serving this Spring 2025 semester are up for the world-fixing challenge. I can only hope some of us here are as well.
With some like-minded colleagues from the world of global consulting, I’ve been exploring the launch of a culture consultancy. Last autumn (in the northern hemisphere) we began testing the appetite for such an offering, and we were heartened by the response. Then the US presidential election happened in November, and the Trump-Musk takeover commenced in late January, and here we are in a new world. A world where the palpable fear of loss – lost jobs, lost clients, lost contracts, lost customers, lost life – now informs every decision every one of us makes.
Here in the second month of 2025, every single decision made by a country or nation, a family or household, a business or organization, a college or university, a state or town is filtered and tested through the lens of a new reality. A reality of something approaching a totalizing state of fear. No one reading this – no business or organization leader, no matter what country or category you’re in – needs any convincing that this is now the general climate determining the terms of their strategic and operational decision-making.
Two weeks ago, a couple of weeks into the fascist seizure of US Government systems, platforms and databases, I suggested to my colleagues that there were three types of companies right now. The first, were the early quislings who used the cover granted by Trump’s executive orders cancelling all DEI language and programs to cancel their own. See Target, Walmart, Amazon and Ralph Lauren as early movers but this first wave of early ring kissers certainly extended cover to more enterprises to follow suit.
The second type of company is the tragically small group of ethical companies like Ben & Jerry’s, Patagonia and Costco who can always be counted on to stand on the same principles they’ve espoused from the start … but now joined by the newly emboldened companies like Sephora, Alta and Proctor & Gamble (https://www.newsweek.com/dei-companies-program-list-policies-donald-trump-2032960) who saw the opportunity to claim the ethical high-ground in the face of the new terror, publicly doubling-down on their DEI programs.
The third type of company was and remains certainly the largest – those companies who have chosen to remain pat. We can imagine their strategy as a wait-and-see, a stalling strategy, a “taking events into consideration” approach of kicking the can of big decision-making as far down the street as possible. As I suggested to my colleagues, this was the group of organizations where, in each category, the management teams and their boards of directors would be constantly calculating the certain risks against the uncertain advantages of coming out publicly in choosing their stakeholders over obeisance to the new king’s commands.
And then the Philadelphia Eagles won the Super Ball and turned down (for the second time) the traditional invitation to an audience with the US President in recognition of their feat. Right now, there is a mortified public relations backfilling going on attempting to cover up the extraordinary humiliation of the Trump regime which, as they did eight years ago when the Eagles players voted to snub Trump for his avowed racism, is pretending to have never invited them at all. No one will be fooled this time, as they weren’t the last. But this time, as we note above, is different.
Different than any other time in the modern history of capitalism and its enduringly ill-fitting dynamic with the governing politics of global affairs. History itself becomes the ultimate judge of each and every organization on the planet in their reckoning with the current situation. A reckoning with the extreme social facts of a country with the largest economy, the most billionaires, the biggest army and nuclear arsenal, the home of almost all the most dominant technology -surveillance platforms and the farthest reaching economic, military and political empire being taken over by a wanna-be world emperor and the world’s wealthiest oligarch.
As I type this on a Tuesday morning in late February 2025 the situation could change by nightfall here in New York. But I believe the accelerated progress of their takeover has cleared the stage of history of all but two types of organizations left on Planet Earth: those who choose to kiss the ring and those who don’t.
If my analysis is correct, the organizations who continue to bet on wait-and-see are doomed to be known, along with the public ring kissers, as having enabled what we must imagine will become a juggernaut of global death and destruction, magnitudes greater than Stalin’s, Mao’s and Hitler’s authoritarian regimes combined. One might rationally argue with my existentially dire assessment, but each day the evidence piles up suggesting that if my calculus is wrong, it is by quantitative degrees not qualitative outcomes.
When the Philadelphia Eagles team voted to snub the US president this time, it was on the contested grounds of absolute difference — ethical, political and cultural difference. The majority of the Eagles are African American, members of one of the ethnic group of humans Trump’s fascist edicts are meant to erase and annihilate. But they are also wealthy professionals and have bravely understood that their position of temporary privilege affords them a powerfully prominent position from which to lead the rest of the world in deciding to resist and lead the fight against this assemblage of brute monsters.
If you’re a leader in one of the hundreds of thousands of organizations on this planet frozen by fear in the wait-and-see crowd, now would be a good time to use the Eagles as an inspiration to a conversation among your senior team and board. There’s actually an extremely strong business case for being the first mover within your category and market to join the Eagles, Ben & Jerry’s, Sephora and Costco in not just whispering “no”, but laying loud claim to a passionately considered, ethically proud resistance.
I take and offer slim solace for us all in sensing that these bastards won’t fully destroy the world we know. There will most certainly be something left to salvage and rebuild upon. The organizations who will lead in that rebuilding are the ones who will be remembered and known as the ones who step up and lead today.
And by today, I mean quarter 1 in a year where the future of everything we value is at stake. A future to be imagined and made by those who make the right choice this quarter, understanding that there might only be one choice left before the end of H1 – and that won’t be any kind of choice at all
NYC
25 Feb 2025
Thom Kennon