The new rage on Wall Street these days is content creation. Don’t worry, Hollywood—you have nothing to fear from the titans of finance; Wall Street content is no match for The Handmaid’s Tale or Killing Eve. But if you are a high-net-worth client of, say, JPMorgan Chase or Goldman Sachs and want to get some insight into how leading CEOs are handling the pandemic or the Black Lives Matter uprisings, an afternoon Zoom meeting, courtesy of your favorite Wall Street investment bank, may be the way to go.
For instance, late last week, Goldman Sachs held one of these illuminating private sessions for its wealthy clients and invited to speak the CEOs of McDonald’s Corporation, the 3M Company, Nasdaq, and Nextdoor to share their experiences with managing through COVID-19 and grappling with the latest wave of social unrest and demands for justice. The Goldman sessions are not made available to the public. But I was able to listen to the conversations and transcribe snippets. They provided a rare, less-filtered-than-usual insight into how powerful CEOs deal with unexpected challenges and adversity. The Zoom call covered a number of topics, but its major theme was how CEOs were thinking about the weeks of protests following the police killing of George Floyd.
3M is headquartered in St. Paul, Minnesota, adjacent to Minneapolis, the location of the senseless killing last month. Mike Roman has been chairman of 3M since 2019, CEO since 2018, and has worked at the company since 1988, when he joined as a design engineer. Floyd’s death seems to have moved Roman deeply. “The killing of George Floyd was just heartbreaking and I would say especially jarring to 3M-ers because the Twin Cities have been our home for decades,” he said on the call. “And in the African American community, it really hit them hard. It’s unacceptable. We have to do something. We have to do something different. We have to make it different this time. And for me, that started with a focus on listening and understanding and acting.”
He said he has had many conversations with 3M employees, first with Black employees and then more broadly across the company. “Everybody has been engaged in it,” he continued, “and I think that’s really helped us build a strong view of what is our role. What is our expectation? Companies have to step up. Company leadership has to step up and act to make a difference. We can make a big difference. There’s a big trust gap out there and that’s something that we do well. We know how to build trust. We know how to execute. We really have to identify what our role will be here.” Roman said 3M has provided funding “for our leaders inside of 3M to really start to map actions” against social injustice. And he’s been working with other CEOs in Minnesota. “I’m focusing my efforts here in the Twin Cities engaging CEOs here on, how do we really step into action this time?” he said.
Chris Kempczinski, who’s been president of McDonald’s since 2016 and CEO since last November, wrote his employees recently that “While our McDonald’s system is not perfect, in so many ways we demonstrate the potential of a more inclusive, just, and diverse community.” To the Goldman crowd, he elaborated on the company’s commitments to diversity. “I do think McDonald’s—given the nature of our business and who we are, who works with us and who comes into our restaurants—I do think we have probably an even greater obligation to be leading on diversity and inclusion. If we just take a look at the U.S., 70% of our crew in our restaurants are racially diverse. And the good news for us is this has been something that for McDonald’s, I think, has been one of our greatest assets and something that has put us in the position that we are [in] because we were early in terms of going into Black communities with our restaurants and tapping into that sort of potential of Black entrepreneurs and franchisees.… The same thing has happened in the Hispanic communities, where our franchisees have helped us grow our brand with a Hispanic community that, had we not embraced diversity and inclusion, we would not have had the business and the brand that we do today. We have, I think, a long track record of where it’s been really beneficial for the McDonald’s brand to be a diverse business.”