Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson’s Post

“I think you can you can make constructive criticisms of things that the Biden administration has done . . . but those concerns are vastly outweighed by the threats the Trump presidency would pose,” former Merck CEO Ken Frazier tells Brooke Masters in a rare public comment on the US election by a senior business leader.

Diverse workforces are here to stay. Companies need to find new ways to manage them. Can diversity be rescued from the DEI wars? In her latest deep dive for the FT Moral Money Forum, Sarah Murray cuts through the political and legal battles to look at what, in practice, business leaders should be doing now.

Wells Fargo has fired several employees for allegedly trying to fool their bosses into thinking they were working when they were not, saying they had sought to “create the impression of active work” through “simulation of keyboard activity”. It's the latest example of a crackdown on non-compliant staff in the era of hybrid work. Needless to say, it's also one of the most popular stories on FT.com today.

PwC has launched a round of “silent lay-offs” in the UK, telling affected staff not to inform their colleagues why they are leaving but instead to adhere to some robotic “suggested wording” provided by HR if they want to send goodbye messages. Did nobody stop for a moment to think how this would be received?

From my colleague Rana Foroohar today: The cult of disruption dies hard. As reformed consultant and Deloitte/Cisco veteran Ashley Goodall writes in his new book The Problem With Change, “while we were all busily disrupting ourselves hither and yon, we somehow lost sight of the fact that change and improvement are two different things”. In the beginning, he says, executives thought “we need to fix this problem; therefore, we need to change”. Now, he says, too many believe that “we need to change, because then all the problems will be fixed”.

If you're hoping that Donald Trump will win the 2024 presidential election, the Financial Times is interested to know why. You can share your thoughts via the short survey here.

“CEOs have to ensure AI is trustworthy,” Kenneth I. Chenault, former CEO of American Express and co-chair of the Data & Trust Alliance, tells Sarah Murray in this excellent piece for the FT Moral Money Forum on the vexed question of what AI means for a responsible business. "The message for the corporate sector is clear," Sarah writes: "that any company claiming to be responsible must implement AI technologies without creating threats to society — or risks to the business itself, and the people who depend on it."

"My sense is that Big Business is mentally adjusting to the prospect of a Trump victory." Lionel Barber makes a guest appearance in the FT Swamp Notes newsletter.