Corporate leaders today are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Nobody can see events playing out in the streets in Minnesota and elsewhere and not be moved in some way. At the same time, they have a fiduciary responsibility to act in the best interests of their stakeholders, regardless of their personal feelings.
I know this dilemma because I experienced it myself. In 2004, I was managing Ukraine’s leading news organization during the Orange Revolution, the third in a series of nonviolent uprisings known as the color revolutions that overwhelmed autocrats in Serbia and then the Georgian Republic before arriving in Kyiv.
As I explained in my book, Cascades, these things follow a specific pattern of contagion, adoption, and defection driven by networks. Eventually, the nonlinear nature of network cascades overwhelms regimes and compels institutions to act. Now, that pattern is unfolding right here and, for corporate leaders, it is no longer something you can afford to ignore.
1. Contagion: How Movements Learn, Adapt, and Spread
2004 was an election year in Ukraine, so politics was in the air. We all saw the campaigns get underway, with ads hitting the air and rallies being held. But from my vantage point inside a news operation, I also began to hear about a youth group, called Pora, that was organizing students and activists against the regime.
But the true origins started even earlier, in a Belgrade café in 1998. It was there that a small group of five activists met and established the youth group Otpor. Their efforts got a boost from a little-known academic named Gene Sharp, who had developed nonviolent methods of overthrowing authoritarian regimes and established the Albert Einstein Institution to support activists around the world.
The Otpor activists would lead the overthrow of Serbian strongman Slobodan Milošević. Shortly after, West Wing star Martin Sheen would narrate a hit documentary about the events, and activists from other Eastern European countries began reaching out to learn how the Serbians applied Sharp’s methods. In 2003, President Eduard Shevardnadze was brought down in Georgia’s Rose Revolution. In the spring of 2004, the Ukrainian Pora activists traveled to Serbia to receive training to lay the ground for the events I witnessed in the Orange Revolution.
We can see a similar process unfolding in Minnesota and beyond. When federal agents began to descend on the community, activist networks first established in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd were activated. They began to organize to protect their communities from ICE and CBP patrols, learning and honing their methods as they went.
Now, as other communities begin to prepare for ICE and CBP activity, activists around the country are watching and learning. Ordinary Americans are attending training—online and in person—that transmits what has been learned in Minnesota: how to organize, dispatch activists, and engage with federal officers on the ground.
2. Adoption: When Participation Becomes the Default
We are a product of our environments. Decades of studies indicate that we tend to conform to the opinions and behaviors of those around us, and this effect extends out to three degrees of relationships. So not only do our friends’ friends influence us deeply, but their friends too—people who we don’t even know—affect what we think and do.
Yet the inverse is also true. The people around us are usually doing pretty ordinary things, like going to work, taking the kids to soccer practice, and cooking dinner. Most people who are not actively opposing agents of the state have little idea how to go about doing so. We are, for the most part, trapped in mundane, ordinary lives and resist changing our habits significantly, yet that can change quickly.
In a highly influential 1978 paper about resistance thresholds, sociologist Mark Granovetter showed how even small clusters of individuals, with low barriers to adoption, can influence those with greater resistance. Once these come on board, they begin to influence others as well. It is a pattern we see over and over again: small groups, loosely connected, but united by a shared purpose are what drive transformational change through network cascades.
We can see those same patterns unfolding in America today. Ordinary people, appalled by the actions of ICE and CBP patrols, have joined activists in opposing the raids. As they do, they tell their friends and neighbors, some of whom begin to join in. As they do, their actions influence others who are slightly more reticent and, as they join, momentum builds even more.
I experienced this directly during the Orange Revolution. In the spring of 2004, I was aware of the demonstrations, but not participating. As a foreigner, I wasn’t sure it was my place. But then my wife’s friends started going and invited my wife. Once she joined in, I began going too and others came with me. The numbers became overwhelming and the regime fell.
3. Defection: When Silence Stops Being Safe
At this point, many readers will begin to notice a problem. Didn’t other movements, such as #Occupy and Black Lives Matter, follow these very same patterns and fail to achieve their objectives? The answer, of course, is an unqualified yes. The presence of a network cascade is necessary, but not sufficient, to bring change about. For that, you need institutions.
Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t just organize marches and boycotts. He used the power of mobilization to influence politicians like Lyndon Johnson. In much the same way, in Poland the Solidarity activists didn’t just organize strikes. They actively engaged the Catholic Church. Early on during the color revolutions, activists learned that international institutions could be powerful allies and were able to successfully leverage that support.
This is, perhaps, the most striking vulnerability for the present administration. Early on, it targeted institutions, such as law firms and universities, but went about it in a very ham-handed way, and key targets successfully fought back. Others, such as Senators Thom Tillis and Bill Cassidy, have voiced opposition to ICE and CBP tactics. Chris Madel, a Republican candidate for Minnesota governor, ended his campaign in protest.
Yet corporate leaders, despite widely reported misgivings, have been largely sitting it out, even as former CEOs like Reid Hoffman, Bill George and Robert Rubin have urged them to weigh in. Good corporate stewardship, however, requires more than just operating a business and managing a balance sheet. It requires being effective leaders of your corporate community.
Getting Ahead Of What Comes Next
I remember attending a group dinner in Kyiv in late 2007 and sitting across from an executive from Sony Ericsson, who confidently told me that the iPhone launch earlier that year hadn’t yet affected his company’s sales. Yet the same pattern of contagion, adoption and defection would soon kick in and Sony Ericsson would lose relevance and ultimately be absorbed, as the smartphone cascade reshaped the entire industry.
Once a cascade begins, it takes on a life of its own.
Corporate leaders in America today face a similar dilemma. Their first responsibility is to their stakeholders, whatever their own personal feelings. Yet among those millions taking to the streets are employees, customers, shareholders and their family members. Hoping you can stay on the fence is dangerously naive. It is only a matter of time before someone in your corporate community is affected by ICE and CBP violence: an arrest, getting roughed up, pepper-sprayed—or worse.
The time to act is now. If Renee Good or Alex Pretti were one of your people or their children, what would you want to have in place for them and their families? What legal, medical, or psychological support are they and their coworkers going to need? You need to start preparing for that eventuality now.
In much the same way, you need to begin to audit your partners and suppliers. Make sure the people you do business with share your values and those of your stakeholders. If they are supporting or engaging in activities that could harm your corporate community, don’t wait for an incident. Cut ties.
Most of all, you need to be explicit about your values and make sure you are living up to them. That doesn’t mean taking a political position, but it does mean being clear where you stand. As someone who has had to rise to the challenge of running a business during a revolution, I can tell you from experience that someday you will want to look back on these times, reflect on what you said and did, and be proud of what you did.