🟠 News Club - Breaking trust, and the internet...

A scandal like the one caught on camera at a Coldplay concert last week always attracts a million eyes, but what’s equally fascinating is the conversation around the expectations we have of business leaders and what happens when they let us down…

Breaking trust - and the internet…

Last week, a 15-second video of Astronomer CEO Andy Byron and the company’s chief people officer Kristen Cabot caught in an embrace at a Coldplay concert was projected on massive screens for 50,000 people to see. Unless you’ve been living in a cave, you’ve probably seen it too.

Hiding from the spotlight, Coldplay frontman Chris Martin joked that the pair might have been having an affair. He was bang on, but the cherry on top was their high-up corporate positions. So the internet did what it does best, and 100 million views and thousands of memes later, Byron went on leave. Then on Sunday morning, he’d resigned.

A family is in tatters, and the company is scrambling to protect its reputation. Yes, it’s been a delicious scandal, but it’s also sparking conversations about leadership, power, and what we expect from our business leaders.

So, our Club Picks this week will help to unpack why an amorous encounter at a concert has captured so much attention. 

1. The schadenfreude factor... The Wall Street Journal says this story exploded beyond typical CEO scandals because, as Yale management professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld explains, there's "a certain schadenfreude associated with this" - a takedown of the 'haves' versus the 'have-nots'. Growing worker disenchantment with corporate bosses with a lack of trust in business leaders rising 21% since 2021 has seen Byron become a symbol of executive privilege.

2. As you know, I enjoy the communications aspects of the big stories. And Axios’s modern crisis communications playbook shows exactly why Astronomer was doomed from the start. As crisis expert Molly McPherson puts it, companies were just getting comfortable with "nameless, faceless statements on Twitter" when TikTok came along… Astronomer faced an impossible task: getting on top of a story that was already everywhere. 

3. The Financial Review's analysis of modern leadership standards shows why Byron's swift resignation was inevitable. As one Australian chairman put it: "A CEO needs to present the best version of themselves in every single interaction they have. There's just no room for anything else now." The reality is that what might once have been private embarrassment is now public accountability.

What fascinates me about this story is that what some people in positions of power have been taking for granted since time immemorial - that is, keeping a lid on their dirty laundry - isn’t really possible in the social media age. 

There was never a great excuse for falling short of these standards in the past - there are just fewer opportunities to recover than there used to be, now that things can blow up very quickly on a global scale. 

May you keep it tidy this week…

There in times of trouble

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