In the past few years, I’ve had the opportunity to guest lecture at Ivey Business School. This year, I was invited to talk about CEO activism. With the pandemic forcing classes online, Ivey HBA Faculty Director Mary Weil and I moved our class to a video chat, discussing questions submitted from her HBA students.

What great questions they had and really interesting timing. Mary and I talked just before CEOs started to really sort out how they would react to the Covid-19 crisis, or if they would at all.

Here’s a video of our conversation, in which we discussed questions such as:

1) How does senior leadership go about managing the interest of its shareholders while simultaneously trying to contribute to social causes that may interfere with the views of the shareholders/board?

and

2) How do you think the size of the corporation effects the CEO’s duty to support efforts to slow the spread of COVID-19?

In the next few blog posts I’ll answer a few more of the questions that students submitted.