LEADERSHIP
Silence Is Also a Statement When the Cameras Arrive
An Entrepreneur contributor who led communications for a chief executive serving on one of the United States president's business advisory councils describes how, in 2017, after the violence surrounding the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, media requests, employees and advocacy groups all demanded a position at once. Each successive draft of the statement grew more polished and, in the writer's account, less certain.
The account frames the delay not as a shortage of words but as the absence of a position decided in advance. Organizations that moved quickly were not facing gentler circumstances; they had already translated values into decisions. The suggested test is backward-looking: reading the last five or ten significant decisions as a stranger would, to see whether they trace a coherent line or merely the loudest pressure of each moment.
Source: Entrepreneur · September 16, 2026