- BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said leaders have to be far more careful about what they say. He compared the attention leaders deal with to living in “a terrarium.”
For BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, the qualities that make a good leader haven’t changed, but the world they live in has.
As a result, leaders nowadays have to measure their words carefully, Fink said during the Forbes Iconoclast Summit in New York.
“You have to be a lot more guarded. I can’t say everything I really want to say to all of you right now,” Fink told the audience. “The reality is you have to be a lot more systematic in what you say and how you say it—internally or externally.”
Fink added the biggest change he’d seen over the last 30 years of being a corporate leader was the “transparency of everything we do.”
Leaders have to be much more judicious in what they say because of “populism” and “social media,” Fink said; the combination of those two forces has created a world where leaders are subject to greater attention and always on the cusp of generating a possible controversy.
“We live in a terrarium today,” Fink said. “We live in a glass bottle. I think [because of] the transparency, which has many fine and good elements and many negative ones, you have to lead differently. You have to be a lot more thoughtful in every word you say.”
Fink, who leads the world’s largest asset manager, has on more than one occasion talked about populism. As far back as 2020, Fink had warned of a growing tide of populism, which he called a “short-term reaction” that was starting to affect the decisions governments made.
“We are seeing less long-term behaviors out of governments than ever before and there lies one of the fundamental problems,” Fink said during an interview hosted by the CFA Society of Toronto.
Last June, in an interview with the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, Fink laid out the consequences of populism’s short-term-ism. “There’s no question populism is inflationary,” Fink said. “Populism is all about today, not about tomorrow.”
Fink himself is no stranger to being the subject of controversy. When BlackRock began investing in ESG portfolios, the firm, and Fink, earned the ire of conservative activists, who thought he was doing so on political grounds. Fink often defended the decision by saying the firm believed investing in companies that could withstand the impacts of climate change was simply sound investing.
Liberal activists also took issue with some of BlackRock’s policies. Amid the ESG debate, some left-wing environmental groups thought BlackRock hadn’t gone far enough in its commitments because it still invested in oil and gas companies. ESG had become such a hot-button issue that in 2022, Fink said he found himself “attacked equally by the left and the right.”
BlackRock’s ESG initiatives were sometimes the subject of Fink’s annual letters. The letter is often eagerly awaited on Wall Street, as investors look to Fink for guidance on the state of the global economy. Despite some of the politically sensitive topics in the letter, Fink insisted he never saw his letter as political.
“There’s never been a moment in time where I thought what I was writing had any political overtones,” Fink said. “So despite the far-left attacks on me, or the far-right attacks. It was meant to be a conversation with me and our shareholders, our clients and the companies we invested in.”
