What’s in a Name

01 Mar 2023

What’s in a Name

Reconciling a company’s past with the present moment

Re: Dolly Chugh (MBA 1994); Mihir A. Desai (Mizuho Financial Group Professor of Finance); Felix Oberholzer-Gee (Andreas Andresen Professor of Business Administration); By: Jen McFarland Flint

Topics: Information-Books Demographics-Race-General Organizations-Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact

Late last fall, Dolly Chugh (MBA 1994) made a guest appearance on After Hours, the podcast where HBS professors discuss current events. (The podcast is part of the TED Audio Collective.) Chugh was joined by professors Mihir Desai and Felix Oberholzer-Gee in a conversation about the pressures on business leaders to respond to the demands of woke capitalism. Chugh is a professor at the NYU Stern School of Business, where she teaches courses on leadership, management, and negotiations; her new book is A More Just Future: Psychological Tools for Reckoning with Our Past and Driving Social Change.

In the episode, “Who Is Afraid of Woke Capitalism?” Chugh relates a story from her book about Dixie beer, a New Orleans staple that had faded in recent decades. New owners took over the company and in 2019 hired General Manager Jim Birch to stage a comeback. By 2020, amidst outcries of racial injustice in the United States, the company recognized that its name—with associations with the Confederacy—was at odds with its goal of bringing people together. As Chugh explains in the edited excerpt below, the company solicited feedback from the community and eventually rebranded as Faubourg Brewing—a name that recognizes the city’s rich cultural history.

Jim Birch was reaching out to buyers across the country—with no thought at all of changing the brand—when he started encountering questions. People in different parts of the country would say: “Are you really okay with the name?” The way he describes it, Birch and the leadership of the company started to reflect throughout 2019 on these questions about … a name that they had never questioned in all its history.

They decided to rename themselves. The decision was announced in June 2020. It was in the air at that point, after the killing of George Floyd. There were a lot of corporate announcements. They found that African Americans in New Orleans were saying to them, “I didn’t have a problem with the name before but I certainly couldn’t defend it. Now that you’re coming to me and asking what it should be called, I feel more connected to the brand. And I can defend this brand.”

Jim Birch describes a reframing of how they thought about their interactions with their community, a broader perspective on who they saw as their buyer, and that complicated reckoning: What parts of our history do we want to hang on to? What’s the part we want to let go of? How do we hang on to the paradox? At first they saw some pushback on social media, but Birch and his leadership came to the conclusion that the folks who objected to what they saw as woke capitalism weren’t the people who were a part of their customer base anyway.

What’s being labeled by some as woke capitalism is what we were calling stakeholder capitalism not too long ago. Woke capitalism is meant to be derogatory, but I think there’s actually pretty broad support for it... We may have an asymmetric perspective on when business should get involved in issues and when they shouldn’t, but I think the days of businesses thinking they can just be businesses are over, rightly or wrongly.