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This week’s tragic shooting in New York City and UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson has raised concerns for the safety of corporate leaders.
CNN says“The murder of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO shows why companies spend millions protecting their top executives.” Forbes columnist predicts that “after the shooting… security personnel will be needed.” And in response to the Wall Street Journal. reporthis assassination “caused an immediate reassessment of long-standing security practices in corporate America,” and “dozens” of security chiefs of enormous American corporations gathered together to debate the situation.
“The environment is explosive right now,” a former Boston police commissioner who now (not surprisingly) consults with large corporations on mitigating security threats told the Journal. “Threats are evolving and becoming more violent.”
Okay, let’s calm down, okay?
Of course, there is reason for these concerns. Not only are corporate executives more in the highlight than ever before, but they’re also not too hard to search out. They attend public events, shareholder meetings and social functions around the world. Often, corporations make their schedules public or issue press releases saying where they will probably be. Getting their home addresses takes a few steps online. Thanks to LinkedIn, X and Facebook, it takes a few minutes to delve into their personal relationships.
If you’re a corporate executive, you could easily turn into the goal of somebody who, say, desires to right a improper or impersonate a social justice warrior for their quarter-hour of fame. But this is not anything latest, is it?
Former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick he was an egg in Taiwan in 2017. Bill Gates was there hit the dough head to head during a visit abroad in 1998. Rubert Murdoch and CEOs Qantas Airlines and currently defunct Enron Company I blushed too. Honestly, a lot of business leaders and celebrities were “involuntarily” hell for years.
But the CEO’s murder is, in fact, much more serious. Fortunately, such situations weren’t only few, but even non-existent.
Advertising director was murdered in New Jersey in 1994, but it turned out to be the Unabomber’s doing. He was the director of Microsoft shot and killed in Florida in 2022, but the perpetrator turned out to be his ex-wife’s husband. George Tiller, owner of a women’s health clinic in Kansas, was murdered by an anti-abortion extremist during a church service (his clinic had previously been the goal of “multiple attacks”).
I don’t wish to downplay or trivialize the seriousness of what happened to Thompson. But I searched Google and various chatbots like Perplexity and ChatGPT for examples of other CEOs who suffered the same fate and failed.
There they are currently 55 thousand public corporations in the world, and in the USA there are over six million only employee-owned enterprises. These corporations are led not only by CEOs and business owners, but also by teams of senior executives who set tempting goals for the attention seeker. And yet such incidents are very, very few. Senior managers appear to be at greater risk of a skiing accident or plane crash than a random person shooting at them at point-blank range on a busy New York street.
So we should always all calm down for a moment. The media loves to take advantage of our worst fears and anxieties to get clicks. So they write things like “security will be desirable” and “the environment is explosive.” Posts like these from irresponsible “journalists” actually won’t help either. This is a great marketing moment for security corporations. But should corporations make knee-jerk decisions and suddenly start spending significant sums on security over what appears to be an isolated incident? If your CEO is Mark Zuckerberg, the star, I understand. But for everyone else? I’m not so sure about that.
Why? Because people don’t go around shooting other people. Our systems – while not catching everyone – are quite good at isolating people with a criminal history or those that require surveillance. Guns may be obtained each legally and illegally, but firing a shot requires patience, skill and planning.
Of course, in today’s world, those in public office must exercise caution. CEOs who engage in political or social issues or support certain controversial causes increase the risk of being attacked by the small fraction of lunatics who oppose them. Managers running businesses that deal with life-and-death matters, corresponding to health care, also should be careful. All leaders must pay attention to their surroundings. If they receive threats – like Thompson he allegedly did it – they need to take them seriously. These are situations where additional security measures are needed, either provided by local police or through private corporations.
But as you can see from the numbers, such situations are few and far between. So no one should panic. Corporations don’t must surround their CEOs with secret service agents wearing sunglasses. Some people do it and pay hundreds of thousands for the privilege. But the overwhelming majority of corporate executives can take solace in the undeniable fact that we’ve not gotten to that time yet. And I don’t think we’ll ever get to that time – at least not in the foreseeable future.
Thompson’s shooting was tragic. But it was a rare event. Anomaly. We should mourn this man. However, we apologize to the security industry and mustn’t overreact.