Faced with internal unrest, plummeting share prices, and a growing public relations disaster, the men and women at the very top of Activision Blizzard—the senior executives and board of directors—should all be resigning. Instead, they’ve put out a desperate press release in the middle of the night, announcing the formation of a “Workplace Responsibility Committee.”
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This committee will apparently “oversee the Company’s progress in successfully implementing its new policies, procedures, and commitments to improve workplace culture and eliminate all forms of harassment and discrimination at the Company.” Policies that reportedly won’t retrospectively apply to the conduct of CEO Bobby Kotick.
Activision have appointed the only two women on its ten-person board of directors to lead this Committee, and will soon be adding “a new, diverse director to the Board” to join them. And just how will this Committee work? Like this:
So the Committee, consisting of two members of the board, will brief the board, of which Kotick is a member. And outside advisors can be consulted, but there’s no mention of input from Activision Blizzard’s nearly 10,000 strong workforce. The announcement closes with:
It has been a challenging time because Kotick and other senior leaders have helped foster, then protect, a culture of harassment and misogyny at the company, while the board of directors, made up of many of Kotick’s old pals, continue to lend him their full support. They did nothing in the ten years preceding the lawsuit that blew this all up, and when given the chance to make changes in the months since July, installed Blizzard’s first woman co-head, then drove her out feeling “tokenized, marginalized, and discriminated against.”