The top executives generally agreed with Stack’s decision, but all three said it was essential they first analyze the potential financial impact on the company’s $8.4 billion in overall revenues. Days after the mass shooting, he connected with Dick’s Sporting Goods executives Lee Belitsky and Lauren Hobart about his idea to significantly scale back the gun-retail business, according to Riedel’s case studies. Somebody needed to do something to fix this broken system, and given our position in the industry, I felt that we needed to take a stand and do something. “I hadn’t cried that much since my mother passed away. “Watching those kids, listening to those parents-it had a profound effect on me,” says Stack in the case. Indeed, after the mass killings at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in 2012, Dick’s Sporting Goods began removing assault-style rifles from its stores, according to the cases.īut after the Parkland massacre six years later, Stack felt compelled to do more, including eliminating the type of semiautomatic rifle that was used in the shooting from stores and refraining from selling any firearms to people under age 21. Stack, whose father founded the company in the late 1940s in upstate New York, had grown increasingly alarmed over the years by several mass school shootings across the United States, the case says. “But what the Dick’s Sporting Goods case shows is that you can get it right, that you can have a positive outcome if you handle things well.” A calculated change “There are always going to be tradeoffs,” says Riedel. These lessons include getting top executives on board with a change, analyzing the financial impact, and developing a communications strategy aimed at explaining the firm’s actions to customers, employees, suppliers, and investors. Other firms looking to take a stand on social issues can’t necessarily take the dramatic steps Stack and his colleagues took to rid their firm of most, though not all, gun sales.īut Riedel, who teaches Leadership and Corporate Accountability (LCA) at HBS, says business leaders can still learn many lessons from how Stack successfully navigated this difficult decision. Riedel stresses that no two companies are the same. Arthur Fellow and senior lecturer at HBS, who wrote the pair of cases entitled “Dick’s Sporting Goods: Getting Out of the Gun Business.” “Standing on the societal sidelines is increasingly becoming less of an option for companies and business leaders.” It’s gone beyond ‘do no harm,’” says George A. “Increasingly, business leaders are expected to take stands on societal issues-to do societal good. “I don’t want to be part of the story anymore,” Stack told his top executives days after the murder of 17 students and teachers in Parkland.Īnd with those words, Stack, a gun owner and gun rights supporter, set in motion a series of corporate actions that may serve as a model for other CEOs trying to balance their personal conscience and corporate interests when dealing with thorny societal issues, according to two new Harvard Business School case studies. But he had legally bought a different shotgun months earlier at a local Dick’s outlet-and that hit close enough to home for Stack. The accused 19-year-old shooter in the Parkland massacre hadn’t purchased his AR-15 assault-style rifle at a Dick’s Sporting Goods store. Days after the mass school shooting in Parkland, Florida, in 2018, a shaken Ed Stack, then the CEO and largest shareholder of Dick’s Sporting Goods, decided it was time for his 850-store chain to pull certain guns off its store shelves.
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