Why do the companies that invest the most in values abandon them first?

In 2020, the Chief Diversity Officer was one of the fastest-growing C-suite titles in America. By 2024, it was one of the fastest-shrinking.

That’s not a political backlash statistic. It’s a structural one.

The Collapse That Was Always Coming

The pattern is everywhere. And it’s not limited to diversity.

DEI programs. Companies hired heads of diversity, funded employee resource groups, published demographic data, and tied executive bonuses to inclusion metrics. Then earnings dipped and the programs were cut before the travel budget.

ESG commitments. Firms pledged carbon neutrality by 2030, hired sustainability teams, and published detailed roadmaps to a greener tomorrow. Then the reporting got complicated, and the timelines quietly moved to 2040. Then 2050. Then “aspirational.”

AI ethics boards. Google, Microsoft, and others created ethics oversight committees with real researchers. When those researchers published findings that were inconvenient, the boards were dissolved, and the researchers were shown the door.

Corporate purpose. Companies spent millions rebranding around purpose — stakeholder capitalism, benefit corporations, shared value. When interest rates rose and margins compressed, purpose evaporated in a single earnings call.

These weren’t fringe companies. Ironically, these were the most vocal, the most invested, and the most visible champions of each commitment.

The Explanation That Doesn’t Hold

The standard take: they never meant it. It was PR. They were performing progressivism for market positioning and dropped the act when the wind changed.

That’s satisfying. It’s also wrong — or at the very least, not sufficient.

Many of these companies genuinely believed. Leaders invested real budgets. Teams were built. Infrastructure was commissioned. People relocated their lives to work on these programs.

If it were pure cynicism, you’d expect a quiet retreat. Gradual deprioritization. Instead, you get public reversals — dramatic enough to generate their own headlines. That’s not the behavior of a company that never cared. That’s the behavior of a company that can’t sustain what it started.

Cynicism doesn’t explain the pattern. Plenty of cynical companies never built programs at all. Which, of course, means that they never had to publicly abandon them.

The companies that collapse the hardest are the ones that invested the most.

What They All Skipped

Look at what was built in every case:

Titles. Budgets. Reports. Announcements. Dashboards. External commitments. Branded initiatives.

Now look at what wasn’t built:

Budgets that couldn’t be cut in a bad quarter. Incentives that rewarded the work, not just the announcement. The authority to actually block a bad decision, not just comment on it afterward. A direct line to the CEO, not a dotted line to communications.

The values were adopted as statements. The operational systems to sustain them were never constructed.

So when pressure arrived — an earnings miss, a board transition, a market correction, a political shift — there was nothing structural to hold on to. The values had no load-bearing capacity. They existed in language, in org charts, in press releases. Not in how decisions were actually made.

Why Sincerity Makes It Worse

And then there is the part that’s genuinely uncomfortable.

Cynical companies never create the expectation. They quietly don’t do the “thing,” and no one notices. A company that never promised carbon neutrality doesn’t generate headlines when it fails to deliver on that promise.

Sincere companies create enormous expectations — and then can’t meet them. Not because they lied. Because they built the announcement before they built the infrastructure. The commitment outran the capacity to deliver, and when the gap became visible, the reversal was louder than the promise.

Sincerity without infrastructure is more fragile than cynicism… Not less.

This is counterintuitive. We want to believe that meaning it protects you. But meaning it just raises the stakes. If you promise and deliver, you’re credible. If you promise sincerely and can’t deliver, you’re worse off than if you’d never promised — because now you’ve proven that good intentions aren’t enough.

The Pattern Underneath

Across DEI, ESG, AI ethics, and corporate purpose, the mechanism is identical:

1. Values adopted as narrative before operational systems existed to sustain them.
2. External commitments made before internal capacity was built.
3. Pressure arrives.
4. Nothing structural holds.
5. Public reversal.

The failure isn’t moral. It’s architectural. The values had no foundation.

And the companies that built the tallest announcements on the weakest foundations fell the hardest.

What This Means

The question isn’t whether companies are sincere about their values.

It’s whether those values are embedded in how decisions are actually made—or just in how they are described.

Because the next time pressure arrives, and it will, the same test applies: what sticks and what doesn’t?

Statements don’t hold. Intentions don’t hold. The only thing that holds is what’s been built into the structure of how a company operates.

If the values live in the press release but not in the purchase order, they’re not values. They’re aspirations with an expiration date.