I’ve seen several dozen large sized companies and CEOs respond to yesterday’s guilty-on-all-three-counts jury verdict regarding Derek Chauvin, the police officer accused of killing George Floyd in Minneapolis nearly one year ago. As I have been looking at who has responded to the verdict, I’ve noticed a few interesting deviations from the norm.

First, several CEOs have written from their personal accounts, not their corporate accounts: CEOs such as Tim Cook of Apple, Chuck Robbins of Cisco, Dara Khosrowshahi of Uber (see below), Pat Geisinger of Intel, Mary Barra of General Motors and a few others. This made me wonder whether responding personally made their sentiments deeper and more reflective of their own values and a slight deviation from what usually happens when CEOs confront societal and political issues today. Everyone knows that they are synonymous with their companies and it is often listed on the description of who they are. But these personal account statements acted to strengthen their convictions.

I also noticed that Citigroup’s head of HR, Sara Wechter, communicated about the verdict on LinkedIn on where employees could go for support. American Airlines’ CEO Doug Parker was joined by the company’s president, and VP of Global People operations and Diversity and Inclusion in an internal memo to employees. That was slightly different than what I usually see.

Not unusual was to see Microsoft’s president Brad Smith post on the Microsoft blog about the Chauvin verdict. Jamie Dimon of JPMorganChase made a statement at an webcast event where he was speaking, presumably since it was scheduled and the verdict was not expected so quickly.

CEOs are probably gearing up for the one year anniversary of George Floyd’s death on May 25th. That day will be another reckoning on social injustice and systemic racism in which corporate America will be expected to be accountable.