| Apparently, burpees and Bad Idea jeans are not mutually exclusive. CrossFit founder Greg Glassman charged into the tense Twittersphere recently with some cryptic posts about the current social justice movement. It was a glib and insensitive missive at best, racist at worst. The backlash was immediate and sizable, the prevailing sentiment perhaps best captured by @Dan_in_CLT: "How to destroy your brand, by Greg Glassman." The next day, Glassman tweeted what appeared to be a heartfelt apology, but also hopped on a video call with dozens of concerned CrossFit gym owners in which he was more inflammatory and combative than contrite, according to several accounts. "It was just a really nasty conversation," recalled Christopher Sainsbury, a participant on the call and co-owner of Brooklyn's Dean Street CrossFit gym. On Tuesday afternoon, we asked via e-mail to interview Glassman, but a few hours later he was gone, retiring from a fitness empire that he had built over two decades. Such is the momentum of the moment. Regardless of what Glassman was trying to say, he sparked a moral crisis, a conflagration that could not be separated from his 15,000 or so affiliate gyms. Between the time of the dubious tweet and the resignation, hundreds of those entrepreneurs—so-called "boxes"—had separated from the brand, either on principle or the calculated decision that a tainted "CrossFit" brand would be more costly than operating outside the cultish trademark. "If I have a young, black kid that I'm coaching, how do I even look him in the eye?" Sainsbury wondered. "The 'CrossFit' name is going to be associated with racism." Reebok, a unit of Adidas, also severed a nine-year partnership with the company, as did some of the all-star athletes of the CrossFit competitive circuit. Get ready to see a lot of this kind of thing. A large swath of the 6 million or so privately held businesses in the U.S. now rely on strong, singular CEOs deftly navigating a tense cultural moment. More than a few of them are going to be morally unequipped to do so or won't have the communication and leadership skills to avoid botching it. And when they do, millions of jobs hang in the balance. The CrossFit crisis is a perfect—albeit explosive—example of the so-called founder's dilemma. Those with the vision and drive to start a booming business aren't always the right people to run it. What's more, they tend to be both underprepared and overconfident. Not surprisingly, the majority of startup savants get pushed out of the C-suite as their companies scale. To be fair, far larger, shinier corporations are struggling with the moment as well. Conde Nast faced a racial reckoning of its own this week. At least one top editor and one senior executive resigned as two of their publishing platforms pledged a thorough race-sensitive audit of not only their HR tendencies but the entirety of its media coverage. Meanwhile, Adidas pledged $120 million in funding for programs aimed at racial disparity and promised that 30% of new hires would be Black or Latino. Still, employees demanded a more thorough mea culpa from executives. Here's a framework for any executive: if you are reacting, you are probably already in trouble. The smartest, most progressive companies–the ones that aren't in the headlines–are leaning into the protests, digging into internal data and going well beyond the rote response of a woke Tweet and a big stack of philanthropy. They are auditing compensation for ethnic disparity, not just gender disparity. They are rebooting recruiting and hiring patterns. They are adding training programs on microaggression, unconscious bias and the other subtle strains of snoozy racism. And they are overhauling supply chains to better support businesses owned by people of color. Sainsbury, in Brooklyn, still doesn't want to ditch CrossFit (although he didn't think any of his 400 or so clients would have left if he did). Rather, he thinks it is too powerful a platform. With thousands of trainers and coaches in some of the most neglected corners of our society, what better infrastructure could one build for addressing social ills? Among other things, he has joined a coalition of gyms calling for a black scholarship fund, a new, diverse board, and CrossFit branded fitness programs in marginalized schools. "I don't necessarily think the canceling culture is the way out," he said. "What we're asking is for them to do the work."  Bloomberg Businessweek, June 15, 2020. Subscribe now. Photographer: Henry Keith (protest); Lori Hawkins/Redux (food) | 
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