Rapid Response: How optimism fuels the economy, w/U.S. Chamber of Commerce CEO Suzanne Clark

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Join us at masters of scale dot com slash apply twenty six. That's mastersofscom slash apply. Twenty six. Did you see what just happened in the pandemic? Did you see how we came together? Do you see what's happening in the economy? And yet you have politicians in both parties just bashing business all the time.

What's at stake for our country is Are we gonna preserve A messy flawed system. It's the best system in the world. and keep making it better.

Are we going to acknowledge what the free enterprise system has done? because we have so much more it still has to solve. That's Suzanne Clark, s ЮС Чамбор Комерс. Suzanne advocates for businesses in front of global leaders and here in the US. And a moment of global conflict, adversarial politics, big tech lawsuits.

I wanted to take the temperature on the state of the economy with someone who represents millions of anxious business people. I was eager to ask Clark about her recent visit to China. And also explore the impact of US government regulation on progress and innovation. I'm Bob Safian. And this is rapid response.

I'm Bob Safian. I'm here with Suzanne Clark, the CEO of the US Chamber of Commerce. Suzanne, thanks for joining us. Well, thanks for having me. So you started the year talking about the state of American business and emphasizing optimism. So now We're three months in. Stock market is way up.

Are you? Just as optimistic? Are you more optimistic? Look, I think the state of American business is almost always optimistic, right? It's core level. You don't say start a podcast if you don't think anyone's gonna listen to it. You don't flip the sign to open on your coffee shop if you don't think someone's gonna come in, right? I mean, it's all an act. of optimize and so Омост еврій бізнес персона й міт.

Is optimistic about their chances, right? About their business. At the same time, to your point, as the year wears on. They have their own concerns. Many everyday Americans seem much less enthusiastic than sometimes the numbers we see from CEOs, right? Do you have a sense of what that disconnect is about? Well, first of all, I think it's fair, right? There are people out there that are really suffering, that feel left behind, that see rent prices or housing shortages or costs at the grocery store and are having real impact on their lives. And so

I I think we have to admit that that's happening and that there's work still to do to help more people be lifted up. Slowing the rate of inflation is not the same thing as prices going down overnight, right? And and I do think the housing shortage is underreported. When we talk to state local chambers across the country, it's become their number one issue. But it's strange, right? If your consumers and your customers are anxious that you as a business leader would be like, Yeah, things are great. Well, you know, it's interesting. We're just out of the field with this um quarterly poll we do with MetLife. Sixty five percent of small businesses said they feel really good about the health of their business. Sixty five percent. That same group of people, only thirty two percent of them felt good about the health of the overall economy.

Right. So you have these small business people in communities saying, I feel good, I can serve my customers, I can serve my employees, I feel good about my business, but boy, I don't know what's going on out there. Right. So I think there are just two stories out there. I know you you're a a former small business owner yourself. The the chamber represents small businesses and big businesses. Is there a difference in what you hear? right now from bigger businesses versus smaller businesses? Oddly, no. To me it's a it's a little bit of a myth. That they're that different. Their concerns are alike.

Worker shortage, wage inflation, supply chain concerns. You know, you hear the geopolitical uncertainty. You hear the same concerns no matter what the size of the business is. The geopolitical uncertainty that that you mentioned, that that seems to be something Worrying US CEOs. You're hearing a lot about as well. Absolutely. You know, we have about eighty people who work full time in international. And so we are lucky to have a lot of experts and to host a lot of heads of state. We've got the Prime Minister of Japan coming in next week.

Remember how important it is again for small businesses to be able to export to a lot of these countries. So both our small guys and our big guys are really interested in the global market. And when Suddenly there's war in Europe. War in the Middle East. Hoodie's blowing up ships so suddenly

You know, we've got ships going on the Cape of Goodhorn and taking an extra two weeks on the supply chain. It does two things really special. specific concerns and Just uncertainty, right? And what is capital hate more than uncertainty? You're a kind of diplomat for American business globally, as you mentioned you talk with uh prime ministers and chancellors, and notably you made a trip to China earlier this year, something that a stream of other US executives and leaders are now doing. Why did you make that trip?

What did you learn? We went to China for a couple of reasons. While there are really important red lines around national security and trade that should not happen with China. There's always this green lane of just normal trade that will happen between two huge economies. Part of the reason for my trip was to work on the yellow area.

to talk to China about intellectual property theft, to talk about um what it feels like to American companies doing business there as the state secrets rules are coming out and and how hard it can be to do discovery there and due diligence there in order to have MA activity. And so what are the places where they want more foreign direct investment? But American companies can find it hard and uncertain to do business there. But I'll tell you the main reason for my trip. Is it's really important that our two countries are in the habit of communication. After President Shi and President Biden met in San Francisco, we resumed military to military communications. If you think for a minute how scary it is.

That that didn't exist. You know, that we were two 24 year olds in airplanes making a mistake away from an incident with no way for leadership to talk to each other was a really dangerous place. So the fact that we've reestablished to military communications, that business communities are talking, that there's any kind of commercial working groups to work through some of these. irritance is really important between these two countries. You met with Chinese leaders with the premier What was the feeling of the meeting?

The thing that has been interesting to me in this job, um, as I've traveled the world and met with heads of state, is how Almost exactly alike it is, no matter where you are. You're almost always brought into a waiting room of some sort. And then you go into a grander room. And you sit in a big fluffy chair that exactly matches The head of state's chair.

And there's a little table in between you. And then your delegation sit in straight back chairs along the side. I have done this In every country that you can imagine. They're almost always exactly alike. And when we've hosted heads of state here, my team will set up a very similar setup. The book I'm gonna write sometime is how funny it is to be female and do this because I'm usually too small for the chair. So you end up like perching on the end of a chair, trying to look important and have executive posture, and yet you're like Tilted on the end of a chair awkwardly, while you know, usually male head of state is able to really own his space. You know, you're just perched awkwardly on the end. Um, but the setup is almost always exactly the same. We did meet with the premier, we did it in the great hall of the people. It is as grand as you would imagine.

That to be beautiful murals and chandeliers, and a very senior ranking delegation on the side. And a in a pretty frank conversation about the uncertainty in both of our economies and what that means. You know, the the Chinese believe that we really are decoupling, not de-risking, despite the administration and Secretary Armando doing a good job of saying that's not true. Um and we really believe that their regulatory uncertainty Um, and their business climate uncertainty is making it riskier and more expensive to do business there. The mood, the tenor of the conversation is pretty

clear. It's not opaque. I mean you don't have that much time, so you don't Wanna take too long, but at the same time there's certain Niceties and risks around being too Blunt. Well there are also risks of not being blunt.

You know, I mean it's not good for an American of any sort with any sort of official duty to go over there and not be blunt and not take hard news, right? So it was really important part of our trip to go over and talk about the real challenges. What's interesting about tone and tenor when you're in a country where they have consecutive translation. Is that You spend a fair amount of time hearing tone and watching body language before you understand the words. And so that can be pretty interesting thinking.

Wow, there's a there's a lot of emotion behind whatever he's saying. But you then you have to wait a beat to find out what those words were. And some of that emotion was around, I think the the Chinese feeling that Um, we're calling everything national security. You know, we had just come out with a decision about cranes. And they were saying see? You're saying everything is national security. And I think Americans believe, well, that one is. So You know, I think there is some real debate between the two countries.

So back here at home. I know your organization's focus overall is on the free enterprise system. One of your colleagues used the phrase to me about Unprecedented micromanagement by the US government.

I wanted to ask you about how How you feel about that and what you mean by that. I mean there's AI regulation, there's FTC Blocking Jet Blue's merger. There's Department of Justice action against Apple. And I don't want to put words in your mouth because this came from one of your colleagues, but Is there a a challenge? That you see in the way the free enterprise system is operating in the US relative to the US government right now?

I think what's happening in the Biden administration is regulatory overreach that feels unprecedented to us. It's possible that the business community has used those words so many times over the years that it feels like we're crying wolf when we say it again, but this time we think there's a real wolf. And so the concern that we have. is

First of all, that we're not setting priorities well. Right. So The decision If we want If we've decided that we need to move the country to EVs

Then we're gonna have to prioritize mining. And we're gonna have to prioritize restoring the electric grid. But if we're not gonna have mining and we're not gonna invest in an electrical grid, but we're gonna make people buy cars and trucks that they can't charge. That's not strategic. That's not a strategic plan. So so often what we hear from businesses

Who by the way want clear, want clean water. would like safe food, you know, are all for good regulation. They want an effective government. That does only what it's supposed to do and does it well.

And one of the problems with government that's doing too much is that it's frequently not doing the things that only it could do. I I think Something we don't talk about enough is All of the regulation in black box at the FTC that the slowing of MA activity.

It's easy to think, Oh, that's good. That's good. It's gonna keep people from getting too big. But the Sad part of that story is the small guy just missed his exit. Right? The big guy can survive without buying that small guy. It can wait through the cycle, but the small guy could have just missed their exit. Right when interest rates were going up, right? So I think there's some pain still out there. I mean, to give you an example.

We did a study of the S P five hundred. We looked at their ten K's over ten years. watched and categorized what they were naming as their biggest risks. And across the decade. The mentions of public policy risk went up almost thirty percent.

That means that American companies are filing that the biggest escalating risk is coming from their own government. That's really startling. I mean I I guess there are two ways I can interpret that, right? Some is about sort of guardrails that the government might be putting on there, but some of those policy risks might also be about The

political uncertainty and instability as our country has become more polarized and A change of administration in the White House is just such a dramatic shift that that kind of uncertainty becomes very difficult for businesses to plan and operate. If 10 of the last 12 elections have been swing elections, that means that government policy goes guardrail to guardrail every two to four years. So, you know. You're an expert. You talk to people all the time. Do you know a business that only has a two year plan, an eighteen month plan? I mean, but those guardrails have become so much farther apart, too, I guess. Like I I I know

You're talking to people Here you're talking to people abroad. Um, you know. Politically in the US, it's like there's talk that this presidential election is the most monumental ever. Do you hear that? from leaders when you're talking to them abroad.

Unfortunately Our allies are concerned. about uncertainty in the United States. You know, and I think it should be disheartening to Americans to think that Our allies look at us and say, What's happening over there? I don't get it.

Right. And what we hear from our adversaries is we love it. Like the more uncertainty the better. What I hear from CEOs I think

Privately. They're getting really tired. Uh The the Oxymoronic.

world they live in where the Edelman Trust Barometer will say Business is the only institution that still has any trust. And yet you have politicians in both parties just bashing business all the time. Right. And I think these CEOs are like Did you see what just happened in the pandemic? Did you see how we came together? Do you see what's happening in the economy?

You know, when two where two point three million more job openings than people looking for work, right? That means everybody who has a job wants a job. Maybe it's not the job they want, maybe they have a higher aspiration, but business is doing a lot of good out there. And I think getting tired of being beaten up about it by people who just want to score political points. Clark makes a good point. As we get closer to the November elections, we're likely to hear more skewering of big business, but it's important to acknowledge the positive impact that businesses have made, particularly in the last four years. After the break, Clark reveals why she thinks it's harmful for employees to bring their whole selves to work.

And why the professional expectations put onto young people today? Can be suffocating. We'll be right back. When you build substantial wealth through your business, it's often tied up in a single equity position. The upside is real, but so is the risk, and knowing when to act isn't always obvious.

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Before the break, CEO of the US Chamber of Commerce, Suzanne Clark, talked about optimism and anxiety among US business leaders. Now she challenges the notion of bringing your full self to work and encourages us all to rethink our priorities. Let's jump back in. I want to ask you in the private conversations I've had with business leaders, one of the things I'm hearing is this sort of heightened uneasiness about addressing like certain kinds of social and Cultural.

Issues and like in a short time, they've gone from feeling like they need to take a stand on everything to now being fearful about taking a stand on anything, right? Whether that's diversity and DEI or climate and ESG or Israel and Gaza. What are you hearing from leaders about that? kind of challenge and how do you ad advise them to think about it? Look, I think first of all, remember that book Bowling Alone? The idea that people were still gonna bowl, but not in leagues.

it's really come true, right? People aren't joining churches and synagogues the way that they used to. You know, my grandfather was an elk and in the Rotary and you know, people just aren't doing those things the way that they used to. And So they come to work. And that might be the community that they have.

And what we see is then people want to act out their whole selves in this community, in this one place. And my personal view is that we have to tell people you can't. Right, we're a fifty fifty country. You think you know what the person the next cubicle thinks or the next zoom box, but you might be wrong. Right, and so How do we evolve to a place where we can respect

that people want to be community activists or political activists and give them time or space to do that, but help evolve to a place where you can't bring all of your pieces to work and have it be the only outlet for that. So I I've been doing this to you in in this Chat, you're often asked like how do CEOs and businesses feel about this or about that? Is there a topic that you're surprised that you're not getting questions about?

That you Think you should or wish you should. I do think that we are not as a country prioritizing very well. You know, I I don't

It's not clear to me why we can't say We need to fix these three things. Yes, there's a list of a hundred. We're gonna fix these three things. And when they're on their way, we'll get to four, five, and six, right? We're at a place as a country where we think we can do all of the things. at the same time. And It just doesn't work, and so

I'm confused, maybe as a human, about strategic prioritization that we all understand in our own homes, in our own budgets, in our own businesses. But that we don't expect our leaders to fulfill in any way, right? It's it's so interesting listening to you because when you Read the newspaper.

Watch TV. The challenges that we hear about business are Are Business creating them. By them being too big or them abusing their power. And what you're saying. In a lot of ways is that the biggest challenges

That businesses facing Is that the government Is not creating an appropriately fertile landscape. for those businesses to build the future that we wanna have. I think the market takes care of things that get too big.

The number of companies that are In the Fortune five hundred today that were there in the eighties is much smaller. Than the average citizen believes it is. It's a more fluid situation than I think people realize. And The idea that you know, you still need government to step in on a on a real monopoly. Sure. I mean there's there's fair government regulation and and fairness matters and competition matters. But

When Every merger is bad and anything big is bad. Well, that's ridiculous, too. I've thought about how the folks at Jet Blue must feel like we would be too big if we were part of spirit. We still won't be as big as the folks we're competing against, you know? Or as or as Apple says you know, to the Department of Justice. Like you say we dominate the US market. We're playing in an international market, and we don't dominate that. And like You know, these are complicated and difficult questions, obviously.

If you look at our big tech companies. It's the one thing our adversaries cannot. beat us at. They have not been able to figure it out. Right? So if you think about

The wars of the future. and how they can be fought over tech and tech infrastructure and how all that's gonna work. They've gotta be laughing at us. that the one thing they can't figure out how to mimic or build or defeat. We're talking about taking down on our own out of a system of fairness, right? Like what is the strategic priority here?

You were first at the US Chamber. From nineteen ninety seven to two thousand seven. Then you left for a while before coming back. The challenges you faced back then, Iraq war, dot com bubble. Does any of that feel familiar today? What's different about what you see?

Now And What's different about what the chamber does now? The difference to me feels like cadence and pace and scale. So if you say inflation is at a forty year high, you're definitionally saying that no one in leadership has ever experienced inflation like this. Right?

But we don't think about it in that human term. So if you think about the same time, no one in leadership had ever experienced a global pandemic. Nobody had ever experienced those supply chain disruptions. No one had ever experienced inflation like this. And so I think that is what's different. Cadence of change, pace of change, and the and the Drama Of the past капловіers. Yeah, well, and and I guess in that context, when you are a business leader and you are running a business

You may feel like you have a different kind of responsibility. Like people are looking to you for things that maybe weren't the purview of a business person in the same way. That they are today. At the end of the day. You have to be a competent executive for your employees and your customers and your shareholders and your investors. And that has to be the most important service that you can provide. Um, but increasingly to do those things.

You're called on in a leadership way that nobody else ever was, you know. My grandfather Came out of World War II in the Navy, used his GI bill to buy his in laws a house, never went to college, Got a job, got a great job, and supported his family for decades. And if you asked him what his purpose was, First of all, he would have laughed at you, but second of all, he would have said I took care of my family. I took care of my community.

And now we say to these young people, Well you gotta do that. You gotta take care of your family and you gotta take care of your community, but you gotta have a mission and you gotta have a purpose and you have to have like somehow we've gotten away from taking care of your family. Taking care of your community. As a life's purpose. You have to also save the whales or something. You know, you have to do all of those things while having this other purpose. And I I just think these young people today, they're so hard on themselves. And I try to tell them. Business can be a great calling that allows you to be philanthropic, that allows you to create opportunities for other people, that allows you to solve problems. You know, it reminds me of what you were saying before about prioritization overall. I think as as individuals, we do the same thing. The world is so interconnected that we feel like we have responsibility for all kinds of things. But as you say, you can't necessarily have impact.

On everything. It ends it kind of ends where we started, right? Which is it's why in however long, whatever period of time I have this job, it can't be about the individual fight for an individual business or an individual fight for an individual industry. It's gotta be about promoting and defending the whole system. Are we gonna preserve A messy flawed system. That's the best system in the world.

And keep making it better. Are we going to acknowledge what the free enterprise system has done because we have so much more it still has to solve, right? Educational opportunities for more people, housing for more people, healthcare for more people. That's going to be solved through innovation and technology and business, right? So what's at stake? Is us. Losing respect for and interest in and passion for The very job creators and problem solvers.

That can help us get through. This complicated time. Suzanne, thank you so much for doing this. Thank you so much for the opportunity. Since talking with Clark, I've been thinking about the idea of purpose and the pressure I put on myself to do more than just take care of my family. It's a balance, right? I I don't want to be insular and selfish.

And while their issues do impact my family's future, the larger community. I suppose what I'm after, like a lot of ambitious business-minded folk, is to have a healthy mix, to take care of my own, but also recognize the privileges that I have and to apply some of that toward helping others. I hope this podcast is a reflection of that larger goal. and that you find it helpful as you try to navigate that balance too. I'm Bob Safian.

Thanks. Rapid response is a wait what original. I'm Bob Safien. Our executive producer is Eve Tro. The production team includes Chris Gautier,

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