Corporate Reckoning: How Businesses Can Address Historical Wrongs
Sarah Federman
The MIT Press (April 2026)

How to avoid or resolve real or perceived grievances

All companies have at least a few customers — and yes, employees — with real or perceived grievances, even those companies that are annually ranked most highly admired and best to work for. People are imperfect. They make mistakes. Some unresolved controversies can last decades and even centuries.

Sarah Federman has written a book in which she shares her thoughts about how companies can — and should — “address historical wrongs.” She cites dozens of real-world examples rather than theoretical or hypothetical.

No brief commentary such as mine can do full justice to the high quality and potential value of the material that Federman provides in Corporate Reckoning but perhaps it will be helpful if I identify a few of the key questions to which she so effectively responds:

o When — and when NOT — to address the given “historical wrongs”?
o What are the most important dos and don’ts to keep in mind when responding?
o Who should be on the response team? WHY?
o Who are the most important stakeholders, both within and outside the given respondent?
o What are the strategic objectives to be achieved?
o What are the best strategies and tactics to achieve them?
o How best to measure progress and impact during the response?

Here is a brief excerpt ƒrom Federman’s article, “How Companies Can Address Their Historical Transgressions,” that was featured in Harvard Business Review (January/February 2022):

“Some multigenerational companies or their predecessors have committed acts in the past that would be anathema today—they invested in or owned slaves, for example, or they were complicit in crimes against humanity. How should today’s executives respond to such historical transgressions? Drawing on my recent book about the effort by the French National Railways to make amends for its role in the Holocaust, I argue that rather than become defensive, executives should accept that appropriately responding to crimes in the past is their fiduciary and moral duty. They can begin by commissioning independent historians, publicly apologizing in a meaningful manner, and offering compensation on the advice of victims’-rights groups. The alternative is often expensive lawsuits and bruising negotiations with victims or their descendants.”

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“Shakespeare wrote, “The evil that men do lives after them.” I see this clearly when talking with those who survived such atrocities. Take Daniel, who was deported on the last train from Paris to Auschwitz. He hangs his only picture of his murdered parents at the foot of his bed. He and his brother both survived the camp, but the experience was so horrifying that he recently said to me, ‘I still wonder if it would have been better to die at Auschwitz.’

“Historical atrocities like slavery and the Holocaust can never be fully repaired. But companies complicit in such events should not avoid their own reckoning. By their nature, executives feel most comfortable when focusing on the future. But the past has a habit of catching up with anyone who ignores or tries to outpace it. Corporate leaders may feel it’s not fair that they should have to devote their attention to making amends for their predecessors’ sins. But particularly in an era when society is scrutinizing and reassessing the history of both individuals and organizations, leaders must be ready to engage with—and atone for—their company’s past actions.

“Corporations must first accept that it is their duty to respond to historical crimes. They should be totally transparent, apologize, and take cues from the field of transitional justice by working with victim communities and their descendants to make amends.”

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