There is a strong case for companies to stay out of politics. First, their top executives are not, in my experience, startlingly better informed than most interested people. In years of listening to business leaders talk about politics, usually off the record, I have heard few say anything more insightful than you hear at the average dinner party.
An exception was a Danish management consultant who, at the time the euro was created, told me it was like setting household thermostats to the same temperature everywhere from Finland to Greece.
His was a more arresting simile than most European senior executives’. At the time, their favourite was that the EU project was like a bicycle and if you stopped pedalling you would fall off.