CEO whisperer Jeffrey Sonnenfeld has the country's top business leaders on speed dial. Here's how the Yale professor gathers dozens of CEOs whenever there's a national crisis.

• For years, Yale professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld has rubbed shoulders with corporate executives.
• Whenever a national crisis strikes, he gathers them for a meeting to discuss solutions.
• We spoke with Sonnenfeld about his latest gathering, a response to Georgia's restrictive voting laws.

After insurrectionists stormed the Capitol on January 6, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld's phone buzzed with notifications from the US's top business leaders.

Since the 1970s, Sonnenfeld has had major pull with the juggernauts of corporate America, such as Merck head Ken Frazier, JPMorgan chief Jamie Dimon, and Starbucks chair Mellody Hobson.

Before the pandemic, his forums were held in New York, DC, Mexico City, Delhi, and Shanghai. Now Sonnenfeld hosts meetings over Zoom in what he describes as "the Hollywood Squares of CEOs."

Usually, the meetings are planned months out. But when issues are serious enough, he calls an emergency session. Recently, amid a presidential election and an insurrection, Sonnenfeld has been organizing emergency sessions more regularly, all under the banner of Yale's Chief Executive Leadership Institute.

The goal of these meetings is to brainstorm solutions or recommendations to the topics at hand. After former President Donald Trump prematurely claimed victory in several states in the days following the 2020 presidential election, "we got about 45 really major CEOs across the political spectrum and they came out with some recommendations right then and there," Sonnenfeld said. "They came up with a crisp set of five statements to be ready as soon as the election was called and it was the best stuff they ever wrote because the CEOs said it, not their staff."

Most of Sonnenfeld's career has been anchored by CEO leadership and corporate-governance research. Since 1999, he's been the senior associate dean for executive programs at Yale School of Management. Before that he was a professor at Harvard Business School for a decade. He's also the author of "The Hero's Farewell: What Happens When CEOs Retire" and other books.

Sonnenfeld sat with Insider to talk about organizing his latest leadership gathering in response to the restrictive voting laws that gripped Georgia earlier this month. Among the CEOs who attended Sonnenfeld's meeting was Frazier, who had recently led an effort in which 72 Black executives signed a letter that addressed Georgia's new voting laws. Our interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Was it difficult to gather so many of America's top business leaders for this latest call?

I just wanted to get everybody together, educationally because we're an education forum, and they said yes. I thought it would've been impossible to get a coalition together. I started calling these CEOs personally. I don't have the content. These are the people with the content, but I do have the relationships with the CEOs. I invited 120 of them with 48 hours' notice. I thought if I could just get 10 of them to show up ... 90 of them said yes.

Did you receive any pushback from the CEOs you invited? Was anyone hesitant to attend?

It's interesting, I had people I thought would be reluctant. For example, when Delta was being pounded, I was wondering if they could get help from other airlines. Without hesitation, Doug Parker from American Airlines, who I know very well and has been very invested in social justice and race issues, jumped on board right away. He had two other conflicting events. He still managed to be there. And Scott Kirby from United Airlines. I don't know him. I still don't know him. He showed up. So you saw things like that.

I wondered if professional service firms would be nervous, but we had major law firms and consulting firms there. With the big service firms, you get one big client mad at you and suddenly you've got a lot of jobs at risk. They were still there.

Pharma to finance to technology to transportation. They were there. LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman was there. There were people from all across the ideological spectrum.

Describe the meeting's format.

Thankfully this coalition trusted me to be the moderator. A lot of these CEOs have been to my 110 prior forums so they know we can do this. So I introduced people and kept the discussion debates going. I came up with polling questions to help provoke discussion and debate. It was only for an hour and 10 minutes.

I made one imperfect call. Just as we were about to close, I called on the guy who I thought would be the perfect closer. Instead, he went down a different path of important stuff, but it wasn't related to this topic. So I spent 10 minutes to get us back on. If this were my MBA class, the students would've been packing up their books and headed out the door, pretending they're going to another class. But everybody stayed on, on a Saturday, for the extra 10 minutes.

What were some of the most memorable moments on the call?

For me it was [Home Depot cofounder] Author Blank's thoughtful discussion about how event management, sports, athletes, entertainment, are looking at the public voice and looking at voting with your dollar when there's misconduct. That was one of the most important ones.

And another one, the general counsel of Delta was explaining, very convincingly, how they feel they had made such progress backstage and it didn't work. That was very candid. They explained how the GOP legislators let them down, or took advantage of the business leaders.

I thought Mellody Hobson really brought us to an incredible close, just talking - and not as a Pollyanna-ish approach, but with a lot of optimism - about how the world can be, how business life can be. It was unscripted, but she was an unbelievably effective closer.

I should have mentioned this at the top, but the most eloquent person living, breathing today that I know from any sector is Ken Frazier [chairman and CEO of pharmaceutical company Merck & Co.]. To say that he speaks like a thesaurus reads is an insult to him. He's better than a thesaurus. He uses words you know but in amazing ways. He was the most evocative. He opened it up, and I can scarcely breathe when Ken is speaking.

In your Wall Street Journal column last week, you wrote: "Ensuring social cohesion in democracy is part of a CEO's job of managing the strategic environment." Could you explain further?

I'm thrilled that you saw one of the most critical lines. In a Wall Street Journal article, there are all these people trying to use this taunting term of "woke CEOs," suggesting that there's something wrong with awakening. Maybe it's a good idea to awaken to social justice. It's a term that goes back to the '60s. I thought, let's not say that something is wrong with looking at social issues. In fact, CEOs don't want angry communities. They don't want people who feel like their safety is at risk. They don't want workers who feel unsafe. In fact, they don't want employees pointing fingers at each other either. They don't want divided shareholders.

CEOs are realizing that maybe they've been identified as the GOP. The Republican Party is the party of big business since Herbert Hoover and through the Eisenhower years. Nobody owns the business community right now. They're not xenophobes. They're not anti-immigration. They are not segregationists. They're not isolationists who say "the heck with you" to the rest of the world.

Do you think CEOs and other influential leaders have a moral imperative to weigh in on political and social issues similar to what's happening in Georgia?

Yes. I think it is part of a CEO's job to take a look at the larger ripple effects on society. It's not the only part of a CEO's job - they're not politicians. Their boards of directors are not municipal city councils. The most respected pillars of society are not journalists or the media. It's not academia. It's not public and elected officials. It's also not the clergy, sadly, as much as it is business leaders.

That was not the case in 2008. They were not trusted and people were pretty angry at the business community. And same in the year 2000 with all the governance failures, and that skepticism was merited.

Right now, business leaders have an extraordinary amount of trust and they're stepping up to the plate to take on that responsibility. For effectively functioning capitalism, you have to have people who believe in the system. You need to have a functioning democracy for our system. They are inextricably intertwined. I think that business leaders recognize that.

What is the biggest risk of CEOs staying silent in a social climate like today's?

This is an important question, because whether or not it's a passing fad - and I don't think so - we do have a workforce and consumers that care about the social positioning of the companies they work for, the companies that they purchase from, and they're voting with their feet. It's not just platitudes.

Who knows if this is going to last a lifetime. It's holding for now. Where people work, where they buy, where they invest are all affected by this set of issues. But on top of the external markets, it's just the issues themselves. These are categorically different issues. These issues are so sharp that there is no middle ground.

People always love to say "both sides this" and "both sides that" and "there are good people on both sides." There aren't. Some things are crisp. They're dichotomous. They're yes or no. And that's the case here.

Silence indicates acquiescence. And with decisions, you can't punt this one. You can't kick it down the road. That's what's so troubling about some CEOs who haven't yet spoken out. By not saying anything, you've spoken.