Success Quote by Lee Scott

There is a corporate confession hiding inside this tidy bit of pronoun work. “We have allowed” is both admission and alibi: it acknowledges drift without naming who benefited from it, or who made the original choices. Scott’s phrasing turns a power struggle into a lapse in vigilance, the kind of thing a leadership team can fix with a renewed “focus” rather than a reckoning.

The real move is in “other people.” It’s vague by design, a catch-all for critics, regulators, unions, the media, activists, even competitors - anyone outside the executive suite who dares to narrate the company’s story. In business, reputation is a market asset; if outsiders “set the agenda,” they’re not just complaining, they’re interfering with strategy. Scott is signaling that the company’s identity has been outsourced to the loudest voices, and that management intends to take authorship back.

“Define who we are” is the emotional payload. Companies love to talk values; they hate being defined by outcomes. The subtext is defensive: you’re judging us by controversies, labor practices, pricing power, market dominance - but we are not that; we are what we say we are. It’s a bid to move the conversation from accountability to branding, from the measurable to the malleable.

Contextually, this is the language of a firm trying to climb out of a reputational ditch: a CEO recasting criticism as a narrative problem, not a structural one. It’s persuasive because it flatters the listener’s desire for self-determination while quietly reframing dissent as an illegitimate authorship claim.