President Trump said he planned to offer a new executive order to replace initial one to temporarily ban migrants from seven Muslim-majority companies. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

In his wild, erratic news conference last Thursday, President Trump said an update to his executive order to temporarily ban migrants from seven Muslim-majority countries was planned for this week. With it could come another round of public statements from CEOs, particularly from the tech industry, who have spoken out in recent weeks against the travel ban, signing legal briefs, protesting alongside their employees or issuing sharply worded remarks.

American companies have emerged as a force for social change in recent years, particularly around same-sex marriage and state-level legislation thought by critics to be discriminatory toward LGBTQ groups. But "there’s just nothing,” in scale or swiftness, that has compared to the corporate response to President Trump’s travel ban, Nancy Koehn, a historian at Harvard Business School, told The Post for a recent story exploring the evolution of this trend.

Their more public statements today are not mere corporate altruism, but often have an economic interest: Fears about changes in visa programs, especially in a tech industry dependent on them, have made speaking out a business imperative. Companies have been funneling millions of dollars into diversity and inclusion programs; if they ignore political actions that hurt certain groups, they undermine the credibility of those programs. Meanwhile, the rise of social media, which can quickly mobilize large groups of people, has put new pressure on chief executives to speak up.

Aaron Chatterji, a professor at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business who has studied CEO activism, says what's changed most over the past year is that staying out of the fray now has a cost. "Silence used to be the default posture," Chatterji said, but political polarization, Facebook and Twitter have changed that. "It's a choose-a-side mentality. The middle is harder to occupy. And with the proliferation of social media, it's kind of like a microphone that's always on. If you're not speaking out, it's more conspicuous."

More on leadership in Washington:

*If Trump is 'unbelievably decisive,' why did it take him weeks to fire Michael Flynn? (The Washington Post)

*Turmoil at the National Security Council, from the top down (The New York Times)