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This time of year, it’s common to think about giving. The holiday season seems to be designed to tap our guilt and elicit generosity.
Which is fine, I suppose. But if this attitude is just limited to a custom we do once a year, then it’s really not much more important than shooting fireworks on the 4th of July.
A nice experience, but then we move back to “normal life” – whatever that is.
Read the rest of this entry »I always find it useful to work with my clients to examine the nature and needs of all the stakeholders in their business. That discussion starts off with customers, partners, supplier, and investors. But there are more!
Sometimes leaders forget that their employees are stakeholders. They care if the company succeeds, because it’s often their primary livelihood and source of income.
But I often find that people forget about one of the most crucial stakeholders in any business: Yourself.
Read the rest of this entry »The world just changed its axis. Did you feel it?
Last week, 181 of the country’s biggest CEOs — representing 15 million employees and $7 trillion in revenues — came together to refute one of the core principles of business for the last fifty years.
That was Milton Friedman’s 1970 paper, The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits. In it, he expanded that title to declare that there was no other responsibility of business than to return profits to its shareholders. Everything else — customers, employees, societal change — must be in service to the shareholders.
Read the rest of this entry »ROBERT REICH
is one smart guy, and I deeply respect the fact that he appears to actually understand how the economy works.
So I noticed his recent article titled “The Rebirth of Stakeholder Capitalism“.
He makes a powerful distinction between Shareholder Capitalism and Stakeholder Capitalism. The former structures a business to benefit only the shareholders, while the latter incorporates other beneficiaries: customers, employees, and communities.
ASPEN INSTITUTE just came out with a new report entitled Unpacking Corporate Purpose: A Report on the Beliefs of Executives, Investors and Scholars. It’s an interesting read, especially for those who are thinking about how investors change the landscape of their company’s purpose.
For me, the most thought-provoking idea was that there are distinctly different philosophies about the concept of a corporation – and they’re all valid.
You’d think that traditional wisdom holds that the purpose of a corporation is to serve its shareholders. But is it? Read the rest of this entry »
The Values-Based Business 