Friday, January 26, 2018

A new model for corporate governance

Without a sense of purpose, no company, either public or private, can achieve its full potential. It will ultimately lose the license to operate from key stakeholders. It will succumb to short-term pressures to distribute earnings, and, in the process, sacrifice investments in employee development, innovation, and capital expenditures that are necessary for long-term growth. It will remain exposed to activist campaigns that articulate a clearer goal, even if that goal serves only the shortest and narrowest of objectives.



Larry Fink's letter to CEOs | BlackRock



This watershed moment couldn’t have come at a more symbolic time.
This week marks the fifth anniversary of Harvard Business Review’s publishing of Conscious Capitalism: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business.  Written by Whole Foods Market co-founder and CEO, John Mackey, and F.W. Olin distinguished professor of Global Business at Babson College, Raj Sisodia, Conscious Capitalism was the catalyst to accelerate a nascent movement aimed at proving business as a force for good.
At the time of the book’s publishing, the concept of Conscious Capitalism wasn’t new. Grameen Bank co-founder Muhammad Yunnus coined the term “socially conscious capitalist enterprise” during a 1995 interview with The Atlantic about expanding the benefits of capitalism to those who needed it the most through a novel approach to microcredit and microfinance in developing nations.