Procter & Gamble employees, do you have a reasonable degree of control over your work and the strategic direction of your Company? Management tells me Procter & Gamble employees have a “significant influence” on Company practices. They have ample opportunity to share perspectives with each other, managers, and the Board. Specifically, they cite the P&G […]
BRT’s Stakeholder Capitalism Exposed Lucian Bebchuk and Roberto Tallarita recently published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, ‘Stakeholder’ Capitalism Seems Mostly for Show. “If CEOs really intended to amend their companies’ purpose, they’d at least consult their boards first.” In an email with a link to the op-ed and the study upon which it is based, Bebchuk […]
Shareholder-Driven Stakeholderism (U of Chicago) by Cathy Hwang and Yaron Nili argues the Business Roundtable Statement of the Purpose of a Corporation should be seen as another way to entrench management, instead of disarming greedy profit-driven shareholders. Analysis of data, drawn from companies in the S&P 1500, found shareholders, not management, “have been the driving force behind […]
Stanford’s David F. Larcker and Brian Tayan have a new paper called Loosey-Goosey Governance: Four Misunderstood Terms in Corporate Governance in which they appear to think they’ve discovered what everyone has understood forever — that there are limits to structural solutions and that checklists of best practices are not especially helpful. We were very clear […]
Shareholders v Stakeholders is in the news again, driven by the Business Roundtable. Someone asked Quora: Regarding corporate social responsibility, do you agree more with the shareholder view or the stakeholder view theory? Below is my response with a few edits, after some additional thought. (more…)
Directors Forum 2018: Directors, Management & Shareholders in Dialogue brings together investors, directors and management to engage in open, off-the-record dialogue about today’s pressing governance issues. Speakers will put a spotlight on the escalating impact of “corporate culture” on business success. Hosted by Corporate Directors Forum, Directors Forum 2018 will be held on January 21-23, […]
McDonald’s shareholders will vote on a proposal to give franchisees a seat on its corporate board of directors at their annual meeting in May. See ‘McD’s must let investors vote on proposal to give franchisees a board seat.’ (Crain’s) Could similar, more inclusive, proposals use preferred shares to create new forms of stakeholder democracy? A report at […]
Major corporations are very good at maximizing revenue capture for their owners — but they do so by externalizing costs to society. This drives many of the fundamental problems we currently face, from environmental degradation to economic inequality. IMD Professor Michael Yaziji discusses limitations to the three current solutions to this root challenge: the free […]
Stakeholder Theory: Impact and Prospects edited by Robert A. Phillips provides a great education in history to those of us who have been using the term “stakeholder” but who have little idea of its origins. Honoring the twenty-fifth anniversary of R. Edward Freeman’s Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach, Phillips assembles a collection of commentaries and critiques […]
Wharton Professor of Management Witold Henisz and two co-authors researched the role that stakeholder events played in companies’ efforts to maximize profits. Their paper, Spinning Gold: The Financial Returns to External Stakeholder Engagement, found the value of stakeholder relationships worth twice as much as the value of physical (more…)
Andrea Bonime-Blanc and Mark Brzezinski, writing for the NYTimes (Business and the Way of Democracy, 12/26/09) argue “Much like transitions to democracy over the past four decades transformed governments from mostly authoritarian to mostly democratic, we are currently witnessing a transformation of global corporations from a more or less opaque shareholder-centric model to a more […]
William Sun’s excellent book is less on how to govern corporations to serve the public good than it is an analysis of corporate governance from the perspective of ontology, epistemology, and sociology of knowledge. Sun does an absolutely fascinating job of tracing the development of two pre-Socratic cosmologies that continue to shape modern thought. Heraclitus […]
Cornelis A. de Kluyver, an academic and practitioner with global experience, has written A Primer on Corporate Governance published by Business Expert Press. While not nearly as extensive as recent textbooks by Bob Tricker or Monks and Minow, this is a quick read that provides most of the basics for future directors and those who […]