You must look beyond simply maximising value for your shareholders and embrace a wider definition of “corporate responsibility”, write John Elkington and Richard Roberts for Harvard Business Review.
In August, the Business Roundtable, an association of CEOs from almost 200 of America’s foremost corporations, declared that the purpose of corporations should be about more than “shareholder primacy”.
For the Business Roundtable, this declaration marks an end to the doctrine of “shareholder primacy”, the belief that the sole purpose of a corporation should be to maximise shareholder value, embraced in 1997, and a return to the association’s previous belief that corporations should aim to balance shareholder interests with those of “other constituencies”, i.e. workers and society in general.