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The Near-Constant Return To “Shareholder Primacy”
This is what dooms the “best intentions” of companies, if and when they truly exist.
I have a little folder in my GMail called “Writing Inspiration” — a-ha! — and sometimes I dump interesting stuff in there and hope to opine about it at a later date. Recently I saw an article from UPenn’s Wharton School about “the long-term case for business purpose,” which can be found here:
That article is based on an academic paper, which can be found here.
If you’ve been in the general game of “thinking about work” for the last 10–15 years, you know that the “purpose” discussion comes up a lot. We have terms like “green-washing” and “woke-washing,” whereby executives wash over their real goals with some phony goals i.e. “We will save the planet while producing these generally-pointless widgets!” There should also be a category called “Purpose-Washing,” because what a lot of senior leaders do is attempt to tie your pointless drivel of task work to some amazing “purpose” or “mission” that they do a half-OK…
