Capitalists Arise! by Peter Georgescu

Author:Peter Georgescu
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Published: 2017-07-10T16:00:00+00:00

WHAT CAN YOU DO ABOUT IT?

At this point, it may well be worth remembering Peter Drucker’s simple admonition: “The only valid purpose of a firm is to create a customer.”11 In our current era, we’ve forgotten how to create nearly everything other than a spurious profit, which will become harder and harder to achieve with each passing year.

The mystery of why free-market capitalism, as we’re now practicing it, cannot rectify our inequality of opportunity is pretty clear. The free-market capitalism that built America into an economic, social, and military powerhouse is no more. It’s a shadow of its former self. Shareholder value has been debased into a machine that rewards one stakeholder—the person who owns shares—at the tragic expense of all the rest: the employees, the customers, the communities, and the nation itself. This practice, now deeply embedded in our public markets and our business culture around the world, is both destructive and unsustainable, as our system eats itself away.

Yet convincing CEOs to change (one by one) is hard. Very hard. After a dozen or more meetings, Ken and I found just how hard it will be to turn this ship. It’s not that any single CEO disagreed that the problem is severe, urgent, and consequential. The answer we get is simply: “What can I do about it?”

I believe the more relevant question today is a new one: What must a CEO do?

The devastating consequence of rising income inequality, which drives the inequality of opportunity in a majority of American communities, is sounding a deafening alarm. We’ve already demonstrated an urgent need for societal and economic change. It’s up to business now to do what it can and what it must to contribute to solutions. Why? Because it will work—for everyone, including the shareholder.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.