Stakeholder Capitalism Quotes

When we apply the principles of permaculture to business operations - we end up with more profitable businesses, more resilient businesses, and businesses that holistically add value to all stakeholders.

When your business prioritizes the wellbeing of all of its stakeholders, then all of those stakeholders gain respect for the business and your business can utilize that respect as a sort of currency and a means to accomplish business objectives.

Permaculture Capital Stewardship, or Permaculture Investing, is about not just having a diversified portfolio, but having a portfolio where all of the assets within the portfolio have synergy and whereby that synergy is channeled toward maximized productivity for both shareholders and stakeholders. A permaculture investment portfolio has a multiplicative value effect.

All stakeholders should benefit from the capital we allocate in our portfolio.

All stakeholders should benefit from the capital we allocate in our portfolio, on a net value add basis.

our biological evolution has not kept pace with our cultural evolution.

Some argue shareholder capitalism has proven to be more “efficient” than stakeholder capitalism. It has moved economic resources to where they’re most productive, and thereby enabled the economy to grow faster. By this view, stakeholder capitalism locked up resources in unproductive ways, CEOs were too complacent, corporations were too fat—employing workers they didn’t need, and paying them too much—and they were too tied to their communities. It is a tempting argument, but in hindsight a fallacious one. Any change that allows some people to become better off without causing others to be worse off is technically a more “efficient” use of resources. But when all or most of these efficiency gains go to a few people at the top—as has been the case since the 1980s—the common good is not necessarily improved. Just look at the flat or declining wages of most Americans, their growing economic insecurity, and the abandoned communities now littering the nation. Then look at the record corporate profits, soaring CEO pay, and jaw-dropping compensation on Wall Street. All Americans are stakeholders in the American economy, and most stakeholders have not done well.

Companies should maintain accurate and timely financial records because it serves as the foundation for informed decision-making, ensures compliance with regulatory requirements, and enhances transparency, ultimately bolstering trust among stakeholders and facilitating long-term financial stability and growth. Without good records, businesses may risk financial mismanagement and uncertainty, hindering their ability to thrive in a competitive market.

The cultural Left has contributed to the formation of this politically useless unconscious not only by adopting “power” as the name of an invisible, ubiquitous, and malevolent presence, but by adopting ideals which nobody is yet able to imagine being actualized. Among these ideals are participatory democracy and the end of capitalism. Power will pass to the people, the Sixties Left believed only when decisions are made by all those who may be affected by the results. This means, for example, that economic decisions will be made by stakeholders rather than by shareholders, and that entrepreneurship and markets will cease to play their present role. When they do, capitalism as we know it will have ended, and something new will have taken its place. […] Sixties leftists skipped lightly over all the questions which had been raised by the experience of non market economies in the so-called socialist countries. They seemed to be suggesting that once we were rid of both bureaucrats and entrepreneurs, “the people” would know how to handle competition from steel mills or textile factories in the developing world, price hikes on imported oil, and so on. But they never told us how “the people” would learn how to do this. The cultural Left still skips over such questions. Doing so is a consequence of its preference for talking about “the system” rather than about specific social practices and specific changes in those practices. The rhetoric of this Left remains revolutionary rather than reformist and pragmatic. Its insouciant use of terms like “late capitalism” suggests that we can just wait for capitalism to collapse, rather than figuring out what, in the absence of markets, will set prices and regulate distribution. The voting public, the public which must be won over if the Left is to emerge from the academy into the public square, sensibly wants to be told the details. It wants to know how things are going to work after markets are put behind us. It wants to know how participatory democracy is supposed to function. The cultural Left offers no answers to such demands for further information, but until it confronts them it will not be able to be a political Left. The public, sensibly, has no interest in getting rid of capitalism until it is offered details about the alternatives. Nor should it be interested in participatory democracy –– the liberation of the people from the power of technocrats –– until it is told how deliberative assemblies will acquire the same know-how which only the technocrats presently possess. […] The cultural Left has a vision of an America in which the white patriarchs have stopped voting and have left all the voting to be done by members of previously victimized groups, people who have somehow come into possession of more foresight and imagination than the selfish suburbanites. These formerly oppressed and newly powerful people are expected to be as angelic as the straight white males were diabolical. If I shared this expectation, I too would want to live under this new dispensation. Since I see no reason to share it, I think that the left should get back into the business of piecemeal reform within the framework of a market economy. This was the business the American Left was in during the first two-thirds of the century. Someday, perhaps, cumulative piecemeal reforms will be found to have brought about revolutionary change. Such reforms might someday produce a presently unimaginable non market economy, and much more widely distributed powers of decision making. […] But in the meantime, we should not let the abstractly described best be the enemy of the better. We should not let speculation about a totally changed system, and a totally different way of thinking about human life and affairs, replace step-by-step reform of the system we presently have.

In the classical imagination, Evil was still a mythical power. There was still a Mephisto or a Frankenstein to embody the principle of Evil. Our evil is faceless and without imagination. We no longer need the Devil to steal our shadows. There are no powers doing battle above our heads, fighting over our souls. No longer any need for the lubricious agency of capital to extort our labour-power from us. We no longer have any shadows, any souls, and we are stakeholders in our own lives.

A sustainable firm provides employees and customers with an inspiring vision to make the world a better place; efficiently delivers value to its customers, consistent with the firm’s vision, thereby earning economic returns, over the long term, that at least equal the cost of capital; builds long-term, win–win relationships with all its stakeholders; and applies creative systems thinking to the design, manufacturing, delivery, and recycling of its products, including their supply chains, so as to reduce waste and harm to the environment. The

The 12 Principles of Permaculture Investing are: 1. Accumulate & Compound Capital: Consistently save and invest to grow your capital base over time, leveraging the power of compound interest. 2. Utilize Capital: Actively deploy your capital into productive investments that generate returns, rather than letting it sit idle. 3. Retain Maximum & Gradiented Liquidity: Maintain a balance between liquid assets (easily accessible cash) and less liquid investments, ensuring you can meet immediate needs while still investing for the long term. 4. Actively Manage Passive: While focusing on passive income sources, actively monitor and adjust your investments to optimize returns and mitigate risks. 5. Prioritize Long-Term Growth: Focus on investments that offer potential for significant growth over the long term, even if they don't provide immediate high yields. 6. Prioritize Consistent Yields: Balance your portfolio with investments that provide reliable, consistent income to support your financial needs. 7. Add Net Value to all Stakeholders: Invest in ways that benefit not only yourself but also the broader community, environment, and all parties involved. 8. Provide Authentic Data: Be transparent and honest in your financial reporting, providing accurate information to all stakeholders. 9. Collect & Utilize Authentic Data: Base your investment decisions on reliable, verified data rather than speculation or rumors. 10. Diversify Holistically: Diversify your investments across different asset classes, industries, and geographical regions to reduce risk and maximize potential returns. 11. Harvest Yields Equitably: Distribute profits fairly among all stakeholders, ensuring everyone benefits from the investment's success. 12. Reinvest Yields in Most Profitable Assets: Continuously evaluate your portfolio and reinvest profits into the most promising opportunities to further compound your growth.

CSR is the way in which business consistently creates shared value in society through economic development, good governance, stakeholder responsiveness and environmental improvement. Put another way, CSR is an integrated, systemic approach by business that builds, rather than erodes or destroys, economic, social, human and natural capital.

WaterLess Urinal Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (Clean India Mission) accelerate sanitation coverage in rural and urban areas. Stakeholders and people from all sections of society have welcomed it as a major step to achieve a healthy and hygienic environment for the citizens of India. This is retrofit waterless urinal technology that gets fitted at base of urinal bowl. It consists of an inlet and outlet cartridge through which urine passes and seals the outlet once the urine is drained out. The technology converts conventional urinal into waterless urinal. No need to remove the old urinal bowl. Advantages:- Waterless urinals do not require a constant source of water Can be built and repaired with locally available materials Low capital and operating costs Waterless urinals produce fewer odours than urinals with water flush and also have no problems with urinal cakes (odour and urinal cakes occur when urine is mixed with water) Waterless urinals contribute to water saving at the greatest possible degree Waterless urinals allow the pure and undiluted collection of urine for reuse, e.g. as fertilizer in urban farming (after appropriate treatment, e.g. storage) and can contribute to closed loop economy, or for effective anaerobic treatment by e.g. an anaerobic ammonium oxidation (anamox) reactor Surface water and aquifers are protected from nutrients and pharmaceuticals if the urine is collected separately Special Feature :- One time fitment Hygienic - Dry restroom prevents bacteria cultivation No Flushing Allocation of transport resources, including the management and regulation of existing transportation activities. No Consumables Waterless and Odorless No Recurring Costs Longer Shelf Life Low & Easy Maintenance Just wipe and clean Structural Feature :- Thin-walled lighted weight Low porosity Ease of transportation Modular Design Flexible in design Minimal surface cracking

Two key markets under capitalism are thereby done away with: the traditional labor market and capital markets. But markets for goods and services remain. Too many informational problems exist for them to be done away with. Companies will also still have to compete with each other—inefficient firms will collapse (though the fall for individual stakeholders in a firm would be cushioned by the welfare state, even more so than it was

companies are responding – or at least are appearing to. Stakeholder capitalism – the idea that business should serve wider society – has become the corporate buzzword of the day. It was the theme of the 2020 World Economic Forum in Davos. In August 2019, the Business Roundtable, a group of influential US CEOs, radically redefined its statement of the ‘purpose of a corporation’ to include stakeholders, rather than just shareholders.

This positive view of profits suggests that we should rethink the concept of ‘stakeholder capitalism’. It’s become an extremely popular term, yet has no official definition24 in any dictionary or Wikipedia. It’s commonly interpreted as giving stakeholders equal priority to shareholders so that they get more of the pie at the expense of profits – akin to ‘anti-shareholder capitalism’. But again that’s based on the pie-splitting mentality. A responsible business absolutely needs to ensure that value is fairly shared, but it’s even more important to create value in the first place.

Facebook, on the other hand, meets regularly with NGOs and other stakeholders, but remains mum about which ones. The company’s policy team is also deeply susceptible to government pressure, and, according to more than a half-dozen individuals that I spoke to, it will often speak openly about it to NGOs when meeting about specific policies.

Companies like Airbnb, Disney, and the NBA gain moral clout when they preach about how much they care about stakeholders at home. But then they turn around and use that moral clout to implicitly endorse atrocities abroad when foreign dictators flex their own stakeholder status. That’s the key difference between stakeholder and shareholder capitalism:

THE CCP IS the spider at the center of the global web of stakeholder capitalism.

June Brought, a leadership collaborator of mine, works in corporate wellness for the successful women’s clothing company Eileen Fisher. The company has flourished since its founding in 1984, currently earning revenue of more than $300 million a year. What truly sets the company apart, however, is its early adoption of conscious capitalism and a sincere desire to enhance the lives of all its stakeholders. Eileen Fisher was one of the first clothing companies that insisted on using sustainable materials such as organic cotton, and implemented programs to reduce fabric and fiber waste. Eileen Fisher’s philanthropic efforts focus on business leadership grants to develop and benefit the careers of young women around the world. The company is also committed to enhancing the well-being of its own employees at every level, which is why June was hired. According to June, “Eileen Fisher is not just another company that claims to care about the well-being of its employees but really only cares about how they can contribute to the well-being of the bottom line. Eileen Fisher truly is concerned with its staff as human beings first.” One of the tools June uses to help individuals at Eileen Fisher and elsewhere find a healthy balance between life and work involves what she calls “completing your own circuit.” She believes it is essential that we plug into our own beings first in order to feel empowered, fulfilled, and complete. As June explains, when we outsource our power to a job, a romantic relationship, or any external condition, “we compromise our emotional welfare and risk having someone cut off our power.” She says that completing our own circuit involves a deep internal knowing that “we are fully charged and complete unto ourselves without any need for outside support or validation.

Conscious Capitalism has four tenets: higher purpose, stakeholder integration, conscious leadership, and conscious culture and management

As most new businesses fail, saying start-ups have a very high rate of failure is by itself not particularly revelatory. But a start-up is not a small business. A start-up is designed from the beginning to either become very big or completely fail—the modern-day equivalent of an uncertain, cross-ocean voyage to the New World as opposed to, say, a predictable, moderately profitable seventeenth-century trading voyage from London to Amsterdam. Stakeholders in a start-up are more interested in increasing the potential magnitude of a spectacular outcome than in bettering the probability of modest returns. Thus, the financial ecosystem’s willingness to accept a high risk of capital loss made venture capital accessible to outliers and eccentrics.

The myth that profit maximization is the sole purpose of business has done enormous damage to the reputation of capitalism and the legitimacy of business in society. We need to recapture the narrative and restore it to its true essence: that the purpose of business is to improve our lives and to create value for stakeholders.

Stakeholders make up a company. They include all the people who impact and are impacted by a business. We must honor them as people first before treating them according to the role they happen to be playing.

Given the inefficiency of the Indian bureaucracy to effectively implement national objectives, a possible approach (as suggested by Prof. Kelkar once), to salvage the existing PSEs (including all its stakeholders) and to protect the State’s investment in them, would be to transfer all Government’s share in all PSEs to a holding company set up under the Disinvestment Act, at once. 8.4.4 Government should disinvest majority of its share (55 %) in the holding company to Indian mutual funds, and insurance companies through the book-building route, twenty per cent of its share to small investors through IPO (Initial Public Offer), five percent of its share to foreign institutional investors, ten per cent of its share through ADR/GDR in the foreign capital market (this would lead to improved corporate governance as listing in foreign markets, particularly NYSE has stringent requirements), and retain just ten per cent of share in the holding company. 8.4.5 The holding company should be managed by a reputed professional board (initially appointed by the Government through wide consultations and subsequently confirmed by the shareholders of the holding company). The Board would be responsible to its shareholders. The Board of the individual PSEs (which would no longer be a PSE as they would become subsidiaries of the holding private company) would be appointed by the holding company and be responsible to the Board of the holding company.

The myth that profit maximization is the sole purpose of business has done enormous damage to the reputation of capitalism and the legitimacy of business in society. We need to recapture the narrative and restore it to its true essence: that the purpose of business is to improve our lives and to create value for stakeholders.

Our belief is that if a company does an outstanding job caring for its team members, creating value for them, and respecting them as key stakeholders, it can successfully avoid unionization.

If you could have a gigantic billboard anywhere with anything on it, what would it say and why? A single bottom line of profit motive no longer serves our interdependent world. We must move from a focus on shareholders to one on stakeholders, take a long-term view, and measure what matters, not just what we can count. That’s a lot easier to say than to do. So we created a manifesto at Acumen, a moral compass to guide our decisions and actions. It is an aspirational document, one I think about daily, though I don’t always live up to it. It is long for a billboard, but maybe if we put it in the right place and encouraged people to pause for just a moment, which in itself wouldn’t be so bad. Here it is: It starts by standing with the poor, listening to voices unheard, and recognizing potential where others see despair. It demands investing as a means, not an end, daring to go where markets have failed and aid has fallen short. It makes capital work for us, not control us. It thrives on moral imagination: the humility to see the world as it is, and the audacity to imagine the world as it could be. It’s having the ambition to learn at the edge, the wisdom to admit failure, and the courage to start again. It requires patience and kindness, resilience and grit: a hard-edged hope. It’s leadership that rejects complacency, breaks through bureaucracy, and challenges corruption. Doing what’s right, not what’s easy. It’s the radical idea of creating hope in a cynical world. Changing the way the world tackles poverty and building a world based on dignity. Or else, I might borrow Rilke’s gorgeous mantra to “Live the Questions,” which is a simple reminder to have the moral courage to live in the gray, sit with uncertainty but not in a passive way. Live the questions so that, one day, you will live yourself into the answers. . . . What advice would you give to a smart, driven college student about to enter the “real world”? Don’t worry all that much about your first job. Just start, and let the work teach you. With every step, you will discover more about who you want to be and what you want to do. If you wait for the perfect and keep all of your options open, you might end up with nothing but options. So start.

In a second stage the aim is habituation. Whereas lawsuits and investigations unwind at the tedious pace of democratic institutions, Google continues the development of its contested practices at high velocity. During the elapsed time of FTC and FCC inquiries, court cases, judicial reviews, and EU Commission investigations, the new contested practices become more firmly established as institutional facts, rapidly bolstered by growing ecosystems of stakeholders. People habituate to the incursion with some combination of agreement, helplessness, and resignation. The sense of astonishment and outrage dissipates. The incursion itself, once unthinkable, slowly worms its way into the ordinary. Worse still, it gradually comes to seem inevitable. New dependencies develop. As populations grow numb, it becomes more difficult for individuals and groups to complain.

Japan's 'stakeholder' capitalism, which has similarities with continental Europe, is a legitimate policy option. The Anglo-Saxon model, which favours capital above labour, has sometimes helped investors at the cost of higher unemployment.

Davos Man championed stakeholder capitalism as a means of preempting government regulation; as a substitute for the public making use of democracy to fairly distribute the gains of capitalism.

Any stakeholder can develop a deeply adversarial relationship with a business if conflicts are handled in unconstructive ways.

Announcements of collaboration create a mirage of progress, without necessarily furthering the resolution of underlying issues,” wrote scholar Evelyn Douek in a 2020 piece critiquing what she’s dubbed “content cartels,” or multi-stakeholder partnerships involving more than one company and, typically, state partners.

stakeholder capitalism: it allows them to exercise quasi-political power without having to go through the hassle of getting elected. Yet that hassle is part and parcel of democracy itself.

In the absence of social goods, ‘profit-first’ economic growth has fed a crony capitalism that serves not the common good but speculators in the ‘liquid economy.’ Collateral banking systems, offshore sites providing fiscal havens for corporate tax avoidance, extracting value from companies to boost the earnings of shareholders at the expense of stakeholders, the smoke-and-mirrors world of derivatives and credit default swaps-all these suck capital from the real economy and undermine a healthy market, creating historically unprecedented levels of inequality. There is a major disjuncture between the awareness of social rights on the one hand and the distribution of actual opportunities on the other. The stupendous rise in inequality of recent decades is not a stage of growth but a brake on it, and the root of many social ills in the twenty-first century. Barely more than one percent of the world’s population owns half of its wealth. A market detached from morality, dazzled by its own complex engineering, which privileges profit and competition above all else, means not just spectacular wealth for a few but also poverty and deprivation for many. Millions are robbed of hope.

Growth equity funds invest in fast-growing, established companies in return for a minority equity share and make a concerted effort to establish a solid partnership with all company stakeholders (especially majority owners).

Investors, labor, management, suppliers—they all need to cooperate to create value for customers. If they do, the joint value created is divided fairly among the creators of the value through competitive market processes based approximately on the overall contribution each stakeholder makes.

Without a sense of purpose,” he explained, “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.

To use today’s corporate parlance, it was a moment when all stakeholders could expect to benefit. The company wasn’t being run just for investors, but for employees, customers, and communities, too. And it worked. The middle class grew, consumer spending ballooned, and new companies were founded, creating yet more jobs.

Stakeholder capitalism is not a grassroots movement. It’s a multi-pronged, well-funded, and unipolar assault on property rights and individual liberty by leftist elites.

Over the past thirty years the orthodox view that the maximisation of shareholder value would lead to the strongest economic performance has come to dominate business theory and practice, in the US and UK in particular.42 But for most of capitalism’s history, and in many other countries, firms have not been organised primarily as vehicles for the short-term profit maximisation of footloose shareholders and the remuneration of their senior executives. Companies in Germany, Scandinavia and Japan, for example, are structured both in company law and corporate culture as institutions accountable to a wider set of stakeholders, including their employees, with long-term production and profitability their primary mission. They are equally capitalist, but their behaviour is different. Firms with this kind of model typically invest more in innovation than their counterparts focused on short-term shareholder value maximisation; their executives are paid smaller multiples of their average employees’ salaries; they tend to retain for investment a greater share of earnings relative to the payment of dividends; and their shares are held on average for longer by their owners. And the evidence suggests that while their short-term profitability may (in some cases) be lower, over the long term they tend to generate stronger growth.43 For public policy, this makes attention to corporate ownership, governance and managerial incentive structures a crucial field for the improvement of economic performance. In short, markets are not idealised abstractions, but concrete and differentiated outcomes arising from different circumstances.

Perhaps striking an appropriate balance between stakeholder and shareholder capitalism is a legitimate matter for debate in any democratic society.

in June 2020, researchers Supriya Garikipati (University of Liverpool) and Uma Kambhampati (University of Reading) confirmed the finding statistically,12 arguing that female-led countries, such as Germany, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, and indeed New Zealand, did better than most in responding to the pandemic.

However, in October 2010, the Government of India appointed a set of interlocutors—Dilip Padgaonkar, Radha Kumar and M.M Ansari—with the mission of taking the peace process further after due consultations with the several stakeholders in Jammu & Kashmir. Mr Dilip Padgaonkar was my colleague in the Kashmir Committee, but I do not have the pleasure of knowing the other two interlocutors personally. This does not detract from their stature or merit. Whispers around Delhi suggested that while the interlocutors were sincerely trying to talk to the people of J&K, they were scarcely talking to one another. This subsequently appears to have blown up into a full scale war, after it was discovered that two of the three interlocutors accepted hospitality from the ISI-funded Ghulam Nabi Fai to attend conferences in plush capitals of Europe and the US. Till date, the interlocutors have made no significant contribution to the peace process.

The Business Roundtable is a powerful and conservative representative of big business that since 1997 has reinforced the idea that ‘corporations exist principally to serve shareholders’ – in other words, that business exists to make money. The 2019 statement upended that principle, suggesting that businesses have responsibilities not just to shareholders but to customers, employees, suppliers and communities. ‘Each of our stakeholders is essential,’ the statement read. ‘We commit to deliver value to all of them, for the future success of our companies, our communities and our country.

One day, virtually every business will operate with a sense of higher purpose, integrate the interests of all stakeholders, develop and elevate conscious leaders, and build a culture of trust, accountability, and caring.

Conscious businesses believe that creating value for all their stakeholders is intrinsic to the success of their business, and they consider both communities and the environment to be important stakeholders. Creating value for these stakeholders is thus an organic part of the business philosophy and operating model of a conscious business.

Conscious Capitalism is not about being virtuous or doing well by doing good. It is a way of thinking about business that is more conscious of its higher purpose, its impacts on the world, and the relationships it has with its various constituencies and stakeholders. It reflects a deeper consciousness about why businesses exist and how they can create more value.

Applying a value lens to stakeholder capitalism, two ideas strike me as particularly important. First, business creates substantial value for customers, employees, and suppliers even if its only goal is to maximize financial returns. Think of all the stories in this book—Best Buy, Apple, Michelin, Quest, Intel, Tommy Hilfiger, and many more. Every one of them is testament to the ability of business to create significant customer delight, employee satisfaction, and supplier surplus. Competition is our best assurance that companies continue to innovate in service to these stakeholders. Second,

Unions simply aren’t necessary if a business operates with a stakeholder philosophy and if team members are seen as important stakeholders who should be well compensated, happy, and flourishing in the workplace.

that business, like other stakeholders in society, had a role to play in creating and sustaining shared prosperity. The best way to do so, I came to think, was for companies to adopt a stakeholder model, in which they served society in addition to their shareholders.