On August 19, 2019, the Business Roundtable, led by JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon and composed of more than two hundred of America’s top CEOs, heralded the dawn of a new age of corporate capitalism. Henceforth, the CEOs proclaimed, the purpose of publicly traded corporations would be to serve the interests of workers, communities, and the environment, not only their shareholders. The declaration capped a two-decades-long trend of corporations claiming to have changed into caring and conscientious actors, ready to lead the way in solving society’s problems. I call it the “new” corporation movement.
To find out more about it, I visited the movement’s global hub, the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, founded and run by economist Klaus Schwab, who originated the idea of ‘stakeholder capitalism’. “Companies recognize that they have a special responsibility in the world, social and environmental responsibility,” Schwab told me in an interview. “Today it is, and has to be, part of corporate action and decision-making.” Everyone I met in Davos agreed. Richard Edelman, for example, told me how today’s corporations embrace social and environmental values as core values, “in the supply chain, in the hiring practices, throughout the corporation,” no longer just as peripheral “philanthropic exercises.” Michael Porter added “it’s quite remarkable how big a shift that’s been—the corporation has really reshaped and redefined itself.”
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