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A One-Legged Stool: How Shareholder Primacy Has Broken Business
Have you ever wondered if business needs to be so...unbalanced?
Is putting shareholders above everyone else the only way for private enterprise to be successful? Is that “just the way it is?”
The short answer is “no.”
Before “shareholder primacy” took hold in the 1970s, investors weren’t more important than other stakeholders. Companies balanced the interests of all the legs of the corporate stool – customers, employees, communities, and shareholders – and everyone’s life got better.
So, what happened? How did we get to today, where “maximizing shareholder value” is seen as the panacea for all the world’s ills? And, more importantly, what’s the path forward that allows business to profit by applying its significant resources to solving society’s problems, rather than making them worse?
We all rely on the stool of business to elevate our lives. Let’s fix it before it collapses.
Is putting shareholders above everyone else the only way for private enterprise to be successful? Is that “just the way it is?”
The short answer is “no.”
Before “shareholder primacy” took hold in the 1970s, investors weren’t more important than other stakeholders. Companies balanced the interests of all the legs of the corporate stool – customers, employees, communities, and shareholders – and everyone’s life got better.
So, what happened? How did we get to today, where “maximizing shareholder value” is seen as the panacea for all the world’s ills? And, more importantly, what’s the path forward that allows business to profit by applying its significant resources to solving society’s problems, rather than making them worse?
We all rely on the stool of business to elevate our lives. Let’s fix it before it collapses.
- GenresNonfiction
321 pages, Kindle Edition
First published March 14, 2022
1 person is currently reading
206 people want to read
About the author
Ed Chambliss
1 book2 followersEd Chambliss has spent over 35 years in marketing, watching his otherwise smart clients make increasingly poor decisions that damage their companies – just so they could extract more money for their shareholders. In 2018, he walked away from being a CEO to figure out why business was on such a destructive path and what could be done to change it. The result is his book A One-Legged Stool: How Shareholder Primacy Has Broken Business (And What We Can Do About It).
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
April 6, 2022
Wonderful book! It was fascinating, insightful, and worth reading. I learned so many things, from how to change business so it makes the world a better place, to how to make the best cup of coffee. So much information, presented in a very informative way,
it was as if your best friend was talking to you.
it was as if your best friend was talking to you.
Displaying 1 of 1 review