GOOD CHANGE: 181 CEOs say shareholder value is longer their main objective.
* The re-imagined idea of a corporation drops the age-old notion that corporations function first and foremost to serve their shareholders and maximize profits.
* Investing in employees, delivering value to customers, dealing ethically with suppliers and supporting outside communities are now at the forefront of American business goals.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/19/the-ceos-of-nearly-two-hundred-companies-say-shareholder-value-is-no-longer-their-main-objective.html
This very positive beginning of change comes about because of employee and consumer choices, including investors and notably millennials who came of age in the callous, irresponsible laissez-faire post-1980 era and want more. What the liberal New Deal era created before the big national wave followed that with a more conservative era.
The new billionaire class were able to delay the next big wave into a new liberal era, but this is one of many, many signs, Obama's elections perhaps the largest, that it's happening in spite of them.
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Remember the auto company executives who called for NOT riding the gravy trains over the cliff? They weren't powerful enough to force their companies to do what they were supposed to? Their choices at that time were either to continue causing trouble and be tossed overboard or to ride to the end and hop off into golden coaches with all the others.
What this indicates is a giant shift back toward more liberal ideals at the top. They won't use that word, but that's what's happening in the BIG picture.
Younger people won't remember, but prior to 1980 a relatively liberal sharing of profits through pensions and lifetime health benefits was normal. But many companies were ruined and whole industries in very bad trouble after conditions changed, including that most retirees lived much longer and healthcare that kept many of them alive for another quarter century itself became far, far more expensive. In the conservative era that followed, that disaster empowered hard-core conservatives and other greedy people, who used the new national mood to deregulate, exploit and pay as little as possible.
But that doesn't mean our business leaders didn't always include more decent people, both liberal and moderate conservative, who needed the power to swing their way again so that their beliefs could become ascendant. I believe this announcement is a huge indicator of the right kind of change, and no accident that it follows/is part of a swing of national mood away from the extreme conservatism that took hold on the right and toward increased liberalism.
