Let’s Make a Sustainably Better Future
Why “Do the Right Thing” is a Ridiculous Motto
Sounds nice. Unworkable in practice.
Can we trust companies to treat their stakeholders well? Or does their focus on shareholder profit make them untrustworthy?
In this series, I explore the current best hope of the ESG movement, stakeholder capitalism. Its advocates want stakeholder capitalism to replace shareholder capitalism as the driving factor behind corporate actions.
But are we pinning our hopes on a doomed strategy? Doomed why? Read on to find out. This is the Stakeholder Capitalism series, Part 5.
What good is a good-sounding corporate motto?
Today I’ll discuss why good-sounding mottos only sound good. And I’ll suggest how better to guide company behavior instead.
Google’s old motto gives us some interesting food for thought. Do you remember it? Their motto was “Don’t be evil.”
Oh, where to start with this? It surely ranks right up there with how President Obama once described his approach to foreign policy:
Don’t do stupid stuff
