Corporate ownership control and responsibilities
Limited Lability companies were set up with the implied bargain that they get the ‘limited Liability” in exchange for the benefits they bring to the society And that worked for a long time Big companies (the vast majority of them) used to operate as “responsible citizens” – looking after Their employees Their neighbours Their society As well as their stockholders Sometime in the 70’s this behaviour changed and shareholders became the only beneficiary – Breaking the implied contract We need to remake that implied contract as an actual contract – the company getting it’s “limited liability” in exchange for the old deal of looking after the society
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John Gibson commented 2016-12-10 19:58:15 +1300Back in the 70’s and 80’s there was a brief flirtation with the so-called “triple bottom line”. Corporate bodies, including companies, were encouraged to report social and environmental outcomes, as well as the traditional financial outcomes such as profits and dividends. However this brief infatuation with feel good reporting was short lived as there were no uniform or agreed metrics for these outcomes. So interest waned. What we need is a mandated set of metrics against which all corporate bodies, private and public, should be required to report. This won’t be easy, but that is why I joined TOP. Because we need to tackle the hard issues. I’m not sure what the metrics should be. But we need to have them.
As a side bar to this, I was pleasantly surprised the other day to read that RIO TINTO had set themselves an aspirational goal of of having a 50/50 gender split in their workforce world wide by 2025. I am a RIO shareholder and I support this initiative. -
John Gibson tagged this with important 2016-12-10 19:58:15 +1300
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