Alibaba CEO Jack Ma has said that “customers are number one; employees are number two and shareholders are number three.”
Paul Polman, CEO of Unilever [UN], has denounced “the cult of shareholder value.”
John Mackey at Whole Foods [WFM] has condemned businesses that “view their purpose as profit maximization and treat all participants in the system as means to that end.”
This week, Marc Benioff, Chairman and CEO of Salesforce [CRM] joined these CEOs and declared in an article in the Huffington Post that this still-pervasive business theory is “wrong. The business of business isn’t just about creating profits for shareholders — it’s also about improving the state of the world and driving stakeholder value.”
“We have an imperative,” says Benioff, endorsing the vision of Professor Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum “to shift from creating shareholder value to stakeholder value… corporate management isn’t just accountable to shareholders… businesses must focus on serving the interests all stakeholders — customers, employees, partners, suppliers, citizens, governments, the environment and any other entity impacted by its operations.”
“But we have to do more. We have to build radically higher levels of trust and transparency with all of our stakeholders. We need legions of ‘stakeholder activists’ who seek to hold companies accountable for all constituents, going beyond the role of investor activists, who focus on holding CEOs and boards of directors accountable in terms of share price. Ultimately, the most effective way to create shareholder value is to serve the interests of all stakeholders.”
Read on here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2015/02/05/salesforce-ceo-slams-the-worlds-dumbest-idea-maximizing-shareholder-value/
Value is the only commonality in an increasingly complex, challenging and interdependent world.