I found this inspiring:
Business schools, he said, never really taught their students that, like doctors and lawyers, they were part of a profession. And in the 1970s, he said, the idea took hold that a company’s stock price was the primary barometer of success, which changed the schools’ concept of proper management techniques.
Instead of being viewed as long-term economic stewards, he said, managers came to be seen as mainly as the agents of the owners — the shareholders — and responsible for maximizing shareholder wealth.
“A kind of market fundamentalism took hold in business education,†Professor Khurana said. “The new logic of shareholder primacy absolved management of any responsibility for anything other than financial results.†^
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. – F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Crack-Up” (1936)
Profit and doing right only make sense together if there’s a bigger goal than either one.
That is to say, if you just run a business viciously for profit, you exchange brand value for short-term profits.
If you only run a business to be ethical, you end up becoming the chump for others.
What you need to do is make a product that’s rewarding, and be willing to bleed off a little short-term profit for long-term value.
Until they ruined their rep recently, Mercedes-Benz was this way. They knew they could go hog wild any year and release some zippy plastic piece of junk that lots of people would buy because it said Mercedes on it; on the other hand, they also knew that doing so would lessen the value of their brand.
B-schools are starting to see the wisdom of this: if you run every business like a pump and dump, soon you wreck brand value, which is a bigger form of unmeasured capital than many people recognize.