| In 2019, the Business Roundtable released a statement signed by 181 CEOs endorsing what it called “stakeholder capitalism.” They emphasized the importance of serving all with a stake in a company’s future: shareholders, customers, employees, suppliers, and communities alike. It caused a stir at the time, as some worried it softened the focus on the importance of making money and building shareholder value. The Yale School of Management established a program to study how stakeholder capitalism fits into the life of real companies, interviewing 175 CEOs on the question. Jon Iwata, who runs the program, reports that overwhelmingly, the CEOs interviewed endorsed some form of what the BRT had endorsed, though they didn’t necessarily think of it as “stakeholder capitalism” and didn’t think it was all that new. One of the biggest and most successful companies around is Mars, founded by Frank Mars in 1911. The Mars family still owns the company, and it practices its own form of stakeholder capitalism, based on the principles on which the family has run the company since the beginning. Victoria Mars, a great-granddaughter of the founder, serves on the board today, and reports that the principles written down and followed by management at the direction of the family help “our associates make the right decisions that create the concept of a win, win.” |
