WHERE PEOPLE AND THE PLANET MATTER

What if there were a stock trading platform where society and the environment were the top priority and profit a means to maintain continuity and not an end in itself? What if the corporations listed on such an "exchange" were valued based on how well they served society instead of solely by short-term profit?

PROSPERITY FOR THE FEW

We have begun to realize that, through the power we have granted corporations and the perpetuation of faulty economic models, we are courting calamities, from climate change to massive societal dislocations, institutional breakdowns and crises in the financial system.

While appearing to create wealth and prosperity, the modern corporation, in pursuit of its legal mandate of solely focusing on shareholder value, has actually created lasting benefits only for the few and significant problems for the many.

Pressure by the investment community on CEOs and boards of public corporations makes it nearly impossible for management to pursue anything but short-term profit. To do otherwise is to virtually guarantee shareholder lawsuits. And historically, courts have ruled nearly universally in favor of investors, because the laws that define the rights and responsibilities of corporations and their managers place those shareholders above all others.

PRIVATE COMPANIES SHOW THE WAY

Corporations that behave in a more environmentally and socially benign fashion (at least do no harm), or in rarer cases where they are viewed as beneficial to society and the planet, are almost always found among private corporations. The consequences of that reality are poignantly described in a book by Bo Burlingham entitled “Small Giants: Companies that Choose to Be Great Instead of Big.”

Burlingham found that thousands of small and medium-sized companies elect to remain private in order to conduct business in a manner more consistent with their values than would be possible if they went public. The 14 companies he highlights serve as a model for what corporations could be like if they were freed from the profit-only mandate.

How can we get public corporations to behave more like the companies Burlingham writes about?  The substantial inertia represented by entrenched interests and simple habit on the part of most participants are difficult to overcome. Buckminster Fuller had a solution for this. “You never change things by fighting the existing reality,” he said. “To change something, build a NEW model that makes the existing model obsolete.”