Business
Purpose

Big Business Has a New Scam: The ‘Purpose Paradigm’ ... Multinational corporations are luring millennial workers with empty promises and self-serving slogans.

Burgess COMMENTARY
Great piece, but this essay only handles the easy part of the problem ... the difficult part is what to do about the problem. I graduated from Cambridge in 1961 and all of my adult life the dominant economic metrics have been corporate profit, GDP growth and stock market valuation. In 1994 the idea of a Triple Bottom Line was described by John Elkington, but 25 years later companies and investors still focus almost exclusively on profit ignoring people and planet (environmental issues). Business Schools have taught multiple generations of managers to optimize for the profit performance of business and taught investors about how best to accumulate wealth. Meanwhile society has done rather poorly with the wages of workers flatlining for decades and the environment being degraded on a scale never seen before. There are no metrics in play to put people before profit nor to put in play the reality that almost everything in the modern economic system is catastrophically unsustainable. Nobody in top leadership whether in academia, in business and banking or in politics seems to understand the need for massive systemic change. I believe the starting point for this is to number in a comprehensive coherent way all the important components of the socio-enviro-economic system. Conventional financial accountancy does a reasonably good job for business profit performance, but needs to be significantly enhanced so that the balance sheet includes social and natural capital as well as economic (financial) capital and the profit and loss accounts include impact on all the capitals and not simply the financial capital. The framing of the numbering system should work not only for the business organization and investors, but also work for individuals, for families, for communities, for places, for big companies. SMEs, governments, processes ... and yes ... products. The system is complex ... but the individual pieces can and must be understood, the everything should be subject to objective accountability. This can be done. This must be done! Respectfully ... Peter Burgess

Linkedin Invitation
Your article in The Nation got my attention. I agree with you almost 100%, but also want to see solutions. It has been corporate organizations have enabled huge progress in standard of living over many decades. There are metrics for this. I want better metrics so enable better decisions. Best!
Peter Burgess

Big Business Has a New Scam: The ‘Purpose Paradigm’ Multinational corporations are luring millennial workers with empty promises and self-serving slogans.