From Shareholder wealth to Stakeholder interests: CEO Capitulation or Empty Doublespeak?
The Business Roundtable Speaks: A flawed message from a flawed messenger
While each of our individual companies serves its own corporate purpose, we share a fundamental commitment to all of our stakeholders. We commit to:
- Delivering value to our customers. We will further the tradition of American companies leading the way in meeting or exceeding customer expectations.
- Investing in our employees. This starts with compensating them fairly and providing important benefits. It also includes supporting them through training and education that help develop new skills for a rapidly changing world. We foster diversity and inclusion, dignity and respect.
- Dealing fairly and ethically with our suppliers. We are dedicated to serving as good partners to the other companies, large and small, that help us meet our missions.
- Supporting the communities in which we work. We respect the people in our communities and protect the environment by embracing sustainable practices across our businesses.
- Generating long-term value for shareholders, who provide the capital that allows companies to invest, grow and innovate. We are committed to transparency and effective engagement with shareholders.
The use of the word “stakeholders: and an explicit listing of how corporations should act in each of their interests has drawn extensive attention from a diverse group of individuals, each drawing its own conclusions and making its own criticisms. Critics of shareholder wealth maximization viewed this statement as vindication, an acceptance of their long-term tenet that focusing on shareholder wealth has given rise to income inequality, loss of good manufacturing jobs and societal costs. Supporters of shareholder wealth maximization considered the statement to be not only ill-advised but also a craven concession to populist forces. Cynics argued that it was more political document than restatement of purpose, smoke and noise that signified nothing. Journalists have concluded that this statement is, in fact, a fundamental restatement of corporate purpose, driven by political pressures.
1. Cutthroat Corporatism
The most extreme view of corporations is what describe as cutthroat capitalism, where the strong companies drive out the weak and the end game is stockholder wealth maximization (often with a founder/family being the prime beneficiary) at almost any cost:
2. Crony Corporatism
- Government-imposed constraints: Governments can write laws or draw up rules that constrain how corporations treat stakeholders, with labor laws determining not only how much workers get paid but also conditions under which they can be hired or fired, product laws capping prices on some products and protecting customer interests in others and anti-trust laws determining whether product markets stay competitive. European governments have been far more aggressive with this approach than the US, but the globalization of businesses has not only weakened the protections offered by these laws, but also put companies covered by them at a competitive disadvantage, relative to companies that operate in countries without these laws and restrictions.
- Self-imposed constraints: In this variant, companies voluntarily adopt constraints on their interactions with other stakeholder groups, often choosing to pay higher wages (than they could get away paying) to their employees, charging customers less for products/services than they could have, given their pricing power, and turning away investments that they could pursue legally, for profits, because of the costs that it will create for society. In effect, the essence of these constraints is that the profit settles for less profit than it could have made if it have as an unconstrained player. The problem with self-imposed constraints is that your capacity to adopt them will be correlated with how profitable you are to begin with, with companies with more slack built into their business models being in a better position than companies facing profit pressures in an intensely competitive market.
- Market-driven constraints: In this final variation, companies adopt constraints on how they treat stakeholders because it makes them more valuable companies, even as they settle for less profits, at least in the near term. That seeming contradiction can be explained by two factors. The first is that whatever costs the company faces in the short term from imposing the constraints may be overwhelmed by benefits in the long term; paying employees more may yield more loyal and better employees, offering customers better deals may lead to more repeat business and being a good corporate citizen may operate as advertising, attracting more customers to the company. To top it all off, investors who care about any or all of these behaviors may be more inclined to invest in your shares, pushing up stock prices. The second is that companies that exploit customers and employees or acquire a reputation for being bad corporate citizens will have few defenders when it does make a mistake or have a problem, inevitable in the long term, leading to potentially catastrophic costs.
5. Confused Corporatism
In some sectors and in some markets and during some time periods, markets will not do the job, leaving us as the mercy of bad behavior by some or many corporate players. It is therefore not surprising that stakeholder wealth maximization is seen as an alternative corporate model:
- Conflicting interests: By treating the interests of all stakeholders as equivalent, it ignores the reality that decisions in companies, almost by definition, will make stakeholders better off and others worse off. Since some of these costs and benefits will be not easily translated into numbers, it is not clear how managers will be able to decide what investments to take, what businesses to enter and exit, how to finance these businesses and when and how much cash to return to shareholders.
- No accountability: The fact that there are multiple stakeholders with conflicting interests also leaves CEOs and top managers accountable to none of them, with the excuse with any group that was ill-served during a period being that other group’s interests had to be met.
- Decision paralysis: If one of the problems at large companies has been the time it takes to make decisions, I will predict that expanding decision making to take into account the interests of all stakeholders will create decision paralysis, as the “on the one hand, and on the other” arguments will multiply, often with no way to resolve them, since some stakeholder interests will remain fuzzy and non-measurable.
- A Public Relations Move: It is undeniable that the public perception of corporations has become more negative over the last few decades, and politicians have noticed. Populists on both sides of the political divide have found that the public buys into their framing as corporations as self-interested entities that don’t care about employees, customers or society, with their focus on shareholders being the reason. CEOs have noticed, and the Business Roundtable’s statement may be just a restatement of constrained corporatism.
- A Return to the Past: Since the business roundtable is composed of CEOs, many of whom have felt the heat of activist investors and pushy shareholders, the cynic in you may lead you to conclude that what the CEOs in the Roundtable would like to see is a return to the good old days of managerial corporatism, where they could rule their companies with little push back, and that this push for stakeholder interests is a diversionary tactic.
- The Conspiratorial Twist: There is a third twist, and it does require a conspiratorial mindset. Note that the CEOs who are in the Roundtable represent the status quo, large and established companies, many of which find their business models being disrupted by young, start-ups. One way to preempt disruption is to increase the costs of doing business and having to take care of all stakeholders does that, but it is a cost that established companies may be able to bear better right now than their disruptive competitors. ( If you are skeptical, remember I said that you need a conspiratorial mindset.
Conclusion
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Source: http://aswathdamodaran.blogspot.com/2019/08/from-shareholder-wealth-to-stakeholder.html
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