Accountable: The Rise of Citizen Capitalism
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ISBN: 9780062976512
Type: Hardcover
In this provocative book, Michael O’Leary and Warren Valdmanis take us inside the fight to save capitalism from itself. Corporations are broken, reflecting no purpose deeper than profit. But the tools we are relying on to fix them—corporate social responsibility, divestment, impact investing, and government control—risk making our problems worse.
Capitalism is broken, but the tools we are relying on to fix it—corporate social responsibility, divestment, impact investing, and government control—risk making things worse, argue two iconoclastic impact investors.
The cynics are those blinded by the defunct ideology that private vice makes for public virtue, that any effort to make markets more moral is empty marketing to make more money. The fools are those who ignore economic reality, preferring to chase false utopias than confront the role for-profit corporations must play in our society. And the pioneers? They are the visionary few cutting through the BS to push out the frontier of responsible capitalism.
The root of the problem is the nexus between business owners and managers. Until we change the mandate that owners give to their companies, reform will prove superficial. We need to re-charter our companies to maximize profit only in pursuit of some deeper social purpose—health care companies should heal us, food companies should nourish us, finance companies should enrich us. We need to empower boards as independent stewards of that purpose and rebuild our corporations to profit only in ways that benefit society and the environment.
Markets are only as amoral as we are. If we, as individuals, expect the economy to reflect our values, we must re-integrate our moral and economic lives. We must combine the civic duty of citizenship with the free market. In this trenchant and revelatory exploration, O’Leary and Valdmanis offer three strikingly original rules that would harness competition to make capitalism both prosperous and good.
