Corporation 2020

Silver WINNER of the 2021 Axiom Business Book Awards in Business Ethics WINNER of the 2021 Jim Deva Prize for Writing That Provokes From the author of The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power comes this deeply informed and unflinching look at the way corporations have slyly rebranded themselves as socially conscious entities ready to tackle society's problems, while CEO compensation soars, income inequality is at all-time highs, and democracy sits in a precarious situation. Over the last decade and a half, business leaders, Silicon Valley executives, and the Davos elite have been calling for a new kind of capitalism. The writing was on the wall. With income inequality soaring, wages stagnating, and a climate crisis escalating, it was no longer viable to justify harming the environment and ducking taxes in the name of shareholder value. Business leaders realized that to get out in front of these problems, they had to make social and environmental values the very core of their messaging. Their essential pitch was: Who could be better suited to address major societal issues than efficiently run corporations? There is just one small problem with their doing well by doing good pitch. Corporations are still, ultimately, answerable to their shareholders, and doing well always comes first. This essential truth lies at the heart of Joel Bakan's argument. In lucid and engaging prose, Bakan lays bare a litany of immoral corporate actions and documents corporate power grabs dressed up as social initiatives. He makes clear the urgency of the problem of the corporatization of society itself and shows how people are fighting back and making gains on a grassroots level.

In Why Corporation 2020?, Pavan Sukhdev examines the many critical planetary boundaries that we are approaching, from greenhouse gas emissions to the nitrogen cycle, freshwater and land use, and food security, and argues that sweeping changes are needed to reform the way we deal with the earth’s resources. Sukhdev makes an arresting case for including the private sector in these changes, arguing that a new corporate model is needed in the next decade to avert irreparable ecological harm. Available free at major online booksellers.

Business as usual’ isn’t working. There is an emerging consensus that all is not well with today’s market-centric economic model. Although it has delivered wealth over the last half-century and pulled millions out of poverty, it is recession-prone, leaves too many people unemployed, creates ecological scarcities and environmental risks, and widens the gap between the rich and the poor. In Corporation 2020, Pavan Sukhdev lays out a sweeping new vision for tomorrow’s corporation: one that will increase human well being and social equity, decrease environmental risks and ecological losses, and still generate profit. Sukhdev illustrates his vision with examples ranging from Infosys’s creation of human capital to Citibank’s having to change its project finance policy due to rainforest destruction. From its insightful look into the history of the corporation to the thoughtful discussion of the steps needed to craft a better corporate model, Corporation 2020 offers a hopeful vision for the role of business in shaping a more equitable, sustainable future.

There is an emerging consensus that all is not well with today’s market-centric economic model. Although it has delivered wealth over the last half century and pulled millions out of poverty, it is recession-prone, leaves too many unemployed, creates ecological scarcities and environmental risks, and widens the gap between the rich and the poor. Around $1 trillion a year in perverse subsidies and barriers to entry for alternative products maintain “business-as-usual” while obscuring their associated environmental and societal costs. The result is the broken system of social inequity, environmental degradation, and political manipulation that marks today’s corporations. We aren’t stuck with this dysfunctional corporate model, but business needs a new DNA if it is to enact the comprehensive approach we need. Pavan Sukhdev lays out a sweeping new vision for tomorrow’s corporation: one that will increase human wellbeing and social equity, decrease environmental risks and ecological losses, and still generate profit. Through a combination of internal changes in corporate governance and external regulations and policies, Corporation 2020 can become a reality in the next decade—and it must, argues Sukhdev, if we are to avert catastrophic social imbalance and ecological harm. Corporation 2020 presents new approaches to measuring the true costs of business and the corporation’s obligation to society. From his insightful look into the history of the corporation to his thoughtful discussion of the steps needed to craft a better corporate model, Sukhdev offers a hopeful vision for the role of business in shaping a more equitable, sustainable future.

A study and analysis of lack of enforcement against criminal actions in corporate America and what can be done to fix it. In the early 2000s, federal enforcement efforts sent white collar criminals at Enron and WorldCom to prison. But since the 2008 financial collapse, this famously hasn’t happened. Corporations have been permitted to enter into deferred prosecution agreements and avoid criminal convictions, in part due to a mistaken assumption that leniency would encourage cooperation and because enforcement agencies don’t have the funding or staff to pursue lengthy prosecutions, says distinguished Columbia Law Professor John C. Coffee. “We are moving from a system of justice for organizational crime that mixed carrots and sticks to one that is all carrots and no sticks,” he says. He offers a series of bold proposals for ensuring that corporate malfeasance can once again be punished. For example, he describes incentives that could be offered to both corporate executives to turn in their corporations and to corporations to turn in their executives, allowing prosecutors to play them off against each other. Whistleblowers should be offered cash bounties to come forward because, Coffee writes, “it is easier and cheaper to buy information than seek to discover it in adversarial proceedings.” All federal enforcement agencies should be able to hire outside counsel on a contingency fee basis, which would cost the public nothing and provide access to discovery and litigation expertise the agencies don't have. Through these and other equally controversial ideas, Coffee intends to rebalance the scales of justice. “Professor Coffee’s compelling new approach to holding fraudsters to account is indispensable reading for any lawmaker serious about deterring corporate crime.” —Robert Jackson, professor of Law, New York University, and former commissioner, Securities and Exchange Commission “A great book that more than any other recent volume deftly explains why effective prosecution of corporate senior executives largely collapsed in the post-2007–2009 stock market crash period and why this creates a crisis of underenforcement. No one is Professor Coffee’s equal in tying together causes for the crisis.” —Joel Seligman, author, historian, former law school dean, and president emeritus, University of Rochester

Business organizations have recently been encouraged by investors, regulators, and communities to define their purposes, values, and fiduciary duties of creating shared value for all stakeholders. Public companies have traditionally operated under the corporate model of “shareholder primacy” with the primary purpose of generating returns for shareholders and thus corporate activities are managed toward creating shareholder value. The stakeholder primacy system encourages directors and executives to focus on managing corporate activities toward creating shared value for all stakeholders. The role of the board of directors under stakeholder primacy/capitalism as opposed to shareholder primacy/capitalism is to oversee the managerial function of focusing on the long-term sustainability performance, effectively communicating sustainability performance information to all stakeholders. A shift away from the shareholder primacy model and toward the stakeholder primacy model has been gaining momentum worldwide in recent years as investors demand, regulators require, and companies define the “profit-with-purpose” mission in creating shares value for all stakeholders. This book offers guidance to organizations for considering both shareholder primacy and stakeholder primacy in defining their mission of “profit-with-purpose” and in creating shared value for all stakeholders. It also highlights how people, business and resources collaborate in a business sustainability and the stakeholder primacy model in creating shared value for all stakeholders. Anyone who is involved with business sustainability and corporate governance, the financial reporting process, investment decisions, legal and financial advising, audit functions, and corporate governance education including directors, executives, investors, and auditor will be interested in this book.

This is the first book to argue comprehensively that unless we destroy the legal and political basis for the corporation, we are unlikely to reverse the decline of the eco-system, and therefore we will hasten the end of the species.

This account of business-related human rights violations details the barriers victims face when seeking remedies and offers policy solutions.