Voices
recent 10-year period:
“The public stakeholder firms...
generated a 1,026 percent return
for their investors, compared with
the S&P 500’s 122 percent return.
By refusing to focus on maximizing shareholder value, they... created eight times more value for
their shareholders.”
And how did they manage this?
First of all, they rejected the extremely hierarchical organizational model that characterizes
the typical large corporation today
where CEOs and other senior officials behave like latter-day royalty whose word is law and who
require obscene amounts of money
and larger and larger private jets,
yachts and the like to meet their
insatiable need for affirmation.
Incidentally, the stockholders of
these companies are not the ones
feeding this unending greed — it
is the result of a deliberately created system of interlocking company directorships whose members reward each other regardless
of the merit of such actions. This
behavior, accompanied by raceto-the-bottom wages for most
everyone else, and the ability of
these corporate entities to rig the
tax system to their advantage, has
played a major role in the wealth
ALLAN
BRAWLEY
HUFFINGTON
12.09.12
and income gaps that have grown
so dramatically — and dangerously
— over the last couple of decades.
The alternative model — which
Whole Foods CEO John Mackey
calls “conscious
capitalism” — rejects
all the trappings of
No one
corporate excess, inat Whole
cluding extravagant
Foods earns
compensation packmore than
ages for top execu19 times the
tives, private jets and
amount paid
the rest. Instead, it
the average
embraces a philosophy of fairness in
worker, in
compensation for all
contrast with
employees, includthe 400-toing complete trans1 ratio that’s
parency about what
developed
everyone earns. As a
for the U.S.
consequence, no one
as a whole.”
at Whole Foods earns
more than 19 times
the amount paid to the average
worker. This is in marked contrast
with the 400-to-1 ratio that has
developed in recent years for the
U. S. as a whole.
It turns out that doing the right
thing for your employees, your
community, and other stakeholders not only demonstrates capitalism with a conscience; it
is also good for business.