Forcorporations

= an Ethical Economy proposal by Umair Haque:

Description

Umair Haque:

"Instead of creating new value, too many corporations merely transfer value from society to shareholders (consider, for a moment, the paradox of skyrocketing corporate profits versus record long-term joblessness, obesity, or carbon emissions). The problem isn’t, when you think about it, that corporations are dysfunctional. The problem is the very opposite: it’s that maximizing near-term profit, no matter what, is exactly what the modern corporation was made to do — and is bound to do.

Rebuilding our base of organizational capital means reinventing our most heavily utilized kind of organization, the corporation, to do bigger, better, more enduring things. How might we do it? By creating private-public partnerships to seed and invest new kinds of corporations. Consider the groundswell of states passing legislation for B corporations, a new kind of corporation which balances shareholder value and social returns, instead of prioritizing one over the other. Authentic prosperity depends on what I sometimes call “forporations”: more efficient, effective corporate forms “for” the pursuit of more meaningful, disruptive goals than just near-term financial gain; that exist “for” the benefit of more than just shareholders.” (http://blogs.hbr.org/haque/2010/08/reseeding_the_economy.html)