Thanks for commenting. What I do agree to is that how far into the future you look is always dependent on circumstances, but at the same time, you can’t ignore the future entirely. To better understand where I’m coming from on that, you may want to visit this article that I wrote where I present my view on the trade offs between short term and long term more Reflection: Weighing The Future.

/Bill

What I would not compromise on are innovative projects that maintain your competitive edge. These are what will position you to lead.

When attending university, I recollect an English professor connecting the dots from the dominate attitudes, fears, values, and culture of the day to the arts, literature, science, and politics. She was able to connect them all with a common thread.

Nothing happens in a vaccuum, and since then, I’ve looked more broadly to understand the motivations in our daily lives. Everything is all connected when you look closely enough.

New attitudes, fears, values, and politics emerge in crisis, so we are likely to see new obsessions as we are forced to survive this crisis. Hopefully we shake that bad ones and focus on more valuable ones…Let’s hope.

What is an appropriate governance structure? Not sure , we need to talk more about this, for sure.

Thanks for commenting, and we do need to relook at the role of companies in society.

What we are seeing in this global economic crisis is that we all have a stake in these companies even if we aren’t the shareholders nor employees. Consequently, it means companies have a much larger responsibility than they’ve currently considered.

What does it mean to be a domestic company today when the world is a stakeholder? Can a multi-national with origins in let’s say the United States subordinate every other national interest to the USA when in many cases the company employs more people outside the US and a majority of its shareholders are outside the US?

In many ways these multi-nationals are “super” government entities that transcend political boundaries.

What kind of governance structure is appropriate in this brave new world?

We have to rethink what a company means, and the end goal to pursue has to be “to deliver a product/service of value to society” and everything else is a “side-effect” in fact, the whole concept of shareholders “owning” a company is a throwback to the industrial age, where a “company” was a bunch of machinery and tools operating by, replaceable, workers. This is no longer true, companies today are mostly in the employees heads, this is especially true in the case of the “knowledge industry”, so what does the shareholder own? people?

I think we need to look at companies as tools to achieve good outcomes ONE of which is shareholder value. Its probably time to come up with a form of corporation that takes into account the other stakeholders too, who have been ignored for too long.

Comments?