A Financial Times Book of the Year 2020! What is a responsible business? Common wisdom is that it's one that sacrifices profit for social outcomes. But while it's crucial for companies to serve society, they also have a duty to generate profit for investors - savers, retirees, and pension funds. Based on the highest-quality evidence and real-life examples spanning industries and countries, Alex Edmans shows that it's not an either-or choice - companies can create both profit and social value. The most successful companies don't target profit directly, but are driven by purpose - the desire to serve a societal need and contribute to human betterment. The book explains how to embed purpose into practice so that it's more than just a mission statement, and discusses the critical role of working collaboratively with a company's investors, employees, and customers. Rigorous research also uncovers surprising results on how executive pay, shareholder activism, and share buybacks can be used for the common good.
Introduction; How to read this book; Part I. Why grow the pie? Introducing the idea: 1. The pie-growing mentality: a new approach to business that works for both investors and society; 2. Growing the pie doesn't aim to maximise profits - but often does: freeing a company to take more investments, ultimately driving its success: 3. Growing the pie doesn't mean growing the enterprise: three principles to guide trade-offs and which projects to turn down; 4. Does pieconomics work?: data - not wishful thinking - shows that companies can both do good and do well; Part II. What grows the pie? Exploring the evidence: 5. Incentives: rewarding long-term value creation while deterring short-term gaming; 6. Stewardship: the value of engaged investors that both support and challenge management; 7. Repurchases: investing with restraint, releasing resources to create value elsewhere in society; Part III. How to grow the pie? Putting it into practice: 8. Enterprises: the power of purpose and how to make it real; 9. Investors: turning stewardship from a policy into a practice; 10. Citizens: how individuals can act and shape business, rather than be acted upon; Part IV. The bigger picture: 11. Growing the pie more widely: win-win thinking at the national and personal levels; Conclusion; Action items; Appendix; Acknowledgements; Endnotes; Index.
