On Tuesday, President Bill Clinton was interviewed about his new book, Back to Work, by John Stewart on The Daily Show (http://www.thedailyshow.com/full-episodes/tue-november-8-2011-bill-clinton, 19.38 mins. to 20.55 mins.). During the interview, Clinton said the following:
“When I went to law school … in the 1970s, I was part virtually of the last generation of American law students and business students taught that corporations had a responsibility (because they had special privileges under the law, like limited liability) to their stakeholders (to their shareholders, their employees, their customers, and the communities of which they were a part). Then, starting in the late 1970s, that practice changed and all of a sudden the shareholders were way up here and all the stakeholders were down here. It had the ironic consequence of giving the most influence over corporate decisions to the stakeholders with the least concern about the long term profitability of the corporation and the greatest concern about the short term profitability. ... We need to be competitive, … but we also need to try to create an ethic in America where the employees and the customers and the communities can [be successful] too and we need to make it easy for corporations to act that way again.”
Have a good weekend
David
Instructor Teaching Site: http://www.sagepub.com/strategiccsr/
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