What’s a company for? An answer from Ancient Greece
An imagined dialogue between Milton Friedman, the economist who has come to represent the shareholder primacy world view, and Socrates.
Image: Unknown man/Shutterstock
The now venerable management scholar Charles Handy asked “What’s a Business For?” in an article published in Harvard Business Review in 2002. Charles Handy has often been ahead of the times—he anticipated the business process outsourcing phenomenon long before it become a standard part of the corporate playbook—and the question he posed in 2002 is has now become one of the current topics in business and management journals.
In August 2019 Business Roundtable, an association of the chief executive officers of major US corporations, redefined the purpose of the corporation to “promote an economy that serves all Americans”.
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