The 10 Most Important Principles of Directorship
The old ideas aren't working.
Confidence in capitalism is collapsing. The gap between the 1 % and the rest has been growing for forty years. And, corporations are six times more likely to die in 2016 than in 1976.
The old theories of shareholder ownership, good governance and profit maximization are making a mess of things.
But these are not theories. Theories are meant to explain things, not change things for the worse. No, they're the pillars that prop up the investment industry.
Agency theory is their improbable mission statement. Maximizing shareholder value was never the moral responsibility of a corporation. It's the vision statement on the desk of every hedge fund manager. Good governance is not a virtue, it's little more than the codification of their investment strategy.
Time for company directors to start again with a different set of first principles based on the law and capitalism's original ethical framework: