Grow the Pie

Companies can both serve society and create profit. This book shows how-based on rigorous evidence and an actionable framework.

A Financial Times Book of the Year 2020! Should companies be run for profit or purpose? In this ground-breaking book, acclaimed finance professor and TED speaker Alex Edmans shows it's not an either-or choice. Drawing from real-life examples spanning industries and countries, Edmans demonstrates that purpose-driven businesses are consistently more successful in the long-term. But a purposeful company must navigate difficult trade-offs and take tough decisions. Edmans provides a roadmap for company leaders to put purpose into practice, and overcome the hurdles that hold many back. He explains how investors can discern which companies are truly purposeful and how to engage with them to unleash value for both shareholders and society. And he highlights the role that citizens can play in reshaping business to improve our world. This edition has been thoroughly updated to include the pandemic, the latest research, and new insights on how to make purpose a reality.

'Alex Edmans wants to restore popular trust in capitalism. He aims to do so by defending his normative vision of a central aspect of capitalism-the free functioning of for-profit firms, especially those that are publicly traded. His vision is, as the book title suggests, for these organizations to aim at 'growing the pie,' where the pie encompasses all of the forms of 'social value' that they can effect and growing the pie consists in increasing the total amount of social value rather than merely transferring value from one group to another. His desired audience is wide: it includes capitalism's elites-investors, executives, boards of directors-and commoners, including workers and citizens.' Grant J. Rozeboom, Business Ethics Quarterly

Auteur

Alex Edmans is Professor of Finance at London Business School and a leading authority on reforming business to serve the common good. He has spoken at Davos and in the UK House of Commons, and gave the TED talk 'What to Trust in a Post-Truth World' and the TEDx talk 'The Social Responsibility of Business.

Texte du rabat

Companies can both serve society and create profit. This book shows how?based on rigorous evidence and an actionable framework.

Résumé
Should companies be run for profit or purpose? This book shows how they can deliver both-based on rigorous evidence and an actionable framework. This edition, updated to include the pandemic and latest research, explains how managers, investors and citizens can put purpose into practice-and overcome the difficult trade-offs that hold them back.

Contenu

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.