The End Of Shareholder Value: Corporations At The Crossroads

by Allan A. Kennedy

In The End of Shareholder Value , Allan Kennedy shines the spotlight on a new revolution in business-as customers, employees, political and social leaders, and governing boards begin to challenge the cozy relationship between executives and investors that has crippled companies in the name of maximizing shareholder value. Analyzing both historical and current material, he explores the colorful history of corporations since the turn of the century, evolving from engines of innovation to machines driven by short-term financial gains. From GE to the hottest new Web-based start-up, those companies that subscribe to the shareholder value ethic cannot be sustained and will, inevitably, be replaced by those who figure out how to create and share wealth with all their important constituencies. Provocative and wide-ranging, The End of Shareholder Value showcases progressive experiments in the public and private sectors, outlines new roles and responsibilities for all participants, and challenges everyone to rethink the purpose of business in the new millennium.

Genres: Business, Economics

252 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

Reviews

[Steve · Rating 3 out of 5]

As one who has been victimized, both as a consumer and as a supplier, by the crimes of large public corporations, I was excited to see this book when it came out in 2000. Unfortunately, though I bought it soon after it appeared, it languished on the shelf for 12+ years. The author, a corporate culture consultant was rightly anguished by the rot caused to public corporations by the "shareholder value" fantasy, which as he rightly points out is a construct, not of business people involved in the real business world, but of academic economists, spouting from the Ivory Tower. At the time of writing, the author felt that corporations following this lunatic ideology of focusing solely on pumping up their stock prices as high as possible, today, right now, had reached a crossroads of "pushback" from stakeholders other than short-term investors. However, his proposals for dealing with the situation, though well-argued and well-reasoned as of 1999, seem, in the light of the dot.com bubble, the housing bubble, the recession of 2001, the financial and banking crisis, the Great Recession, Enron, WorldCom, the staggering excesses of CEO theft (compensation) etc., etc., seem pretty naive by 2013. I should have read this book 12 years ago when I first bought it. The author should have more strongly considered the benefits of the guillotine and the firing squad in reforming large, public corporations.