“The capitalist system is under siege,” Porter and Kramer wrote, in a fair impression of a nineteenth-century manifesto. Business was being “criticized as a major cause of social, environmental, and economic problems.” Companies were “widely thought to be prospering at the expense of their communities.” And who was to blame? “A big part of the problem lies with companies themselves,” they wrote. And what they blamed in the companies was “an outdated, narrow approach to value creation.” Companies had become too focused on “optimizing short-term financial performance.”
