Jack Welch has called it “the dumbest idea in the world.”
Vinci Group Chairman and CEO Xavier Huillard has called it “totally idiotic.”
Alibaba CEO Jack Ma has said that “customers are number one; employees are number two and shareholders are number three.”
Paul Polman, CEO of Unilever [UN], has denounced “the cult of shareholder value.”
John Mackey at Whole Foods [WFM] has condemned businesses that “view their purpose as profit maximization and treat all participants in the system as means to that end.”
This week, Marc Benioff, Chairman and CEO of Salesforce [CRM] joined these CEOs and declared in an article in the Huffington Post that this still-pervasive business theory is “wrong. The business of business isn’t just about creating profits for shareholders — it’s also about improving the state of the world and driving stakeholder value.”
