The Company Was Chartered for Something

Abstract

Chapter 1 began with the two sentences every company keeps: the one it shows and the one it runs on. This chapter is about the first, and about how it came to matter so little. Colin Mayer, a professor of management studies at Oxford's Saïd Business School and a former dean there, spent much of the last decade asking what would happen if the first sentence were made to mean something. His book Prosperity: Better Business Makes the Greater Good , published by Oxford University Press in 2018, is the fullest statement of that question. Its claim is plain enough to fit on a card. A company has a purpose, and the purpose is not profit. Profit is what a company earns for doing its purpose well. The final report of the British Academy's programme on the future of the corporation, which Mayer led, puts the purpose of business in one line: "to create profitable solutions for the problems of people and planet, while not profiting from creating problems for either."