Did Shareholders Develop a Conscience?
Last week Facebook’s stock nosedived by more than $100 billion and now shareholders want Mark Zuckerberg out due to his mishandling of crises that have been popping up over the last year. Do shareholders now have a social conscience?
Um, no.
Did the shareholders care about the election meddling when we all learned that the Russians were interfering via social media and posting messages in the effort to influence the election? No.
Did shareholders care about the rise of hate messages in Facebook and the incidents of mob murders in India and Myanmar due to the incendiary hate messages? No.
Did shareholders care about the possibility of loss of individual data privacy when the Cambridge imbroglio came out? No.
Only when the stock price dropped by more than $100 billion (or roughly 20%) did the shareholders rise up and agitate. These people don’t care about anything but their money. They didn’t care about loss of privacy, election meddling and mob deaths from hate messages.
This indifference to general society welfare is why capitalism needs to change the philosophy from just focusing on the shareholders to a more enlightened view of doing good for all stakeholders rather than just shareholders. Somehow customers need to hold companies accountable for their actions, Harvard Business School needs to change its teaching to tackle the broader concerns beyond bowing down to the shareholders and politicians needs to set up laws that provide proper incentives to redirect the effort from shareholders to the community and the workers. Shareholders are sick and most will never care about the general society.
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