TAAlina and Thoughts

In my last post, I ruminated why the collective’s worldview defines corporate purpose. Thus I pose the question: Should we care about more than just our shareholders, and thus focus on profits and cash-flow only? Really? Just for fun, let’s find out what the literati of the business world think. In 1970, the inaugural European Management Symposium was held in Davos, with the idea that companies should be mindful of far more than the bottom line. At that time, this was a fairly novel concept. The event evolved into the annual World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting established with the idea that businesses should serve society as a whole, in addition to shareholders – thus giving birth to the “stakeholder concept”. This was memorialized in 1973 in the Davos Manifesto. Fifty years later, the updated Davos Manifesto 2020 came about after a changing world and evolving expectations. Stakeholder capitalism is mainstreaming and activist investors are becoming more influential. The fi...

Is there such a thing? My opinion is, “yes”. And although those are some really nice cars parked at my club last weekend, they are NOT corporate purpose. I admit to being prey to some cognitive bias here – post hoc ergo propter hoc . And lest you think I’m showing off my Latin, be assured that this came from one of the episodes of the very profane and clever TV series episode of West Wing Season 1. Since there is the recognized legal entity, there must therefore be a purpose for it. Such an artificial construct – the incorporated company. Yet our Malaysian laws, derived from the creation of property rights and eventually the conferment of life-like attributes on an intangible concept through charter and later statutes of the English legal system, recognize companies and especially the public listed ones, with human characteristics. By comparison, in Islam the concept of “dhimmi” has never been extended to artificial or created life forms. Not even to the waqf, the Islamic found...