Salesforce CEO Slams 'The World's Dumbest Idea': Maximizing Shareholder Value

[hifiguy]

16. The list of toxic effects created by this mindset in the article

is stunning:

These criticisms of the single-minded pursuit of shareholder value as measured by the current stock price are well-founded. The theory has contributed to:

pervasive short-termism;

diverted human and financial resources from needed investments in innovation;

dispirited both employees and managers, leading to pervasive disengagement;

generated “bad profits” that undermined customer loyalty;

caused excessive “financialization” of the economy, making it vulnerable financial crashes;

incentivized CEOs to become financial engineers and companies to lose their entrepreneurial mojo;

led firms to pursue the extraction of value, rather than the creation of value;

undermined the economic recovery from the Global Financial Crisis;

drastically reduced rates of return on assets and on invested capital;

appropriated gains that flowed from workers’ improvements in productivity; and

led to secular economic stagnation and increasingly unsustainable economic inequality.

And this is from freaking Forbes.