Top American CEOs endorse stakeholder capitalism

At Awards International, we’ve always believed in the importance of customer and employee experience. That’s why we organise the UK’s biggest Customer Experience Awards and the Employee Experience Awards.

We believe this approach to business benefits everyone, providing customers with better service, employees with better jobs, and ultimately leading to better commercial results.

So we were pleased to see the announcement from America’s top CEOs, the Business Roundtable, that companies should aim for more than just pleasing their shareholders.

Leaders from some of the biggest US companies, including Amazon, Apple, Walmart and IBM, signed a statement committing themselves to this approach. In this year’s Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation, they outlined their vision:

While each of our individual companies serves its own corporate purpose, we share a fundamental commitment to all of our stakeholders. We commit to:

• Delivering value to our customers. We will further the tradition of American companies leading the way in meeting or exceeding customer expectations.
• Investing in our employees. This starts with compensating them fairly and providing important benefits. It also includes supporting them through training and education that help develop new skills for a rapidly changing world. We foster diversity and inclusion, dignity and respect.
• Dealing fairly and ethically with our suppliers. We are dedicated to serving as good partners to the other companies, large and small, that help us meet our missions.
• Supporting the communities in which we work. We respect the people in our communities and protect the environment by embracing sustainable practices across our businesses.
• Generating long-term value for shareholders, who provide the capital that allows companies to invest, grow and innovate. We are committed to transparency and effective engagement with shareholders.

Each of our stakeholders is essential. We commit to deliver value to all of them, for the future success of our companies, our communities and our country.

A better way

This announcement is a recognition of the changes in business culture over the past decade. As JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon put it, ‘major employers are investing in their workers and communities because they know it is the only way to be successful over the long term.’

At Awards International, we welcome these changes, but it’s nothing we haven’t been saying for the last ten years! We’re glad that the world’s biggest companies have finally caught on.

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