Towards ‘good companies’: Responsible leadership and ‘good dividends’
Janie is an entrepreneur-in-residence and has been lucky enough to spend some time chatting to Steve Kempster about his research into business with purpose.
It feels so much more important right now as we face the worldwide chaos and destruction of Covid-19.
“The time is most pressing for responsible leadership. Leadership is the most influential mechanism on Earth to shape the social condition of people for good and for bad.
Leadership is required to address the societal challenges that face humanity – climate change, poverty, modern slavery, food security, refugees. Leaders of business and many other stakeholders – including governments – must partner together to deliver on their fiduciary duty to address these challenges, through multiple means and avenues, that will culminate in a great movement of social change. In this way ‘good’ companies led by responsible leadership have the potential to deliver transformational change.
Much has been said with regard to the failures of market capitalism. And a few have offered up the notion of moral capitalism without any sense of knowing what this might be and how it might work. I hope that the good dividends driven by leadership of purpose and responsibility might be a tangible way of making this occur.”
