Rebecca Henderson @RSA: ‘can business save the world’ presentation :

• growing inequality and climate change is bad for business.
• Eventually, who are these companies going to hire and sell to?
• One prob is both right and left define ‘business’ as ‘maximising profit’ – either positively or negatively – with little room for nuance. But there are growing numbers of businesses that don’t fit this model…
• Maximising shareholder value only maximises freedom and prosperity when markets are genuinely free and fair. If…
  • prices don’t reflect real and full costs (eg CO2 emissions / pollution etc)
  • millions of people can’t participate because of where they’re born or colour of skin
  • one of the ways to profit is by flooding political sys with £ to change rules in your favour …
  • Then it’s not a fair and free market!!!
• One of the values in medieval society was that it was wrong to make money from money, as opposed to actually doing something / contributing
• Frederick Laloux – reinventing organisations
• A third of the world’s largest 1800 firms are causing more environmental harm than their profits, and another third more than 25% of their profits
• Design of our democratic institutions is critical to our destiny (eg first past the post sys)