Emphasising personal consumption decisions over more systemic changes is often a convenient move for corporations. In 2019 Shell’s chief executive, Ben van Beurden, gave a lecture in which he instructed people to eat seasonally and recycle more, lambasting people who eat strawberries in winter. In reality, in order to solve climate change, what we actually need is for companies like Shell to go out of business. By donating to effective nonprofits, we can all make this kind of far-reaching political change much more likely.

The Corporation in the 21st Century- John Kay

PART 1: The Background

1: Love the Product, Hate the Producer

“Some of these billionaire executives are no superstars: individuals such as Philip Green, who extracted nine-figure sums from retailer BHS before selling the company to multiple bankrupt Dominic Chappell for £1, Mike Ashley, the domineering boss of the retailer Sports Direct, and Eddie Lampert, who inflicted similar destruction on Sears, for a century America’s leading store chain. The lifestyle of these executives contrasts with the fate of their businesses. The 90-metre yachts of Green and Lampert make good newspaper pictures. Green’s is moored in the harbour of the tax haven of Monaco, where he is resident, while Lampert’s is named Fountainhead, after Ayn Rand’s turgid paean to individualism.

6: The Rise of Corporation

“Guilds and livery companies survive into the twenty-first century as dining and drinking societies, and many support charitable causes. But you would rarely find a practising fishmonger in Fishmongers’ Hall, and the only fish would be the sole meunière served at feasts – although in 2019 a narwhal tusk was pulled from the wall and used to subdue a terrorist who had murdered two people at a conference on offender rehabilitation.

Leslie Hannah, an eminent business historian, has shown how the ‘rationalisation’ of industry, which was favoured by the British Government (represented by the Bank of England), set the stage for the new ‘corporate economy’ which would characterise Britain for decades. The 1920s saw the creation by merger of ICI (chemicals), the Distillers Company (Scotch whisky) and Unilever (soap and margarine). A similar wave of mergers in Germany established IG Farben and Vereinigte Stahlwerke as the dominant chemical and steel producers respectively. (Both these companies were dissolved by the victorious Allies in 1945.)

1. John Antioco, “How I Did It: Blockbuster’s Former CEO on Sparring with an Activist Shareholder,” Harvard Business Review, April 2011, https://hbr.org/2011/04/how-i-did-it-blockbusters-former-ceo-on-sparring-with-an-activist-shareholder.