2020 Under Fire

Boardroom Governance Newsletter #4 | September 2020 Edition

The U.S. West Coast is under fire. At least 30 people have died in recent blazes, and almost 5 million acres have been burned in California, Oregon and Washington. The air quality in the region is mostly unhealthy or very unhealthy, and this is all on top of COVID-19 which has now claimed 29.2 million+ cases globally, including ~6.5 million cases and 194,000+ deaths in the U.S.

In this environment there has been a lot of soul searching, particularly on the question of climate change. If you add widening economic inequality and social unrest to this crisis, it is no wonder that corporations have been revisiting their purpose in society. The debate was re-ignited last year by the U.S. Business Roundtable’s restatement on the purpose of a corporation, in which they argued that companies should no longer advance only the interests of shareholders. Instead, they argued that the focus should be on all the stakeholders, a group that includes customers, employees, suppliers, the community and …