Dear Fellow Supporters of Integrated Reporting,
August 23, 2019 Special Edition on The Statement of Purpose
On August 19, 2019 the Business Roundtable released its “Statement on the Purpose of the Corporation” which was signed by 181 CEOs. Yesterday Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson, U.S. Business Editor for the Financial Times, in “Companies under pressure to declare ‘social purpose’.” about how companies should do this by having the boards of individual companies publish their own “Statement of Purpose.” More on this below.
The essence of the BRT’s simple one-page statement is “While each of our individual companies serves its own corporate purpose, we share a fundamental commitment to all of our stakeholders.” This statement was an update to the BRT’s much longer 1997 “Statement on Corporate Governance” White Paper which asserted shareholder primacy in the first sentence of the Introduction: “The Business Roundtable wishes to emphasize that the principal objective of a business enterprise is to generate economic returns to its owners.”
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Kind regards,
Bob