Over-Emphasising Shareholder Value

One of the mistakes from the 80’s “Greed is Good” era of Corporate America was this excessive emphasis on shareholder value.  Shareholders are one of several stakeholder.  Customers and clients are stakeholders.  Vendors and partners are stakeholders.  Employees are a major stakeholder of a business.  A company that only emphasises shareholder value will inevitably fail since the focus is on immediate gain, not long-term market growth.  This sort of thinking still plagues investment banking, and fund management, which leads to excessive risk, and eventual cost that affects shareholders as well.  An overt emphasis on shareholder value to the exclusion of everything else is self-defeating, and kills the business, the environment, and even people sometimes.