Firms of Endearment: How World-Class Companies Profit from Passion and Purpose, Second Edition

1. Building Business on Love and Care

This book is not about corporate social responsibility. It is about enlightened business management.

This book owes much to the ideas of R. Edward Freeman, who in 1984 made a strong case for a stakeholder-based business model in his book Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach (Pittman Publishing). As management professor Ronald W. Clement wrote in an article examining stakeholder management theory, “Freeman was the first management writer to so clearly identify the strategic importance of groups and individuals beyond not only the firm’s stockholders, but also its employees, customers, and suppliers. Indeed, he saw such widely disparate groups as local community organizations, environmentalists, consumer ...