The Ethical Capitalist
How to Make Business Work Better for Society
Julian Richer
Having read it
★★★★☆
Sensible, thought-provoking and wonderfully honest.
However, it was not quite as good as I thought it might be despite, in one’s opinion, it’s opening pages and conclusion being pretty much the best bits!
Some of his approaches seemed a little, to me anyway, business-heavy (maybe even politically-led in a certain way) but, if you break down the basic principles and methods, sense is made and actually demonstrate and achieve good things; in a broad sense, it’s a constructive addition to needing a more socially democratic form of capitalism that flexes and adapts confidently, regularly, respectfully and responsibly, with rules and obligations for the collective, not just treating it all like a binary competiton of them and us.
Here’s hoping many other businesses, finance-led entities and political institutions at the very least actually enact and adapt to some of his good, fair and sensible approaches.
A good passage
In a healthy economy, money needs to be widely distributed and circulating, not siphoned off to unproductive tax havens. All the evidence suggests that it creates problems in society that are enormously expensive to fix. A country such as the UK, which has a relatively wide gap between rich and poor, also has higher levels of crime, obesity, illiteracy and other health and social problems.
A second good passage
I always say to our sales colleagues that achieving an immediate profit by persuading a customer to buy something that isn’t right for them is both wrong and crazy. We should be aiming to keep a customer for life, not for one transaction. ... Rewarding people simply for carrying out a transaction, regardless of the wisdom of that transaction, is a recipe for disaster.
A third good passage
No business is an island. However much successful people like to think they are self-made, they would be nowhere without the society that surrounds them, and the support, security and economic stability that society provides. They would be nowhere without other people: they need a workforce and customers just as much as that workforce and those customers need them.