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An anonymous (for the moment) friend of mine sent me this link from the New York Times written by Andrew Ross Sorkin about Laurence D. Fink

the Chief Executive of Black Rock investment.

Black Rock investment is the biggest independent investment firm in the world founded and ran by Fink who manage $6 trillion. Yes, I said that, trillions of dollar’s worth of investment in some of the world’s largest businesses.

They have significant power in the voting on and voting off boards in key Director positions and can support or oppose resolutions on a moments whim.

Read the article, it’s here, but if you can’t be bothered the key point are here.

• Black Rock is a firm that now believes that companies must show much greater responsibility to society and move away from the principle of ‘shareholder value only’.
• Companies must be accountable, transparent and open to greater society.
• Companies must be responsible to the people who work for them.

If you didn’t think this was a significant thing then you were wrong. This is a hugely significant step and in fact a change of stripes and a U turn as is mentioned in the article.

The article also references the significant step taken by Jana partners, the huge California retirement system that manages the pensions of the state public school teachers who wrote a letter to Apple demanding they focus the detrimental effects it’s products may have on children.

I reference this in a previous blog and Jana are a significant stake holder in Apple’s share portfolio.

You may look at this and think that it’s a world away from anything that you do and is insignificant so long as Apple keep producing iPhones and all of the rest of the corporations keeping feeding your consuming habits, or you may see this as a change in the wind, much welcomed and a bus that you can get on.

Fink is not the only person who is thinking like this. All over the place this concept of  a greater connection and greater meaning in relation to work, society and the corporation is beginning to spring up. Three years ago, we set up a little scheme of our own in our tiny little insignificant business in a corner of Nottingham.

Firstly, we allocated 1% of our turnover to what we called at that stage ‘Corporate Social Responsibility’ but the name will be changing imminently (We dont like that name anymore).

This is a significant move for any company but particularly a small company to effectively tax ourselves at 1% and then re distribute the money to causes more important than ours.

One of the things we did with this was to start to promote the charity ball that we hold every November and today I was able to write a cheque for over £6,800 for The Friary in Nottingham. This was half the proceeds of the ball. The other cheque for the same amount went to Bridge2Aid.

We’re also able to use that fund for greater things and to allow our team to work at The Friary at times if they want, or support other endeavours and activities outside of our business to share a little bit of the luck and the privilege that we have.  We match employees charity fund raising up to a significant level.

We also adopted a new set of core values and HR rules in the practice including a guarantee of the living wage for anyone who works with us and a no redundancy policy to give dignity and security to people that work with us.

There is growing evidence to suggest that disconnection from the work place and disconnection from meaningful work is one of the significant causes of depression in western society. Some stats will suggest that 87% of people are disengaged or actively disengaged at work.

I don’t think there is any question that this stems from the shareholder value concept and the idea of running a corporation like an army with a man at the top, commanders in between and foot soldiers at the bottom who are, in these cases, totally dispensable. For years I’ve thought the change would come from the bottom up. It would take people like us to do little things and show what other people could spread along the bottom, only laterally filtered towards the top of society to the big multi-nationals and to the people holding most of the investments.

This article is a ray of sunshine.

It seems like it’s going to happen from all directions at once and then hopefully they might meet in the middle.

At last, a little sparkle of optimism.

Blog post number: 1558