Thom Hartmann Here with an excerpt from my book “Rebooting the American Dream: 11 ways to rebuild our country.”
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My radio show has a mission statement. We don’t say it on the air, as it sounds a bit pompous, but it’s the metric against which we measure our work: Saving the world, by awakening one person at a time.
During the 1980s, when I was CEO of an advertising agency10 in Atlanta, our mission statement was to help people communicate, to make better and more open companies. Before that, in 1983, I started a travel company11 that hit the front page of the Wall Street Journal the next year and has conducted around a quarter billion dollars in business since then, and its mission statement was to help people better understand the world by traveling through it. And in 1978 my wife and I started a community for abused children12 in New Hampshire, with a clear mission statement: Saving the world, one child at a time.
For most of American history, businesses—for-profit and nonprofit—had mission statements that were broader than simply serving the interests of shareholders and CEOs and referred instead to the long-term interests of the company, its workers, and its customers.
Economics author Barry C. Lynn noted that “by the 1950s managers were wont to present themselves as ‘corporate stewards’ whose job was to serve ‘stockholders, employees, customers, and the public at large.”13 In other words, besides the stockholders, there are also the workers, the customers, and the general public, who are crucial to the long-term well-being of the corporation itself. CEOs actually rose through the ranks of the business and felt loyal to the companies they ran.
They’d often started in the mailroom as a 20-year-old and fully expected to retire with a comfortable pension, the company in the good hands of one of their younger protégé vice presidents, who was working his or her way to that CEO status.
That corporate mentality and mission was generally true all the way until the 1980s. But in the early Reagan years, something changed dramatically, and it’s devastated the American corporate landscape.
First, President Reagan effectively stopped enforcing the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, a law that effectively prevented cartels and monopolies and large corporations from dominating the markets.
The Reagan administration’s backing off from enforcement of the act led to an explosion of mergers and acquisitions, buy-outs, greenmail, forced mergers, and other aggregations of previously competitive or totally unrelated companies. The big got bigger, the midsized got acquired or crushed, and the space in which small entrepreneurs could start and flourish nearly vanished.
But what followed this was even worse. Starting back in the 1930s, a particularly toxic form of economic thinking—some would argue sociopathic economic thinking—began to take hold, some of it propelled by theories developed at the Chicago School of Economics by Milton Friedman (who would later serve as an economic adviser to Reagan).
By the 1980s that economic thinking had undergone several mutations, and the one that has hit America the hardest is the notion that every business in the nation has a single mission statement: maximize shareholder value and dividends.
