Category: Friedman Doctrine

Categories
Case Studies Corporate Social Responsibility Diversity Equity Inclusion Friedman Doctrine

Impact, Money and Morality: Seeing Impact-Weighed Accounts Through a Moral Lens

‘George Serafeim, an Accounting professor at HBS, has been leading a very interesting and impressive project, called the Impact-Weighted Accounts (IWA) Project:

The mission of the Impact-Weighted Accounts Project is to drive the creation of financial accounts that reflect a company’s financial, social, and environmental performance. Our ambition is to create accounting statements that transparently capture external impacts in a way that drives investor and managerial decision making.

In this post, I’ll give some basics of their approach, and highlight how it relates to moral accounting.  The upshot is that the impact accounting project proposes a particular improvement to reporting on how businesses affect the world; moral accounting provides a framework for resolving disagreements about what impacts matter, and how to integrate their reports into accountability systems. There will be a lot of such disagreements, and they are going to be distinctly moral disputes.

Continue reading “Impact, Money and Morality: Seeing Impact-Weighed Accounts Through a Moral Lens”
Categories
Case Studies Diversity Equity Inclusion Friedman Doctrine Speech

Basecamp: A case study in governing speech

Basecamp implodes as employees flee company, including senior staff

After a controversial blog post in which CEO Jason Fried outlined Basecamp’s new philosophy that prohibited, among other things, “societal and political discussions” on internal forums, company co-founder David Heinemeier Hansson said the company would offer generous severance packages to anyone who disagreed with the new stance. On Friday, it appears a large number of Basecamp employees are taking Hansson up on his offer: according to The Verge contributing editor Casey Newton’s sources, roughly a third of the company’s 57 employees accepted buyouts today. As of Friday afternoon, 18 people had tweeted they were planning to leave.

As I wrote in a prior post, speech is rarely free.  It costs time, so when time is short, people impose limits on what can be said:  speakers need to comply with a LAAP.  Just like GAAP restricts what you can say in financial statements, a LAAP restricts what you can say in some particular venue (the L is for Local).

Continue reading “Basecamp: A case study in governing speech”
Categories
Case Studies Friedman Doctrine Law

The Friedman Doctrine & Voting Laws

When should businesses get involved in politics, or other social matters?  Case in point:  what do you think of this?

Business Coalitions to Speak Out Against Voting Restrictions in Texas

Two broad coalitions of companies and executives plan to release letters on Tuesday calling for expanded voting access in Texas, wading into the contentious debate over Republican legislators’ proposed new restrictions on balloting after weeks of relative silence from the business community in the state.

One letter comes from a group of large corporations, including Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Unilever, Salesforce, Patagonia and Sodexo, as well as local companies and chambers of commerce, and represents the first major coordinated effort among businesses in Texas to take action against the voting proposals.

The letter, under the banner of a new group called Fair Elections Texas, stops short of criticizing the two voting bills that are now advancing through the state’s Republican-controlled Legislature, but opposes “any changes that would restrict eligible voters’ access to the ballot.”

A separate letter, also expected to be released on Tuesday and signed by more than 100 Houston executives, goes further. It directly criticizes the proposed legislation and equates the efforts with “voter suppression.”

Continue reading “The Friedman Doctrine & Voting Laws”