May 2024
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The assumption of this chapter is that capitalism’s future depends on our ability to nudge, legislate, educate, and allow for new forms of capitalism to emerge. For the purposes of this chapter, I will refer to this emergent entity as next stage capitalism. “Next stage capitalism” is a term of art that is used here to include the many and various serious proposals about capitalism’s future. The single theme that runs through all these new proposals and ties them together is the call for business to begin to serve the public interest, not indirectly, but by conscious design. While this movement is not yet mainstream, nor is there a single philosophy or organization that fully articulates it, the basic outline of a next stage of capitalism is becoming more legible with each passing year. A next stage capitalism requires justification through fair and open dialogues centered on human values. Or, putting it negatively, in the absence of human values, the concept of corporate values makes no sense, and in turn, in the absence of corporate values, how are corporate purpose or purposes going to be generated, understood, and ultimately justified in a credible way to stakeholders and citizens? This chapter will explore just one of the many implications for the emergence of next stage capitalism. This is the increasing need to teach business students to become fluent in the language and use of values in business. In the simplest formulation, the goal of introducing values into the business school curriculum is to help students learn to work in Purpose-Based Corporations. This means they will have to learn how to 1-think and speak together about, 2-plan, 3-build, and 4-sustain a future world in which they and subsequent generations will not just survive but will love wholeheartedly. Or, in more colloquial and less grandiose terms, the point of teaching students about values is to provide them with some additional tools to create and sustain good enough businesses so that we can all work and live together in relative peace and harmony for the near future.