Hello my name is shareholder value

It shows a red conference name tag reading Hello, my name is Shareholder Value. The joke gives a face to the abstraction that quietly decides layoffs, budgets and strategy while nobody in the meeting admits it is in the room. Wearing it is a small act of honesty – introducing the real decision-maker by name.

The value a company delivers to its owners, usually measured as share price growth plus dividends. As a management doctrine, maximising shareholder value means treating that number as the main goal of the firm. It spread from the 1980s, popularised for example by Alfred Rappaport’s book Creating Shareholder Value (1986).

The view that a company’s only social responsibility is to increase its profits within the rules of the game – open, free competition without deception or fraud. Milton Friedman set it out in his essay The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, published in The New York Times on 13 September 1970. It became the founding text of shareholder primacy.

Shareholder theory says managers act for the owners and should maximise their returns. Stakeholder theory, associated with R. Edward Freeman’s Strategic Management – A Stakeholder Approach (1984), says firms must also answer to employees, customers, suppliers, communities and the environment. The debate is really an ethical one about whose interests count.

Jack Welch, for decades celebrated as the model shareholder-value chief executive, told the Financial Times in March 2009 that shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world. His point was that it is a result, not a strategy – value comes from looking after employees, customers and products.

Karl Marx’s term from Capital, Volume 1 (1867). Under capitalism, relations between people appear as relations between things – prices, markets, values – which then seem to rule us like natural forces. In the preface Marx adds that he treats individuals only as personifications of economic categories. The name tag on this design makes that abstraction literally wear a badge.

It is Kant’s formula of humanity from the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785) – act so that you treat humanity, in yourself and in every other person, always at the same time as an end and never merely as a means. Employing someone is fine; treating them as nothing but a cost line to be cut for the share price is what Kant forbids.

Yes, for anyone who has sat through a strategy meeting and wondered who is really in charge – economics and business students, consultants with a conscience, union reps, ethics lecturers and the colleague who quotes Marx at the coffee machine. The name-tag format keeps it subtle enough for the office.

Hello my name is Shareholder Value comes as a unisex classic T-shirt, a sweatshirt, a premium hoodie, a mug and a sticker. The mug and the sticker are the quietest ways to bring it into the next budget meeting.