A ONE-LEGGED STOOL

A debut financial book offers a diagnosis of what’s wrong with modern business—and some ideas as to how to fix things.

In this work, Chambliss contends that one of the central activities of companies—to maximize profits for shareholders—has become an insane, greed-motivated mania that’s hurting not only society at large, but also the businesses themselves. His governing metaphor is a stool, with shareholder profits being only one leg, with employee well-being, customer service, and broad communities being the other three. According to the author, companies started lengthening one leg of the stool at the expense of the others, actually turning on employees, customers, and communities in order to continue this shareholder primacy. “This, of course, is really bad for the stool,” he writes with the direct clarity that characterizes the whole book. He cites statistics about the United States’ staggering wealth gap that will be familiar to anybody who follows economic news—like the fact that the top 1% of Americans account for nearly 20% of all income, “a concentration not seen since the Roaring Twenties, right before the Great Depression.” And he deftly details the destructive ripple effects of this imbalance, reflected not only in the tendency of such concentrated wealth to warp national politics in its favor, but also in the role it plays in eroding the middle class. “As economic inequality increases,” he writes bluntly, “so does political inequality.” The author’s framing and summarizing of the current nightmare of shareholder primacy are concise and accessible, and the note of personal optimism he sounds throughout is much appreciated considering the dark tidings he’s relating. The steps he proposes to fix things—essentially applying Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics to companies—seem fanciful when facing the juggernaut of greed he describes. But readers will nevertheless feel encouraged to make the changes they can.

An engaging, optimistic plan for addressing nihilistic corporate greed.