07/08/2025

Corporate America Soured on ‘Business for Good’

Here’s how it must reframe conscious capitalism

Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I'm Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning.

In the fall of 2019, as editor of Fast Company, I commissioned a package of stories on innovators working to reinvent and bolster capitalism to make it more equitable and environmentally sustainable—the theory being that a system that works for everyone is good for business and society. The print magazine featured a close-up photograph of Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard with the provocative headline: “Capitalism is dead. Long live capitalism."

Six years later, those stories feel almost quaint, and Fast Company has published something of a rejoinder. Its summer cover story, “How ‘business for good’ went bad—and what comes next,” explores the fall and future of so-called stakeholder capitalism, which posits that CEOs should lead their companies to serve not just shareholders but also employees, customers, suppliers, local communities, and the environment. (The story is behind Fast Company’s paywall. Modern CEO readers who aren’t yet subscribers can access a one-day premium pass here.)

Please select this link to read the complete article from Fast Company.