21st Century Inc.: Making the corporation work for us

Colin Mayer calls for a new approach to how we run companies to ensure that the corporation contributes to, rather than undermines, our economic prosperity, environmental welfare and social well-being.

RSA Thursday

While corporations are the source of our prosperity, they are also the cause of many of our most-pressing global problems. How is the corporation failing us, and what steps should we take to restore trust in it? How can we enter into a new way of thinking about the firm, which not only stops it destroying us but turns it into the means of protecting our environment, addressing social problems, and creating new sources of entrepreneurship and innovation?

Colin Mayer, Peter Moores Professor of Management Studies at the University of Oxford, visits the RSA to expose the sources of these problems – ownership, governance, accountability, transparency and the erosion of citizens’ trust in big business.

The current pre-occupation with shareholder value has been very damaging to the performance of firms, but also to their customers and the communities they should serve. He sets out an ambitious agenda for change and will be challenging corporations, regulators, governments, shareholders and consumers to engage meaningfully with the issues and to commit to transformation.

Speaker: Colin Mayer, Peter Moores Professor of Management Studies, the University of Oxford.

Chair: Matthew Taylor, chief exeutive, RSA.