Donald, I think those of us who shared your experiences with great employers are among the luckiest people in the world. I worked for four such publishers and tried to match them as a manager and employer.
My question is, what do you expect loyal employers, shareholders and employees to do to earn the right to think of themselves as loyal?
As a loyal employees, my wife and I worked very hard and long hours to produce the kind of content that our employers, sources, colleagues and content consumers wanted and expected. What we expected was the freedom to produce honest and useful business and consumer journalism and rewards for doing so.
We usually gave and got loyalty.
But while corporations have wonderful mission statements and generally try to live up to them, every large organization has executives, managers and employees who don't get or believe in the mission or the message.
It takes only one or two bad actors to mess up an organization in the eyes of an employe, shareholder or customer. And every organization has someone who is in it for himself regardless.
Thanks for the comments, and I'm very pleased we're able to reconnect in discussions after all these years, if only through the medium of text. You raise points I hope to address in some future posts, so stay tuned, and thanks for recounting your own experiences.
To your central question: how does anyone in this ecology of work and business earn loyalty? I've been puzzling over the investor side for quite a while, basically since the UK introduced its Stewardship Code in 2010. In addition to reiterating the fiduciary duty that institutional investors have to their clients, it sought to develop an ethos of constructive engagement with the companies in which they invest. The code came with mechanisms to allow others to see what they were doing. The code has enjoyed great success around the world with other would-be regulators, though rather less with investors themselves. I collaborated on an academic paper in 2016 about this with a colleague, which suggests how an attitude of loyalty links to stewardship action. It's free to view at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/corg.12143.
More recently, I came across a bit of political theory that seemed to apply as well to corporate governance. That turned into a discussion about how investors might earn the right to voice through stewardship. That one is also free to view at https://doi.org/10.1007/s40926-023-00237-4. It goes against the grain of mainstream investor sentiments on corporate governance.
A friend of mine, Dionysia Katelouzou, pulled together a book of essays on this last year. It's at https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108914819. It's not free, but it has some great detail and - needless to say - a lot of disagreement among its contributors.
In these pages, I hope to decode the academic presentation of such matters and build a friendlier portrait of the problems and possible work-arounds. Solutions? Well, as this post has suggested, it's tricky. There's a saying in complexity theory: Wicked problems have messy solutions.
I'll try to respond to the parts of your question about the other actors - employees and companies themselves - in future posts, once I've given those sides (even) more thought.
![How to govern [not like that]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!emEQ!,w_80,h_80,c_fill,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa9d7f587-4c16-42f0-9526-b00edc0ab4c8_155x155.png)
![How to govern [not like that]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!emEQ!,w_36,h_36,c_fill,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa9d7f587-4c16-42f0-9526-b00edc0ab4c8_155x155.png)
![How to govern [not like that]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Te2X!,e_trim:10:white/e_trim:10:transparent/h_72,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F51c6c618-ff5a-481b-b4e2-28047c606ca8_990x369.jpeg)
Donald, I think those of us who shared your experiences with great employers are among the luckiest people in the world. I worked for four such publishers and tried to match them as a manager and employer.
My question is, what do you expect loyal employers, shareholders and employees to do to earn the right to think of themselves as loyal?
As a loyal employees, my wife and I worked very hard and long hours to produce the kind of content that our employers, sources, colleagues and content consumers wanted and expected. What we expected was the freedom to produce honest and useful business and consumer journalism and rewards for doing so.
We usually gave and got loyalty.
But while corporations have wonderful mission statements and generally try to live up to them, every large organization has executives, managers and employees who don't get or believe in the mission or the message.
It takes only one or two bad actors to mess up an organization in the eyes of an employe, shareholder or customer. And every organization has someone who is in it for himself regardless.
Thanks for the comments, and I'm very pleased we're able to reconnect in discussions after all these years, if only through the medium of text. You raise points I hope to address in some future posts, so stay tuned, and thanks for recounting your own experiences.
To your central question: how does anyone in this ecology of work and business earn loyalty? I've been puzzling over the investor side for quite a while, basically since the UK introduced its Stewardship Code in 2010. In addition to reiterating the fiduciary duty that institutional investors have to their clients, it sought to develop an ethos of constructive engagement with the companies in which they invest. The code came with mechanisms to allow others to see what they were doing. The code has enjoyed great success around the world with other would-be regulators, though rather less with investors themselves. I collaborated on an academic paper in 2016 about this with a colleague, which suggests how an attitude of loyalty links to stewardship action. It's free to view at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/corg.12143.
More recently, I came across a bit of political theory that seemed to apply as well to corporate governance. That turned into a discussion about how investors might earn the right to voice through stewardship. That one is also free to view at https://doi.org/10.1007/s40926-023-00237-4. It goes against the grain of mainstream investor sentiments on corporate governance.
A friend of mine, Dionysia Katelouzou, pulled together a book of essays on this last year. It's at https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108914819. It's not free, but it has some great detail and - needless to say - a lot of disagreement among its contributors.
In these pages, I hope to decode the academic presentation of such matters and build a friendlier portrait of the problems and possible work-arounds. Solutions? Well, as this post has suggested, it's tricky. There's a saying in complexity theory: Wicked problems have messy solutions.
I'll try to respond to the parts of your question about the other actors - employees and companies themselves - in future posts, once I've given those sides (even) more thought.