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A panel of three CEOs from Cornell and a lawyer headlined a recent gathering at the Commonwealth Club of California (this is not the start of a joke). There I heard something I have never heard before, professionally or otherwise, “As you can tell, I have a passion for corporate forms.”
That's not a reference to bureaucracy but to the legal structure of corporations. What does it have to do with afforestation in the Amazon, wages in Indonesia, or the state of the planet our grandchildren will inherit?
A lot, actually.
While the rest of us obsessed over Copenhagen, climategate, or clawing out of the recession, a group of 10 corporate lawyers, including law professors from Stanford and UC Berkeley, worked pro bono last year to draft a little-known, 280-page bill for the California legislature.
Senate Bill 1463, introduced by State Senator Mark DeSaulnier of Contra Costa County, would enable companies to file as “flexible purpose corporations” and prioritize society or the environment alongside shareholder value.
As Suz MacCormac, the panel's moderator and one of the lawyers leading the charge for SB 1463 said, “It means that a company can emphasize things other than shareholder value, any time, and not get sued.”
With a flexible purpose corporation, or FPC, a company can justify actions that go beyond enhancing financial shareholder value, and promote activities with positive effects on employees, customers, suppliers, the community and society, or the environment.
Wow. I would normally rate an in-depth panel on corporate forms as engaging as a TMZ retrospective about the Kardashians, but this could fundamentally alter the future of green business.
The panelists -- Autodesk CEO Carl Bass, New Leaf Paper's President and Co-Founder Jeff Mendelsohn, and RSF Social Finance President and CEO Don Shaffer -- all mentioned how the existing corporate form was limiting. For example, nonprofits cannot gain access to capital markets, and for-profits can't necessarily do good when they want.
Cal. Senator Mark Desaulnier
Cal. Senator Mark Desaulnier refutes in a letter dated Sept 9 the Contra Costa Times M Krupnick that latino enrollment fell and out of state jumped 2010 at University of California Berkeley
Senator DeSaulnier agrees that UC Chancellor Birgeneau should continue to recruit outside California to achieve lation/diversity goals.
Make you views know to people who count and can make a difference.
Looking forward to California
Looking forward to California passing the new Flexible Corporation statute (and geekily interested in the proposed law's corporate structure provisions). What we're finding in Maryland (the first state in the Union to pass a similar law, April 2010): a modest number of businesses filing so far and a lot of "Benefit Corporation" curiosity and much confusion. Interestingly, the law here passed without any budget for the State agency handling filings and without any incentives...NB, legislative staff wanting to get something through the corporate section of the bar and through committees that could sound like a radically new kind of capitalism...and without much advance knowledge or organizing among businesses. We've been working with business, associations, local electeds to sort our issues and share information, but a number of significant issues remain unaddressed as yet under the Maryland statute.