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The History, Purpose & Possibilities of Mandatory Reporting

James F. Boyle, Founder and CEO of Sustainability Roundtable, Inc., and author of Dignity First Leadership: Developing & Driving a World-Class Sustainability Strategy

I. What Mandatory Reporting Is For

Multi-billion-dollar global operating companies are now required, by the ISSB baseline, the European directives, and the California climate laws, to measure, manage, and disclose their non-financial relationships, or capitals, with the customers, talent, suppliers, host communities, and investors they most depend on. That requirement is often experienced as a burden, and it is the subject of real controversy. What is the global move to mandatory sustainability reporting for? Where did it come from, what is it meant to accomplish, and what does it make possible for the enterprises that must now comply with it? This essay sets out the history, purpose, and possibilities of mandatory reporting, and argues that the requirement is better understood as the resolution of a question the field could never quite settle for itself. It does so as SR Inc. prepares to introduce, later this month, its Comprehensive Compliance Collaborative for Mastering Mandatory Reporting [link to CCC landing page].

Few phrases in business are used as widely and understood as loosely as “Corporate Sustainability.” Boards adopt it, investors demand it, regulators codify it. Yet when a Director of Corporate Sustainability explains to a chief financial officer what the function is for, the answer too often dissolves into a list of programs, metrics, and deadlines. The label has outrun its meaning. Mandatory reporting, as I will show, supplies the meaning the label was missing.

This essay is an attempt to illuminate what the label has always meant. Corporate Sustainability, definitionally and in fact, has from the beginning been an approach to business that manages risks and opportunities for multi-stakeholder value creation in an increasingly challenged world. The people who built the field, Bob Massie and Jean Rogers among them, promoted it because they saw the building threat that accelerating human-caused climate and environmental breakdown posed to all value, and because they had faith that a more explicitly multi-stakeholder understanding of value creation, through what Massie has called a multi-capital approach, would let enterprises sense the deepening systemic challenge sooner and respond to it collaboratively.

No corporation is fully sustainable, because every one operates inside a broader system that is not. But a more sustainable corporation can be well understood as a Relational Enterprise: one that recognizes its value is created with and through the people, communities, and living systems on which it depends, and I will argue that this is the most authentic and responsible form the modern corporation can take. The field has practiced this logic for a generation without always naming it; the frameworks now require it; and closing the gap between practice and explicit commitment will serve as the foundation for the next decade of work helping to align business with life.

II. A Definition That Carried a Dispute

In 1999 the Dow Jones Sustainability Index defined Corporate Sustainability as a business approach that creates long-term shareholder value by embracing opportunities and managing risks deriving from economic, environmental, and social developments. The definition did real work. When Teradyne became SR Inc.’s first renewing client in 2009, the reasoning was nearly syllogistic: if Corporate Sustainability is as the DJSI defines it, then everyone must support it. From 2010 to 2021 that definition ran under my signature line and my CFO’s. It gave a young field a seat at the table because it spoke the language the table already understood.

Over time it came to feel truncated rather than wrong. It described the mechanism of sustainability while naming only one beneficiary. In 2021 we revised it: Corporate Sustainability is “an approach to business that manages risk and opportunities deriving from social and environmental change for multi-stakeholder value creation in the near, mid and long term.” The beneficiary moves from the shareholder to the stakeholder system as a whole, with shareholder value becoming what it has always been in a well-run company, an outcome of value created for and with others.

Definitions set the frame for every subsequent decision. A function organized around shareholder value measures itself by share price and avoided penalties; one organized around multi-stakeholder value creation measures itself by the health of the relationships on which the enterprise depends. These lead to different decisions about what to fund, what to disclose, and what to refuse.

III. Freeman’s “Stakeholders”

The idea the 1999 definition inherited without naming belongs to R. Edward Freeman of the University of Virginia’s Darden School. In Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach (1984) he defined a stakeholder as any group or individual who can affect or is affected by the achievement of the organization’s objectives, and proposed that management’s central task is to create value with all of them rather than to treat the shareholder as sole principal and everyone else as a constraint. Freeman took seriously the experience of executives who could not run a company by share price alone. He did not argue that profit was unimportant; he argued that profit is what happens when a company creates value for the people who make it possible.

He returned to the subject in Stakeholder Theory: The State of the Art (Cambridge, 2010), written with Harrison, Wicks, Parmar, and de Colle, which traces how a provocation became a research program across ethics, strategy, finance, and law, answers the standing objections, and insists that stakeholder theory is not a doctrine of dividing a fixed pie but an account of how value is jointly created. It is the intellectual charter for everything the frameworks later required, and I discuss it in the Notes. The aspiration is older than the theory: the Davos Manifesto of 1973 had already declared that management’s purpose is to serve clients, shareholders, workers, and society. Freeman gave the aspiration a discipline.

IV. Massie’s History

No one has watched the idea move from the margin to the center of capital markets from closer range than Bob Massie, first president of Ceres, co-founder of the Global Reporting Initiative, and initiator of the Investor Network on Climate Risk. Massie holds a doctorate from Harvard Business School and is an ordained Episcopal priest, and he is a hero of mine. His 2016 essay in Institutional Investor, “Welcome to the ESG Evolution,” remains the best short history of that journey.

Massie opens at the United Nations in January 2016, listening to Al Gore tell investors managing $22 trillion that the fight on carbon was being won, and reflecting on the quarter-century it had taken. In 2002 he had been snubbed at an International Corporate Governance Network dinner for suggesting climate was a fiduciary matter; by 2016 the same ICGN was training its members on ESG. The institutions now governing the field, he observes, were built one at a time by people who could not persuade existing institutions to care and so created new ones.

Beneath that history he names the dispute this essay is about: whether value should be understood broadly, across the whole company and all its stakeholders, or narrowly, as near-term financial benefit for those who own the stock. It was resolved less by corporations than by the largest indexed pension funds, which realized they owned the whole market and could not diversify away from systemic risk.

His most important observation concerns the integrated reporting framework he helped draft, which beneath deferential language about providers of capital concluded that a business draws on six forms of capital, financial, manufactured, intellectual, human, social, and natural, and that the honest question is whether a business model enhances or depletes each. The old accounting, he says, judged a company’s health by whether air was moving in and out of its lungs. And he asks the question this essay exists to answer: whether broader and more democratic participation, and greater diversity, might increase a company’s ability to respond to a complex and rapidly changing environment, so that business becomes a system for the manufacture of joint gains across every capital.

Massie closes by asking whether capitalism is a cloaked transfer of human and natural capital into private wealth, or whether it will grow up and rescue people and planet with a wisdom commensurate with its power, and he wonders where the field will stand in 2026. It is 2026. The frameworks have largely grown up; corporate self-understanding has not yet caught up with them.

V. The Embrace

Three years after Massie wrote, the leaders of global capital said in their own words what the field had been practicing. On August 19, 2019, the Business Roundtable, under the chairmanship of JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon, released a Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation signed by 181 chief executives. It superseded the Roundtable’s shareholder-primacy principles of 1997 and committed the signatories, under a fundamental commitment to all stakeholders, to deliver value to customers, invest in employees, deal fairly with suppliers, support communities, and generate long-term value for shareholders, in that order. Dimon’s gloss was that the American dream was alive but fraying, and that investing in workers and communities was the only way to succeed over the long term.

Four months later the Davos Manifesto 2020 defined the purpose of a company as engaging all its stakeholders in shared and sustained value creation, adding that a company is a steward of the environmental and material universe for future generations. In January 2022 Larry Fink’s letter to CEOs on behalf of BlackRock argued that stakeholder capitalism is neither political nor ideological but capitalism itself, grounded in the mutually beneficial relationships a company depends on for its prosperity. Each statement subordinates the stakeholder commitment to a prior expectation of shareholder return, and each invites the question of what happens when the two diverge in a given quarter. The answer begins by noticing that the frameworks have already settled it in practice.

VI. What the Frameworks Require

A statement of principle can be ignored. A disclosure standard that requires a company to identify its stakeholders, assess what they deem material, and report how it manages the resulting risks and opportunities has systematized stakeholder management whether or not it uses Freeman’s vocabulary. Read that way, every major framework embraces multi-stakeholder value creation, some by declaration and the rest by requirement.

GRI, launched by Ceres in 1997, put the stakeholder at the center of reporting from the start, requiring organizations to identify their stakeholders and report impacts on people and the environment across the value chain. The DJSI, for all that its definition named one beneficiary, scored companies from the beginning on labor practices, human rights, supply chain, and stakeholder engagement. SASB, founded in 2011 by Jean Rogers, made materiality industry-specific by consulting companies, investors, and experts about which topics mattered in each of seventy-seven sectors, which is to say it mapped what the stakeholders of each industry deem material to the firms in it. I note with some pride that Rogers was one of SR Inc.’s earliest Member Executives, when she was a leading sustainability consultant at Arup in North America, and that she built SASB with the support of Michael Bloomberg, chairman of Bloomberg, which has been an SR Inc. member-client for more than eighteen years.

The International Sustainability Standards Board, which consolidated SASB and the TCFD into IFRS S1 and S2 in 2023, serves investors and lenders, and its language is the language of enterprise value. That is its purpose and no one should be surprised by it. What is sometimes missed is what the standards require in order to serve that purpose. IFRS S1 requires a materiality assessment of the sustainability-related risks and opportunities across a company’s operations and value chain, which is a structured prioritization of its dependencies on its workforce, suppliers, customers, communities, and natural systems. IFRS S2 requires transition plans, scenario analysis, and Scope 3 emissions, none of which can be produced without engaging the entire value chain. A company cannot comply with ISSB without doing the work Freeman described. The investor orientation does not negate the stakeholder logic; it is the mechanism by which capital markets now demand it.

The European Union went further: the CSRD’s double materiality requires reporting on how a company affects people and the environment as well as how sustainability affects its finances, and the CSDDD converts disclosure into a duty to prevent and remediate adverse impacts across the chain of activities, treating affected people as rights-holders. The frameworks are the stakeholder theory of the firm written into disclosure and into law. The gap that remains is between that method and the shareholder vocabulary many companies still use, and in that gap sustainability functions are asked to serve two masters.

VII. From Machine to Living Relationship

Why, if the method is settled, does the vocabulary lag? Part of the answer is historical, and Stuart L. Hart has supplied it in Beyond Shareholder Primacy: Remaking Capitalism for a Sustainable Future (Stanford, 2024), the largest and most important book of his career. Hart retells the history of capitalism from the fifteenth century and shows that the system has reformed itself twice before. Shareholder primacy is not capitalism’s essence but a forty-year aberration that began with Milton Friedman’s 1970 essay and the agency-theory revolution, and a third reformation is underway, driven by the externalities the aberration was built to ignore. Hart relieves the stakeholder argument of the burden of novelty: the Director who makes it is not asking the corporation to become something new but to remember what it was.

Part of the answer lies in the metaphors we use. For most of the modern era the corporation has been imagined as a machine: people as inputs, performance as a function of control, markets as mechanisms seeking equilibrium, economies as closed loops. Jeremy Lent has made the most sustained case that this inheritance is both mistaken and ecologically lethal, and in Ecocivilization: Making a World that Works for All (Melville House, 2026) his chapter on principles, grounded in the design patterns of ecosystems and in humanity’s evolved inclination toward justice, mutuality, and dignity, may prove era-defining. Two of its concepts matter here. Symbiosis names the pattern by which living things that appear separate depend on and benefit one another, so that the relationship itself becomes the source of a system’s capacity to adapt and endure. Fractal coherence names the recurrence of healthy organizing patterns across scales, so that a cell, a community, and an ecosystem flourish by the same logic of mutual benefit.

SR Inc.’s commitment to aligning business with life was made long before Lent gave the idea this vocabulary; it was a conviction reached through practice. But Lent has given it a biological foundation. Executives, customers, businesses, markets, and economies are not half-imagined closed-loop machines. They are complex, adaptive, rightly purposed, intensely human persons, teams, and communities, every one of them sustained by ecological systems now under threat. I am nearly, not completely, aligned with Lent. He promotes degrowth; I reject it as an inversion of the quantity-based growth paradigm rather than a turn toward value-based growth.

Mariana Mazzucato has taken the same intuition into economics. The Common Good Economy: How to Make Capitalism Work for Us All (2026) is the book most likely to organize progressive economic hope between now and 2040. Economics, she observes, has treated “the good,” whether as public goods or as the commons, as a category of market failure to be patched when private incentives fall short, trapping governments and businesses in a reactive posture. Her corrective is an economics with the common good at its center, achieved through collective action, participation, and reciprocity. It is here that she introduces the Relational State: a state that governs not by command or correction but by building purposeful relationships with businesses, communities, and citizens, sharing risk and reward, and creating the spaces in which human flourishing can happen.

This essay proposes the Relational Enterprise as the counterpart the Relational State requires, not merely an extension of it. Mazzucato is blunt that stakeholder capitalism as a declaration of good intentions changes nothing; it must go to the center of how a firm creates value, and a firm that jointly creates value but privately captures it has not practiced it at all. That is wholly within an enterprise’s own control. How it shares the rewards of value created with its workforce and suppliers, who sits at the table when material decisions are made, and whether it accounts honestly for the value it draws from others are choices no regulator makes for it. Value is created in relationships, and their quality determines who benefits and who bears the cost.

Mazzucato is also specific about how collaboration is practiced, and her guidance translates directly to the enterprise. The compass she sets out in Part II of the book has five elements. Purpose and directionality: a mission chosen with stakeholders, ambitious enough to orient investment and clear enough to be measured against. Co-creation and participation: the people affected by a decision sit at the table where it is made, as participants in design rather than as audiences for consultation after the fact. Collective learning and knowledge sharing: what is learned in one part of a system is shared across it, so that suppliers, customers, and partners improve together rather than hoarding advantage against one another. Access for all and reward sharing: the gains from jointly created value are distributed to those who created it. Transparency and accountability: the enterprise is open about what it draws from others and what it returns. These are the operating principles of the Relational Enterprise, and it is no coincidence that they are also, almost item for item, what the mandatory reporting regimes now require a company to show.

Mazzucato grounds her argument in Elinor Ostrom, and her recounting of Ostrom’s Nobel deserves attention. For a generation, Garrett Hardin’s tragedy of the commons held that any shared resource would be destroyed by its users’ self-interest, leaving privatization or state control as the only remedies. Ostrom studied actual commons, Swiss pastures, Japanese forests, Spanish irrigation systems, Maine lobster fisheries, and found communities that had governed them sustainably for centuries with neither. Governing the Commons (1990) distilled their design principles: clear boundaries, rules fitted to local conditions, participation by those affected, accountable monitoring, graduated sanctions, accessible conflict resolution, and nested governance. The 2009 Nobel honored a refutation of the premise beneath modern economics, that people cannot communicate, trust, commit, or learn.

Mazzucato’s extension is that protecting the commons is not enough; the common good is an objective to be achieved together. The lesson for the corporation is direct. Its reputation, workforce capability, supplier relationships, social license, and the ecosystems it draws upon are a commons no shareholder owns and on which every shareholder’s return depends. Stakeholder mapping, materiality assessment, engagement, assurance, and grievance mechanisms are Ostrom’s principles under other names.

VIII. The CEO’s Window Sill

On the window sill of my office sit two framed Time covers. On the right is Milton Friedman, from December 1969, the year before his essay declared that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits. On the left is George W. Merck, from August 1952, with the words he had spoken to the Medical College of Virginia two years earlier: that medicine is for the people, not for the profits, and that the better his company remembered this, the larger the profits had been. They sat there for months before I understood what I was looking at. The first is an academic’s view of the corporation. The second is a CEO’s.

I learned the difference early, as the son of a business owner, and I have lived it as the CEO of a small mission-driven company. The CEO’s native perspective is forward-looking and relational. She knows the enterprise by the people who make it work and the customers who make it worthwhile, and she experiences value as something that arrives through those relationships, often years after the investment in them was made. The CFO’s perspective is retrospective and custodial, and necessarily so: what was earned, what was spent, what can be proven to an auditor. A healthy company needs both. But only one is the view from which an enterprise is led, and it is the view Merck described, not the one Friedman theorized. The error of the shareholder-primacy decades was to install the custodial view as the purpose of the firm.

This is the argument I made in “In Defense of the CSO” [link to In Defense of the CSO] in August 2026. The forward-looking, multi-stakeholder vision of the Chief Sustainability Officer is not a staff function’s special pleading; it is the natural perspective of the CEO, carried into the parts of the enterprise where the quarter would otherwise crowd it out. The introduction of SR’s Comprehensive Compliance Collaborative reflects the same conviction in operational form. Its premise is that mandatory reporting under CSRD, CSDDD, ISSB, and the California climate laws, done well, is the construction of exactly the systems a Relational Enterprise requires. The regulators have written Freeman into law, and the enterprise that treats compliance as an occasion to become more deliberately relational will find it has built, at modest cost, the governance it needed anyway.

IX. The Relational Enterprise: Aligning Business With Life

The thesis, stated whole, is this. A democratic capitalism capable of creating a shared and sustainable flourishing, as climate and environmental breakdown accelerates and as we enter an age of fragmentation and artificial superintelligence, requires corporations that are deliberate in their commitment to the multi-stakeholder value creation Freeman first defined. That commitment must be the purpose of the enterprise rather than a constraint upon it, and it must rest on a theory of value that recognizes markets as shaped by, and shaping, human beings.

The products we are offered, the work we can do, the communities we can afford, and the ecosystems we depend on are configured by market activity, and they configure what we come to want. A corporation therefore cannot disclaim responsibility for the shape of the markets it helps to make; that influence is what I have called Scope 4. And only a theory that acknowledges this can fully respect the dignity and autonomy of every human being, because only such a theory recognizes people as agents who shape the systems they live in rather than as inputs to be maximized or preferences to be priced. Dignity is recognized, not achieved, and the enterprise that honors it magnifies the agency of its stakeholders rather than extracting from them. That deeply personal and profoundly relational value is the center of Dignity First Leadership: Developing & Driving a World-Class Sustainability Strategy [link to DFL landing page], and it is the ground on which everything else in this essay stands.

I do not have to argue this from theory. It is manifest in SR Inc.’s own membership. Cisco Systems, a Member-Client for many years, was named the number one workplace in the world by Fortune and Great Place to Work in 2019, 2020, and 2021, and has appeared on Fortune’s U.S. list for every one of its twenty-nine years; its 10-K describes its relationship with employees as one of mutual benefit and names the practice a Conscious Culture, defined as acting with dignity, respect, fairness, and equity in every interaction.

Takeda, founded in Osaka in 1781 and now 245 years old, has decided and acted for more than two centuries by an explicit ordering of priorities, Patient, Trust, Reputation, Business, in that order, under the values its founder set down as Takeda-ism: integrity, fairness, honesty, and perseverance. And Merck KGaA of Darmstadt, the oldest pharmaceutical and chemical company in the world at 358 years, is still majority-owned in its thirteenth generation by the founding family, which holds some seventy percent of the capital through E. Merck KG, regards itself as trustee rather than owner, and attributes to that structure its heritage of taking responsibility for employees, the environment, and society. The George W. Merck on my window sill ran the American company that grew from the same Darmstadt pharmacy.

None of these enterprises is fully sustainable. Each is more sustainable than its peers precisely because its commitment to mutually winning relationships is storied, systematic, and present, and each has outlasted every management fashion that told it to do otherwise.

The more sustainable corporation, then, is the Relational Enterprise: one that defines its purpose as multi-stakeholder value creation in the near, mid, and long term, treats its stakeholders as partners rather than risks, governs its shared assets as the commons they are, takes responsibility for the markets it shapes, and reports on all of this with the honesty the frameworks now require. It is the most authentic form of corporate life because it describes itself truthfully. It is also the most durable, because the companies that have endured longest are those that cultivated their relationships and adapted them as conditions changed.

SR Inc.’s purpose is aligning business with life. The phrase sets a standard that can sound impossible. Life is staggeringly complex and relentlessly dynamic; no plan, model, or command structure can keep pace with it, and the mechanistic corporation has spent a century proving the point by being surprised, again and again, by the systems it depended on. How can any enterprise align with something it cannot predict or control?

The answer is structural, and it is the reason collaboration is both the purpose and the practice of the Relational Enterprise. An enterprise that recognizes and celebrates the dignity of every stakeholder, across continents and cultures, is not merely being decent. It is multiplying the number of intelligent, committed agents who are sensing change and responding to it on its behalf. The engineer in Bangalore, the supplier in Guadalajara, and the customer in Lyon become collaborators in a shared project rather than variables in someone else’s equation, and what they notice, invent, and adapt flows back into the enterprise as the coherence and creativity of a living system. That is how life itself keeps pace with life: not by central control but by distributed, mutually beneficial relationship at every scale.

The Relational Enterprise is not a sacrifice made for the sake of the planet. It is the form of the corporation best fitted to flourish in a world that is changing fastest exactly where the need for what it provides is growing most, and it flourishes the way life does: as it dignifies, and as it collaborates.

Notes and References

Freeman. R. Edward Freeman, Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach (Pitman, 1984; reissued Cambridge, 2010). R. Edward Freeman, Jeffrey S. Harrison, Andrew C. Wicks, Bidhan L. Parmar, and Simone de Colle, Stakeholder Theory: The State of the Art (Cambridge University Press, 2010). The 2010 book is in three parts. The first restates the problems stakeholder theory was built to solve, of value creation and trade, of the ethics of capitalism, and of the managerial mindset, and the core claim that a business is a set of relationships among groups with a stake in its activities. The second traces the idea across four literatures: business ethics, where it grounds managers’ obligations to all those affected by their decisions; strategic management, where it reframes strategy as creating value for stakeholders rather than capturing it from them; finance and accounting, where it challenges agency theory’s assumption that the shareholder is the only principal; and law and public policy, where it informed the constituency statutes and governance debates of the 1990s and 2000s. The third answers the standing objections. To the charge that a manager who serves everyone serves no one, the authors reply that stakeholder interests are far more often aligned than conflicting and that the manager’s craft lies in finding the decisions where they converge and making the remaining trade-offs transparently. To the charge that stakeholder theory is socialism by another name, they reply that it is a theory of value creation within capitalism that takes the shareholder’s return more seriously than agency theory does, because it attends to that return’s sources. The book closes on Freeman’s integration thesis: that every business decision has an ethical dimension and every ethical claim about business has economic consequences. It is the intellectual charter of Corporate Sustainability in a single volume.

Massie. Bob Massie, “Welcome to the ESG Evolution,” Institutional Investor, March 9, 2016. https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/2bsy3hpe296nq1057v3sw/corner-office/welcome-to-the-esg-evolution

The embrace. Business Roundtable, “Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation,” August 19, 2019 (181 signatories). https://www.businessroundtable.org/business-roundtable-redefines-the-purpose-of-a-corporation-to-promote-an-economy-that-serves-all-americans. World Economic Forum, “Davos Manifesto 1973” and “Davos Manifesto 2020: The Universal Purpose of a Company in the Fourth Industrial Revolution,” December 2, 2019. Larry Fink, “The Power of Capitalism,” BlackRock letter to CEOs, January 2022.

Frameworks. DJSI Corporate Sustainability Assessment (SAM, 1999 onward); GRI Standards (stakeholder inclusiveness principle from the 2000 G1 guidelines); SASB industry standards (2018); IFRS S1 and IFRS S2 (June 2023); Directive (EU) 2022/2464 (CSRD) and the European Sustainability Reporting Standards; Directive (EU) 2024/1760 (CSDDD), as amended by the Omnibus package. SR Inc.’s 2021 definition of Corporate Sustainability is from its published materials.

Hart, Lent, Mazzucato, Ostrom. Stuart L. Hart, Beyond Shareholder Primacy: Remaking Capitalism for a Sustainable Future (Stanford Business Books, 2024). Jeremy Lent, Ecocivilization: Making a World that Works for All (Melville House, May 2026). Mariana Mazzucato, The Common Good Economy: How to Make Capitalism Work for Us All (PublicAffairs, September 2026; UK edition A New Compass, Allen Lane, June 2026). The compass is set out in Part II, Elements of the Common Good (chs. 5–10); the firm-level argument for collective value creation, engaging Freeman and Oliver Hart, runs through ch. 7 (Co-creation and Participation), ch. 9 (Access for All and Reward Sharing), and ch. 10 (Transparency and Accountability). See also Mazzucato, “Collective Value Creation: A New Approach to Stakeholder Value,” International Review of Applied Economics (2022), and “Governing the Economics of the Common Good,” Journal of Economic Policy Reform 27 (2023). Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge University Press, 1990). Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162 (1968).

The window sill. Time, August 18, 1952 (George W. Merck); Time, December 19, 1969 (Milton Friedman); Milton Friedman, “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits,” New York Times Magazine, September 13, 1970.

Author’s own work. Jim Boyle, Dignity First Leadership: Developing & Driving a World-Class Sustainability Strategy (Sustainable Leadership Press, June 2026); “In Defense of the CSO,” SR Inc. Sustainable Leadership Blog, August 2026 [link to In Defense of the CSO].