Business Concept
Business & Society

"What is good for society, is good for business," said former General Electric CEO Jack Welsh. The signals, however, are red: Mistrust is declining in industries worldwide. It is fuled by rising expectations of all key stakeholders towards the corporation. Mistrust in an industry leads to higher transaction costs, including lobbying and advertising budgets, increasing customer acquisition costs, ligitation fees etc. But trust is also being rebuild in some companies. Business must get back into society to prevent a rapid decline of trust in globalization and capitalism in general.

 Size obliges explains, how managers can stop the decline of trust in global corporations. Where global companies fail to see themselves as part of society, they are very soon under attack from public opinion. The opportunity in all this is to set their own standards before the state intervenes by acting as a regulatory body.

Politicians worldwide have set themselves ambitious goals for the future: continued economic growth, the defeat of poverty and epidemics, stable governments in third world countries, and intercultural dialogue to prevent war and terrorism. But climate change threatens to bring all this to a grinding halt - in The Environment Strikes back.

From some western perspectives, there seemed to be no alternative to the Western values and business model. But its uncontested supremacy might just be a Western self-dellusion. From an outsider's perspective, the rise of the West in the past 250 years can be interpreted as a short period in history, possibly now approaching an end. The West needs a new Sense of Self.