As I joined more than a thousand people at the Royal Albert Hall last week to mark 25 years of the Prince of Wales's presidency of Business in the Community, I reflected on how the battles over corporate social responsibility have changed.
For decades, some rejected the very idea of corporate responsibility. Milton Friedman called it a “fundamentally subversive doctrine” in a free society, adding: “There is one and only one social responsibility of business – to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits.”
If managers wished to support other causes they should do so in their own time and with their own money. Many supported this view. The shareholder value movement, which argued that a company's sole responsibility was to produce a decent return for its owners, was based on it.