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Business has been measuring shareholder returns via earnings reports and changes in stock price for what seems like forever. But now that stakeholder capitalism is in vogue, corporations need new metrics.
Enter Brian Moynihan, Bank of America’s CEO of 10 years and the latest guest on Fortune podcast “Leadership Next.” As chair of the International Business Council (IBC), he is working to figure out a set of common metrics the business community can use to measure the stakeholder capitalism that the Business Roundtable endorsed last year. And despite the pandemic, the group is getting closer to determining that final list of metrics and sub-metrics.
“You’ve had a pandemic and an economic crisis around that pandemic, but at the same time, we have more people signing onto the metrics, we have more dialogues, and the green part of this has gotten completely embedded into the recovery question,” Moynihan said of interest in stakeholder capitalism despite the recession.
To ensure that interest translates into widespread use of the metrics, the IBC has been focusing on finding “the best-of-the-best metrics” that allow for results that companies can easily calculate and disclose. Moynihan said that the consistency and accountability these disclosed results provide will be key, because society’s problems can’t be solved without private industry.
“Private money has to drive it,” he said.
In the remainder of the interview, host Alan Murray asks Moynihan about his stance on ever-increasing CEO pay, purpose-driven leadership at Bank of America, and the bank’s enormous commitment of $300 billion over the next decade to environmentally friendly business.
