Fortune Archives: New Year’s resolutions for the corporate world

Eight years ago, at the dawn of Donald Trump’s first presidency, a group of the world’s largest and most influential corporations roared into 2017 with an ambitious set of resolutions. 

A month earlier in Rome, at the encouragement of Pope Francis, Fortune and its then sister publication Time had assembled some 100 CEOs and a slew of leaders of influential NGOs and charities for a day of brainstorming on how the private sector could address global social problems. The promises that came out of that gathering—dubbed the Fortune + Time Global Forum—were inspiring, as Fortune deputy editor Clifton Leaf wrote at the time.  

The companies vowed to bring the one-fifth of the world’s population that was “unbanked” onto the financial grid, and to invest in primary education, small businesses, job training, and health care for those who most sorely needed it. The executives also “pledged to do a better job of protecting the planet, reduce their own companies’ energy use and environmental footprints, and accelerate efforts to fight climate change,” Leaf wrote. “And they recommitted to embracing inclusion in their own ranks.” 

That gathering was a precursor to a shift in the prevailing philosophy of America’s powerful Business Roundtable, as Fortune’s then-CEO Alan Murray wrote in 2019. The group of prominent company CEOs announced that they were moving away from the Milton Friedman–derived “shareholder primacy” approach, in which profits are a company’s only priority, and toward a vision of “stakeholder capitalism” that commits also to the concerns of customers, employees, suppliers, and the larger community.  

Other seismic forces have rocked the business world since then, including the COVID pandemic and the 2020 summer of protests and corporate reckonings following the murder of George Floyd; a lacerating campaign against diversity initiatives in higher education and corporations; and growing backlashes to ESG investments and “woke capitalism” from both the political right and left.  

All that, plus the imminent return of Donald Trump to the White House—which has left many in the business world anxious about chaos and retribution—suggests that this may not be the moment for a new list of resolutions.

But perhaps, as we consider the challenges of the year ahead, it’s worth looking back to the world-changing ideas hatched at that Rome meeting. There is still plenty of work to be done.