Part of this is unintended consequences. Previous rulings have said that the board and company must prioritize shareholder benefit to avoid them focusing on their own personal enrichment. At the same time, this pursuit of growth is why the stock market is growing 25%+ in the good years which everyone loves seeing in their 401K and IRA statements.

We really need to encourage more B corporations both in the founding and running and also by eschewing public company stocks that are not.

It's a common belief, that boards have encouraged, that they are "required" to act in the best interests of shareholders by maximizing share value. This is wrong on both accounts. Boards are only required to consider the direct impact on shareholders when deciding on events that would directly impact them, ie mergers and acquisitions. The rest of the time they can do as they please shareholders be damned, and there is a ton of case law supporting that.

The OG battle of Dodge v Ford was about profit margins and sort-of about dividends. It's hard not to feel that the case law is muddy on the subject given that's where its roots lay.

I’m curious if “free markets” are really driving these companies towards endless growth every quarter or if it’s the result of the sophisticated capital system Wall St pioneered in the late 1800s.

If anything it’s a function of American style public markets and I’m not going for a no true Scotsman argument but rather it’s important to look at the whole system in place rather than dismissive politicized labels.

This skewed incentive system then gets combined with another common problem and made far worse. Public stock market corporations are not the only ones who decline in caring about their core values. This happens to many actual public government agencies, non profits, or any large organization when later generations of executive take over...people who weren’t there for the original vision. These people care more about the organization itself than they do about what value the organization delivers to society.

In public stock companies this usually means the people who then start to only care about the accountants demands (tons of CEOs are accountants, few are engineers) and what public investors think and feel (their moods often determine prices as much as reality) and most importantly not caring first about their value to customers... which had created the whole empire [1]. Ala the Iron rule of bureaucracy [2].

[1] GE is the perfect example of this, where the finance/Wall St guys took over, created the highest growth rates, then nearly destroyed the company in pursuit of growth, and changed the whole company away from their core engineering business and nearly destroyed it. They are now slowly slimming the Capital division and retiring to making things

https://www.wsj.com/articles/ge-powered-the-american-century...

[2] https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html

FWIW, the CEO of Rogers (large Canadian telecom and media corp) was an engineer by training. It's not much different. (Though I'll give him points for pushing for improved customer focus, while focusing on growing the network infrastructure, and for choosing Ericsson equipment primarily) But still. They're not well-liked in Canada—though maybe less hated currently with the recent heat on Bell.

Yeah that's more of a representative example of the culture of public companies (accountants and finance running the show) rather than engineer-CEOs being some panacea solution.

Individuals and leaders within the company help but they're all playing the same game in a culture which values the organization for the organizations sake combined with a system that forces companies to be laser focused on a single metric... when companies in a typical marketplace are a collection of metrics/incentives.