It has belatedly dawned on the movers and shakers that organizations don't exist for the sole purpose of earning money to the shareholders.
Stakeholders, Corporate Social Responsibility, Sustainability, Triple bottom line... These were not subjects covered when Stanford did their board member trainings only a few years ago. Now, even the Business Roundtable of America seems to at least pay lip service to the importance of more balanced stakeholder interests - or in economic terms: that unless enough people earn enough money to shop for more than the mere basics, there will be no positive bottom lines for anybody.
As some organizations have a hard time recognizing the legitimacy of employees organizing, it was refreshing to hear VC Ben Horowitz (of Andreessen Horowitz) discuss his take on what ethical leadership looks like: It is not in the values that we write on nice posters but in how we treat each other.
While you can fool all people some of the time and some people all of the time, you can't continuously fool all people to believe that you are an ethical person or company if you don't treat your people that way.
The discussion took place at the Computer History Museum before Thanksgiving and is now available on Youtube.