Successful Companies Live Up to this Ancient Greek Ideal

Companies’ priorities are rooted in the culture of their times. The East India Company, for example, systematically asset-stripped the Indian subcontinent for more than 200 years — and was largely celebrated by its shareholders as a roaring success. Now we look back in horror at the bloodshed, slavery, drug money, corruption, and exploitation that were its daily currency, and we note that today’s leading companies (hopefully) have strikingly different definitions of success.

Today, most people would argue that successful companies are not just financially sound, but must also be socially responsible and environmentally sustainable, which can be assessed with various environmental, social, and governance (ESG) metrics. We propose, however, that ESG metrics are merely the observable result of a more fundamental set of values: a notion we call corporate philotimy.

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Written by: Gabriel Karageorgiou and Dominic Selwood