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How an esoteric economic theory—and its most devout believers—changed the world forever.

In the modern economy, stock price is king. The value of a corporation is measured in how it enriches its shareholders, even when doing so subtracts from long-term growth or social good. Greed, in the last half-century of corporate practice, has become very good. Company Men is a sweeping intellectual history of how shareholder value rose from the lesser-known edges of academic theory to the vanguard of corporate practice.

Historian Sean Delehanty marshals archival resources to reveal how a group of motivated consultants, activist investors, and academic economists successfully branded shareholder value as the antidote to problems of management and economic stagnation in the 1970s. In their success, they created a class of well-heeled managers who executed shareholder-value theory as an everyday practice—and at the expense of most everything else. Delehanty’s history of the modern American corporation is a sobering account of the business regime that would rule the world and produce no shortage of regrets—even amongst those who championed it. Company Men is intellectual history at its most vital, offering a surprising origin story of our economy’s discontents.

On the faulty intellectual origins of shareholder primacy—and how policy can win back what’s been lost.

In an era of shareholder primacy, share price is king. Businesses operate with short-term goals to deliver profits to shareholders, enjoying stability (and bonuses) in the process. While the public bemoans the doctrine for its insularity and wealth-consolidating effects, its influence over corporate governance persists. Good Company offers an exacting argument for why shareholder primacy was never the right model to follow for truly understanding how corporations operate.

Lenore Palladino shows that corporations draw power from public charters—agreements that allow corporations to enjoy all manner of operational benefits. In return, companies are meant to innovate for the betterment of the societies that support them. However, that debt—increasingly wielded for stock buybacks and shareholder bonuses—is not being repaid. Palladino theorizes a modern corporation that plays its intended role while delivering social and economic good in the process and offers tangible policy solutions to make this a reality. Good Company is both an expert introduction to the political economy of the firm—as it was, as it is, as it can be—and a calibrating examination of how public policy can shape companies, and societies, for the better.