Beyond Statements: How Corporate Structural Reforms Can Support the Public Interest

Corporations get a lot of flak. Some of the biggest love to evade taxation, suppress wages, and influence politics. But sometimes, companies do look beyond profit margins and seek to make decisions that benefit the public. This week, we explore the structural features that could help businesses embed public-interest values into their work and make those alternate priorities more feasible to pursue.

Julie Menter is program director at Transform Finance, where her work focuses on challenging traditional investment practices and mobilizing support for Alternative Ownership Enterprises. Transform Finance is a research, education, and implementation partner that works with stakeholders to challenge legacy investment approaches, seed transformative investment models, and build movement power.

---

Earlier this month, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei refused the Pentagon’s demand for unrestricted military use of the company’s AI models. He drew a line at autonomous weapons and mass surveillance, even as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth threatened to blacklist the company.

While the headlines focused on one CEO’s courage, what’s more interesting is how he was able to make that moral stand.

Anthropic is a Public Benefit Corporation with a Long-Term Benefit Trust (LTBT) designed to safeguard its mission against short-term pressures of shareholder returns. Specifically, the LTBT “can ensure that the organizational leadership is incentivized to carefully evaluate future models for catastrophic risks,” according to Anthropic’s website, “rather than prioritizing being the first to market above all other objectives.” These structural features don’t guarantee the company will always make the most socially beneficial decision, but they do help explain why Anthropic could say no to the Department of Defense when others wouldn’t.

Contrast this with 2020, when America’s largest corporations pledged nearly $50 billion toward racial equity after George Floyd’s murder. Walmart, Amazon, and Meta made sweeping commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion. By 2024, those same companies were rolling them back. Without structural mechanisms to lock in the commitments when they were made, they evaporated when political winds changed.

What makes values-based decisions durable isn’t the whims or courage of select leaders—it’s infrastructure. And the opportunity to build corporate infrastructure that supports public benefit is broader than most people recognize.

More Business Leaders Act on Values Than We Realize

There’s a powerful norm in our economic system: shareholder primacy. That’s the idea that corporate board members and managers are expected, even obligated, to prioritize short-term financial returns for shareholders above everything else. This norm is reinforced by investor expectations, business education, market incentives, policy choices, and anyone who treats profit maximization as inevitable.

But this norm is relatively recent, and more contested than many believe. For much of history, commerce was embedded in community obligations. Medieval European guilds, Islamic waqf endowments, and Indian shreni associations all balanced profit with broader social purposes. The singular focus on short-term shareholder returns intensified only over the past few decades.

Even today, strategic choices guided by values like environmental stewardship, economic inclusion, worker dignity, or community responsibility—even when those choices conflict with short-term returns—happen across industries, ownership structures, and company sizes. In fact, we found and analyzed over 600 such cases.

These decisions are not always motivated by or related to progressive goals—Chick-fil-A, for example, closes on Sundays for religious reasons, forgoing revenue in ways many companies wouldn’t tolerate. But they show that shareholder-first norms can be broken. Dick’s Sporting Goods, a publicly traded company, took a $150 million revenue hit to stop selling assault rifles after the Parkland school shooting. Epic Systems, now valued at over $45 billion, refused outside investment for 45 years to maintain independence and control over its patient-centered mission. Beatrice Dixon left $70 million on the table by agreeing to sell the Honey Pot Company to a buyer committed to preserve its values, for $380 million instead of $450 million.

Business leaders are already making decisions motivated by reasons other than profits, and sometimes to the detriment of profits. And while every business leader who breaks the norm makes it easier for others to follow, individual decisions aren’t enough. Without structural backing, they can be easily reversed.

Structural Mechanisms Can Make Values-Led Decisions Durable

The DEI rollbacks demonstrate the core challenge: When values depend only on ongoing leadership commitment, without structural backing, they can be abandoned when political winds shift, leadership changes, or investor pressure mounts. What makes values stick is whether they’re embedded into mechanisms that can apply them into a company’s day-to-day operations.

Our research identified a range of tools companies use to operationalize values—from mission statements and philanthropic programs that can be easily reversed, to legally binding provisions that are far harder to undo.

Kickstarter, for example, amended its charter in 2015 to become a Public Benefit Corporation, legally obligating directors to consider impact on society, not just shareholders. This requirement has now outlasted leadership changes and market pressures for a decade. When Bob’s Red Mill‘s founder faced succession, he converted the company to employee ownership rather than sell to private equity, ensuring workers would share in long-term success and values would outlast him. CivicaRx, a nonprofit pharmaceutical manufacturer, can offer insulin at a fraction of typical market prices specifically because its nonprofit ownership structure prioritizes access over profits.

These mechanisms—ownership structures, governance provisions, agreements that protect values during acquisitions—are where progress gets locked in. The challenge is making them much more widespread.

How Nonmanagement Stakeholders Can Push for Change

Nonmanagement stakeholders—workers, consumers, investors, and civil society groups—have long pushed companies to act on values. But the outcomes of that pressure vary widely.

Sometimes pressure leads to commitments that quickly evaporate, but other times, it leads to lasting structural change: After the rise of the #MeToo movement, shareholder advocacy groups convinced Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Wells Fargo to drop forced arbitration clauses. Health-care unions pushed for California’s mandated nurse-to-patient ratios, which became policy that bound the entire industry.

Some business leaders want to prioritize values but lack the models or resources to make those commitments last. We see three promising pathways to address this gap:

1. Build awareness of alternative models. Most business leaders don’t know that options like employee ownership, golden shares, or perpetual purpose trusts exist—or how to implement them. Organizations like the Purpose Foundation, the Employee Ownership Expansion Network, and Doughnut Economics Action Lab are documenting these models and expanding what business leaders see as possible.
   

2. Direct capital toward values-aligned structures. Business leaders interested in values-led structures often struggle to find investors who won’t demand financial returns above all else. These leaders can turn to impact-investing initiatives like the Catalytic Capital Consortium, which supports investors who prioritize values over financial returns. When stakeholders organize to direct this capital, they can create the financial infrastructure that makes alternative models viable.
   

3. Advocate for enabling policy. Policy can make values-based corporate governance mechanisms easier to adopt. The proposed American Ownership and Resilience Act would make employee ownership transitions more financially viable by allowing selling owners to defer capital gains taxes. As an example from abroad, Germany is working to establish a distinct legal form for steward-owned companies—businesses where control stays with active stewards rather than external investors, and profits are supporting the company’s purpose rather than enriching shareholders. Workers, consumers, investors, and civil society groups can advocate for policies that make durable mechanisms for values-based corporate structure the easier path, not the harder one.

None of this replaces the critical need for government action to raise the social and environmental standards for all companies or the need to hold corporations accountable for their actions. But stakeholders can shape the broader ecosystem by influencing norms, building awareness of alternatives, organizing capital, and advocating for enabling policy. Together, they shape the structural conditions that make values-led decisions more possible, more likely, and more durable.

Thanks to Curt Lyon and Andrea Armeni for their guidance and feedback in drafting this article.

---

Fireside Stacks is a weekly newsletter from Roosevelt Forward about progressive politics, policy, and economics. If you enjoyed this installment, consider sharing it with your friends.