Professor Colin Mayer addresses the future of the corporation

Society was in attendance today at a thought-provoking RSA event, looking at how we can restore trust and integrity to big business. The talk, entitled ‘21st Century Inc: Making the Corporation Work for Us', was delivered by Professor Colin Mayer of the University of Oxford.

Mayer's assertion is that corporations currently act both as engines of prosperity and the source many pressing global problems. He believes that big businesses have increasingly become hijacked by short-term shareholder interests. In order to rediscover their moral authority, corporations much therefore express a clear set of organisational values and anchor these commitments under the long-term custodianship of trusts or foundations. In this way, he predicts that it is possible to maintain the transformative wealth-creating powers of business, to minimise their destructive capability, and to harness their potential to help and enrich society at large.

Colin Mayer is the Peter Moores Professor of Management Studies at Oxford's Saïd Business School. He was actually Saïd's first Professor back in 1994 and its Dean from 2006 to 2011. Prior to entering mainstream academia, Mayer was a director of Oxera, and helped to build the business into one of the largest independent economics consultancies in the UK.

Mayer's book ‘Firm Commitment', on which this talk was based, is available now in bookshops.