The crucial importance of stakeholder relationships is now widely recognised.

However, in practice, global companies rely not just on face-to-face interaction with their stakeholders but on digital communication with their networks, for example, with global supply chains and complex interconnected groups of suppliers and customers. So effective relationships in these huge networks are crucially important, which depends in turn on the human connectivity of these networks. Consequently, the major challenge facing us is not simply about ethics: rather it is to design companies and markets, as well as governments, in such a way that the pursuit of wealth, justice and sustainability does not become self-defeating.

The second key issue to increase public acceptability and financial stability of Corporate Capitalism is the need to realign corporate stakeholder relationship priorities, which currently give excessive attention to the interests of shareholders over all other major stakeholders who are impacted by its values and behaviour.

The starting point of Michael’s new book is a simple proposition: that if we are serious about transforming Corporate Capitalism, whether Western Capitalism or “State Capitalism”, we will need to start by looking at how these systems connect us as human beings.

At present, Corporate Capitalism does not ensure that the interests of all stakeholders are properly considered in strategic decisions, nor that stakeholder relationships and their wider network relationships have the necessary relational stability, and thus the resilience required for financial sustainability, which in turn undergirds national political stability – especially in democratic societies.

The need for relational stability forces us to ask the question: What is this company here to do? Like it or not, a company relies on the effort, resources and goodwill of a diverse group of stakeholders, all of whom have at least a moral claim on how this accumulation of financial power is used. The peculiar construction of the listed company, with its current explicit or implicit bias to shareholders, has introduced a relational instability with widespread and sometimes conflicting effects. It requires closer examination.