Beyond the Plc

What is wrong with contemporary capitalism? Was the financial crisis of 2008 caused by deep structural problems in the way firms are organised? In Beyond the plc, two of the most creative thinkers in Britain today, Paul Ormerod and Greg Fisher, tackle this problem head on. They show that Britain lacks diversity in its forms of corporate governance and is too reliant on the plc model. Too many British companies are plcs (or shareholder corporations whose shares are sold on public stock markets). Yet this model was shown to have serious defects during the financial crisis. The authors point out that it was designed for the capital-intensive nineteenth-century economy rather than the contemporary digital economy. They argue that the laws relating to plcs need to be updated and that entrepreneurs should be given options to choose new organisational forms, such as the 'for-benefit corporation', that are better suited to the twenty-first century. Traditional economic understanding hinders reform because it sees the economy as a static machine rather than a dynamic, evolving process. The authors give a comprehensive account of the defects of the plc and show the changes needed to make it work better. They also propose legislation for several new organisational forms: a triple bottom-line company prioritising social and environmental goals as well as profit; a German-style governance structure with employee representatives on the company board; and a for-benefit corporation designed specifically for the needs of the information economy. Greater pluralism in the ecosystem of corporate forms will give Britain the diversity it needs to thrive in the rapidly changing economy of the twenty-first century.

Table of Contents:
Authors, Executive Summary, 1. The Thesis, 2.Organisations, 3.The Emergence of Different Organisational Forms, 4. Organisational Law and the Dynamic Economy, 5. The Joint Stock Company, 6. The New Economy, 7. Policy Recommendations, Appendix 1: Organisations - Forms and Participation in the Economy, Appendix 2: Senscot.com Article: 'Intellectual ferment poured into CICs!'Appendix 3: For-Benefit Corporations

About the Author :
Greg Fisher is the Managing Director of Synthesis. After growing up in the West Midlands, he studied Economics & Politics at St John's College, University of Cambridge. Greg joined the Bank of England as a graduate entrant in 1995 and subsequently worked in a spectrum of roles that mixed economics and finance. Between 2004 and 2008, Greg worked for a hedge fund as a global macroeconomic strategist. Before joining the think-tank, ResPublica, in August 2010, he spent two years researching the new science of complex systems, and how it relates to economics and finance. Greg is a Senior Research Associate of the London School of Economics' Complexity Group. His interests extend beyond pure economics, and include human psychology, neuroscience and cognitive science, and how these relate to our understanding of society. Paul Ormerod is a Director at Synthesis. He is the author of three best-selling books on economics, Death of Economics (1994), Butterfly Economics (1998), Why Most Things Fail (2005), a Business Week US Business Book of the Year. He read economics at Cambridge and took the MPhil in economics at Oxford. He worked initially as a macro -economic forecaster and modeller at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research in London. In the early 1980s he moved to the private sector as Director of Economics at the Henley Centre for Forecasting. The management team bought this from the Henley Management College and subsequently sold it to Martin Sorrel's WPP Group. He founded Volterra Consulting in 1998 in order to carry out innovative work on practical policy questions in both the public and private sectors. In 2009 he was awarded an honorary DSc by Durham for the 'distinction of his contributions to economics'. He publishes on complexity-related areas in a wide range of academic journals such as Proceedings of the Royal Society B(iology), Journal of Cultural Economics and the Journal of Economic Interaction and Co-ordination.