**7. Conclusion**

In conclusion, currently many businesses are operating in ways that have had adverse outcomes on natural environments, employment opportunities, and aggravated inequalities in wealth. These adverse consequences occur to a significant degree because many businesses are operated and organized in order to maximize the value of businesses measured almost exclusively in financial terms, thereby prioritizing financial interests above all other interests. The financial model of business enterprises has become so dominant that many ESG initiatives are promoted and defended as being financially advantageous to businesses rather than because they will provides means for increasing the productivity of enterprises with regard to natural and human resources valued on their own terms as valued economic assets. I have criticized the financial model for a number of reasons. In so far as businesses have operated in keeping with this model, they have tended to occasion the adverse environmental, social, and economic consequences described above. This model provides an overly narrow and restricted understanding of productivity and has encouraged businesses disproportionately to favor the interests of investors over other stakeholders.

I have called for significant changes in how to think about the business of businesses and how business enterprises govern themselves. Many people have a vested interest in the financial model of business enterprises and will resist these changes. As the climate crisis becomes more severe, many people will probably be forced to modify their views modestly and work to reduce GHG emissions, while still prioritizing their financial interests. The proposed changes, like those endorsed by the Business Roundtable, that recognize business enterprises in relation to their stakeholders are likely to meet with resistance. Nevertheless, a number of these changes have already been introduced, in this or that country, in this or that firm, and defended by business people both because they respect the complex, interactive character of business enterprises as they operate in practice and because they more adequately foster and gauge productivity – not as currently almost exclusively in relation to financial returns but in the effective and value-added utilization of natural and human resources to meet human needs and wants. After all, that is what the business of business is all about.
