NEW YORK, UNITED STATES / AGILITYPR.NEWS / October 24, 2024 / JUST Capital’s Annual Americans’ Views on Business Report Is A Blueprint for “Win-Win-Win” Between Stakeholders, Shareholders, and Society at Large

JUST Capital, a leading non-profit organization defining, measuring, and incentivizing corporate stakeholder behavior, recently released its annual Americans’ Views on Business Survey. 

This report, which is the organization’s longest-running longitudinal study, is based on focus groups and a representative survey of 3,000 Americans.

Today’s corporate leaders are facing a deeply divided political landscape, rapidly shifting stakeholder demands, ongoing economic uncertainties, and myriad technological, regulatory, and environmental forces that present both risk and opportunity. Against this backdrop, the report highlights the public’s clear direction for corporate leaders:

• The majority of Americans — regardless of political party, ideology, or other demographic differences — are generally united in their expectations for corporations, particularly in areas where positive societal impact dovetails with positive business performance: paying people fairly, investing in their workforce, treating customers better, offering products or services at a fair price, minimizing harm to the environment, strengthening communities, and even making good on climate commitments.
• Whereas in previous years this survey saw greater demand for CEOs to speak out on social issues, opinion is now much more divided overall. When looking at political ideology splits, we see the percent of Americans on both sides of the aisle who believe CEOs should speak out only on issues related to their business grow between 2021 and 2024.
• In today’s low-trust environment, the American public is looking for more information on what companies are actually doing, not what they say they are doing.

“Corporate leadership is under unprecedented pressure. Performance expectations are sky-high, scrutiny is intense, and the margins for error are basically nonexistent. In surveying the American public’s views on business, we have found common ground across political and other demographic lines: executives need to get back to the basics,” says JUST Capital CEO Martin Whittaker. “The leaders who create value for all their stakeholders, also create more value for their shareholders, for themselves, and for society at large. Our data shows this ‘win-win-win’ is not mere conjecture; it’s a fact.”

These insights will be followed by JUST Capital’s polling data later this year, which further breaks down how the American public prioritizes key issues for companies to address and will underpin the annual JUST Capital Rankings of America’s Most Just Companies in Q1 2025.