It’s cap-and-gown season, and while I like a good commencement speech as much as the next guy, I tend to find myself, at graduation ceremonies, wanting to hear more from the young people graduating, rather than some established oldster like myself. That feeling is even stronger this year, given the particularly strange and trying times in which this cohort has been forged. 

The class graduating college in 2021 was mostly born in the year 2000, give or take — true “Millennials,” to render a meaningless marketing and media segmentation even more meaningless. This generation came into existence right before the attacks on 9/11, experienced the financial crisis of 2008 and the Great Recession as one of their first memories of public affairs, and are now entering the professional world as young adults during a catastrophic global pandemic. 

That lens is so different from the one that I and my peers looked at our future through, when we moved our tassels from one side to the other. And I think we have at least as much to learn from them as they do from us. In that spirit, I’ve invited a member of the Class of ‘21 to share her perspective with Forbes readers. Ten years ago, when she was in seventh grade, I taught Daniela Nemirovsky’s “Introduction to Entrepreneurship” class. (Did I mention she went to school in Silicon Valley?) In high school, she was a summer intern at my firm. And earlier this week, she graduated summa cum laude from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, one of the best business programs in the world. 

In the following essay, Daniela lays out the concerns that many in her cohort have about how business has been, and is currently, conducted. They’re worried it’s a slow-motion plucking of the goose that laid the golden egg. She shares some thoughts on what she believes her generation of business leaders will need to do to reimagine capitalism and leave the world better off than they found it.

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Let me begin at the academic beginning: “Legal Studies 101: Ethics and Social Responsibility.” It was one of my Wharton class’ most influential courses, because it taught us the rules of the game of business: what was blatantly illegal, what was unethical but profitable, where to draw the line. We spent each session discussing the grey area between legal and ethical, cast votes for different approaches to cases, and consistently returned to a question we would ask ourselves thousands of times over the next four years: What does it cost? 

It turns out that a lot of business is essentially reducible to this question. But the implication is not the cost to our employees, the environment, or society. What we really care about is the cost to shareholders.

“Shareholder primacy,” as we now know it, was popularized by Milton Friedman in the 1970s and underlies almost all business activity. Every dollar we spend — from advertising to “corporate social responsibility” — can be and is reduced to return on investment. We must know these numbers, because, according to Friedman, the social responsibility of a business is “to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits.” This is a core tenet of business school: as operators, we learned how to make decisions in the best interest of the company and its investors; as investors, we learned to invest in companies that produce returns.

The social responsibility of business, according to Friedman, is “to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception fraud.” It’s hard to imagine the business world straying from what has become such a venerated and foundational principle. But by defining legality as the only acceptable constraint on profit maximization, Friedman has allowed businesses to ignore the consequences of their actions on society. Now, we are grappling with an alarming reality: capitalism as it exists does not work for most people. It’s a game many don’t want to play.

As a newly minted graduate of Wharton, I believe in the power of business to positively impact the world. My peers and I recognize that the capitalist system — a system built by many readers of this publication — has generated more growth and prosperity than any other in human history. And yet, as future business leaders, some of us also fear that we are inheriting a poisoned chalice; that the actions of corporations now are myopic and ultimately self-annihilating. If business continues as usual, there will be nothing left to hand to the next generation. 

The advent of “meme stocks” — most notably GameStop — demonstrates many people's disgust with a game they can’t seem to get in on. Take NFT or crypto-mining, which has enriched a very small part of society. Mining one token emits more CO2 into the atmosphere than driving from Philadelphia to Detroit. On Wall Street, Amazon increased its profits 84% in the last year but continued to deprive its workers of humane living conditions. Billionaires increased their wealth by 54% during the pandemic while 27 million of their fellow citizens work for less than a living wage. 

The cracks are everywhere, and they’re beginning to raise questions about the structure of our economy. This is especially true in the United States, which largely leaves it up to companies to determine its citizens’ wages, working conditions, healthcare, and quality of life.

My graduating peers and I will soon be holding levers of power in these companies. We are the next generation of CEOs and investors, and that puts us in a position to begin to redefine the rules — to decide where to draw the line between accountability to the shareholder and to the world. If we hope to preserve the foundations of business itself, we must hold ourselves responsible to the larger world in which we operate.

This is not a novel idea. In 2018, Larry Fink addressed the importance of social purpose in his annual letter to BlackRock’s CEOs, pointing to failures in government as both an opportunity and duty for the private sector. A year later, a 2019 Business Roundtable letter signed by 181 prominent CEOs pledged to promote “an economy that serves all Americans” and to “commit to deliver[ing] value to all [stakeholders].” Companies are recognizing that as an industry, our fiduciary duty must not only be to our shareholders. We must take it as our cause to generate value for all stakeholders: employees, customers, the environment, and the greater society must factor into our cost-benefit analyses. 

As future leaders of business, my generation will be accountable for the promises made by the companies we lead. It is up to us, therefore, to lead with a wider, more systematic view of our impact on the world. This means incorporating business externalities into our decision making, holding those we invest in accountable for their impact on society, and reckoning with what is owed to all stakeholders. 

It is up to us to build a world in which society is symbiotic with and continuously improved by business. To get there will require changing the nature of the game of business. But that sounds like a game worthier of playing.

- Daniela Nemirovsky, Wharton Class of 2021