In her blog “Thought Sparks“, Rita McGrath quotes and cites Lazonick’s book, Investing in Innovation: Confronting Predatory Value Extraction in the U.S. Corporation, and discuses “a board and governance level issue that doesn’t get nearly enough attention is whether firms…
Tag: agency theory
Innovative Enterprise Solves the Agency Problem: The Theory of the Firm, Financial Flows, and Economic Performance
By William Lazonick ♦ Since the late 1980s, the dominant ideology of corporate governance in the United States has been that, for the sake of superior economic performance, companies should “maximize shareholder value” (MSV). As promulgated by agency theorists, however, MSV is an ideology of value extraction that lacks a theory of value creation. As a theory of value creation, I have constructed “The Theory of Innovative Enterprise”—an analytical framework for understanding how a business enterprise can generate a good or service that is of higher quality and lower cost than products previously available. In this essay, I use innovation theory to provide both a general theoretical critique and a selective empirical critique of agency theory.