Book & Videos

Good Companies
How to reinvent the economy and create companies which will drive us to a meaningful future?

Author: Piotr Trojanowski

Published: Jan 17th, 2023

We are living in an era of great anxiety and great disconnect. Civilizational debt calls to be paid off while CEOs continue to pursue profit and return on invested capital for shareholders.

If we do more of the same things that we have been doing, where does it lead us to?

In recent decades, this question has grown into the #1 most important question in the public domain. I call it the Great Challenge Question.

The Great Challenge question is a manifestation of the growing anxiety of individuals and societies across the globe. It exposes our current weakness and a crisis of humanity.

If you accept The Great Challenge, then there are natural follow-up questions that you need to ask yourself. What do our actions say about our current ways of thinking? What do they say about our beliefs, habits, and assumptions we make? What do they say about the goals we pursue?

Let’s look beyond the current well-established role of business and the principles of the economy. How do we need to transform the business world to start serving what is important to us?

In the just-released book "Good Companies: How to reinvent the economy and create companies that will drive us into a meaningful future?", I invite you to explore the current landscape of business and humanity. The book offers an aspirational alternative and constructs a vehicle for the necessary change to drive us toward a meaningful future.

My humble request to you is to wait no longer and act! Sometimes it is easier than we think, even if the task at hand looks daunting! Let’s engage in a collective effort, be the change we want to see in the world and be proud of our legacy for future generations!

Praise for Good Companies

Good Companies is a timely, intellectually stimulating, and original book that rests on the recognition that companies are not founded upon an impersonal social contract between individuals but emerge as a reciprocal covenant between generations. Indeed, the firm is not simply a money-making machine, as suggested by a dominant reductionist view. Rather, it is above all a “political agent”: a strong agent of transformation of the context in which the company operates.

Many efforts and attempts have been made in recent times to lay down the pillars of an economy based on the culture of care, true value creation and solidarity – as this book widely documents. The goal is to move ahead towards a different kind of economy, one that is inclusive and not exclusive, humane, and not de-humanizing, one that cares for the environment, not despoiling it.

Piotr Trojanowski should be credited with striving to give a human face to a new corporate culture, a subject that is still at an exciting stage. Good Companies is a must reading for all those – academicians, business leaders, practitioners – who are really interested in triggering off a deliberate process of social reconfiguration of our market economies.

Stefano Zamagni

Professor of Economics, University of Bologna

Adjunct Professor at SAIS Europe of the Johns Hopkins University