 So what do I think the role of business in society is? I have my own view, which is, and maybe it's what I want business in society to be, but I actually think business is an agent of development in society, which is not what a lot of people might say. I think it means different things to different people. I think it can benefit a lot of people, but I think it can also hurt a lot of people. It can benefit its owners, its customers, society at large, but it can also damage those people. And it can damage its own owners, I guess, as well. For me, it's what business is for, what it does, and then the manner in which it does it. So it can do it well, it can do it in a way that makes people's lives better, and it can do it in a way that hurts people or hurts the environment. It can do it, I guess you could say, nicely, and it can do it sort of brutally and callously. I tend to focus on the company, which isn't every aspect of business, but if we look at, say, the history of the company, and that goes right back to Roman times or even before, we've had companies, groups of people, we share a mission to do something. And companies originally were, it's changed over time, rich companies originally were very much more, quite often agents of state to do things like build housing, get social projects done. And then very much sort of private businesses. I'm kind of also interested in, if you look back at things like the East India Company or the Dutch, that was the British East India Company or the Dutch East India Company, which became massive companies, actually sort of embarked on state enterprises overseas, very brutally, but of huge profit to their home countries. And it wasn't until we incorporated companies in the mid-19th centuries, around the 1850s, 1860s, and we gave them this privilege of limited liability. That went on in the UK in particular, but also in different parts of the States. It was a state-by-state thing in the US. And the joint stock company came about, that we started to grow something that looks like the modern company. But if you look also at things like the Quaker companies in Victorian Britain and in America, companies like Western Union or the chocolate companies like Cadbury's or Clark's Jews, that had a social mission. They chose what they embarked upon, they chose the businesses, they wouldn't do certain types of business, they chose their businesses. They also benefited their employees, they built social housing, they built schools, and they saw their mission as a societal mission. They made money, and many of those companies exist now, they've been long-term companies. But for me, something particularly changed in the 1980s with a sort of sharpening of the purpose of a company being about, almost entirely being about profit. Relatively short-term profit, so shareholder value. And people often say shareholder value is long-term, but actually companies tend to be measured on a quarterly basis. For me, we lost any broader purpose. I certainly think expectations have changed. I think it's an interesting question is whether how much companies have changed in response to that, how much of it is defence, reputational defence, what you might call band-aid type activities and how much is fundamental changes in mission. But I think companies now, so oil companies 20 years ago belong to a coalition that tried to stop any action on climate change and that changed in the 1990s. Oil companies, some of the leading oil companies now amongst the people calling for carbon tax agents or carbon trading systems. And that's partly because society expects them to deal with their products. I think lots of companies now are dealing with things that 20 years ago they wouldn't have seen on their radar. Freedom of expression for Google and Yahoo or water usage for Coca-Cola. And it's not just business, it is also about societal expectations. But I'm not sure if you dig deep whether those companies see their purpose as changing, I think they see this as, we need to do this in order to enable our purpose, which is shareholder value. There are some companies that have always, Hewlett Packard maybe is one, who always expressed a social mission rather than simply a profit mission. So a company, a shareholder value is simply two things, the dividend stream and the share price. So you're driven to one, make profit quarterly because dividends are paid quarterly and two, drive up your share price. Often by making your company bigger or by upgrading the assets of it. But it's interesting, I mean it's often quoted now but Paul Polman at Unilever has said he doesn't want Unilever to report quarterly and he's also said that he doesn't get up in the morning I'm paraphrasing I think, in order to increase shareholder value he gets up because he wants to satisfy his customers. I might ask for a broader social mission than that but it's still not a short term mission. So one of the things that I think we don't really explore enough and think about enough is although it's coming out right now because of people's concern with tax avoidance in particular is whether businesses benefit societies particularly in the places that they operate. So the ability of a business, a global multinational business at least now to move its profits around to internal pricing systems into different tax regimes can mean that the place where the business is done doesn't always benefit from the business and you couple that with what's happened in recent years particularly without sourcing and particularly with sourcing from poorer countries that businesses go to a place Bangladesh is a recent example where the garment factory collapsed and we've had fires in garment factories in parts of the world as well recently and they go to a place which has weak capacity and what goes with weak capacity is low wages and that's why they're there they're there because it's low wages but it also means there's weak capacity and that means there isn't much in the way of government standards for example building regulations for factories or inspectors to inspect them or even the ability to inspect them so a country like Bangladesh which has a GDP per capita of six, seven hundred dollars the government doesn't have the capacity to put that in place and we have a tendency to then say that when the factory collapses that why isn't the government of Bangladesh doing enough to maintain standards it doesn't have the ability to do so and that's why the business is there and it's making advantage of the weakness and capacity and not contributing to it so I think there's something about contributing to the place you're in I think the various stakeholder approaches that have emerged in the last 15 years or so take us some of the way that a business it's not just and in some ways what that does is it looks at what other people value so if you are concerned as a business about what your customers value what your employees value which may be time at home with their children or what the society in which you operate values which may be environment, it may be peace it may be stability it may be a whole range of things then I think that starts to get you into into a business operating behaving in a different way they don't exist in law of course we still have the legal construct which is that a company's a limited liability company's responsibilities are towards its owners pretty much