• Decency can help a business can define their role in society and make stakeholder capitalism a reality.
  • Inclusivity includes a diversity of thought among employees and partners.
  • For capitalism to benefit all stakeholders, companies must continue to innovate.
  • Businesses must work to earn stakeholders' trust.
I believe it’s possible to have an economic engine that works for all stakeholders: governments, people, businesses and the planet. The World Economic Forum has established the vision, the UN has set the goals. Corporate leaders – myself included – have made a commitment. Together, we’ve charted a course to make stakeholder capitalism a reality.
But belief is not enough to get us there. Signatures, goals and conversations are only a starting point. For companies to fundamentally change the way we think about our purpose, demonstrate that we take our responsibility to society seriously and have real, positive impact, we have to do. And how we do is just as important as what we do.
Getting the “how” right requires something very basic: decency.

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Decency is the foundation for the relationships that drive innovation, urgency and enterprise-wide thinking and behaviors. It sets the stage for the listening, open-mindedness and diversity of thought that make us inclusive collaborators. And it helps build trust, the bedrock on which everything else is based. We have to know that we’re all working with helping hands at each other’s backs – and not in each other’s faces.
Don’t mistake me: business is not philanthropy. It can’t be. We have to make our margins, be competitive on price, drive profit and grow. That’s capitalism, plain and simple. For too long, a narrow definition of capitalism has pitted corporate profit against social purpose, relegating decency’s role in a company to a “nice-to-have.” But, when we dare to broaden our focus, we can see that purpose and profit are intertwined – and that decency is the connective tissue.
Yes, companies and nations survive on people making and spending money. But, when we bring our basic human decency to the forefront of our work, it’s easier to see that giving people a lift, expanding the middle class, helping them thrive and grow will also do the same for you. And reaching out to partners and combining strengths often results in a total impact greater than what any one party could have achieved on their own.
At Mastercard, decency underpins our sustainability as a company because it helps us see clearly that doing the right thing for society leads to the right outcomes for our business. And with that, it becomes easier to define our role in society and make stakeholder capitalism a reality. We use our network and technology to drive financial inclusion, digital empowerment and, ultimately, inclusive growth because decency is our guide.
Here’s what decency in action looks like for Mastercard.

Inclusion

Inclusivity makes stakeholder capitalism sustainable, both commercially and socially. We strive for diversity of thought among our employees and our partners. That mix of voices helps us see systemic challenges and helps us craft long-term solutions with the widest-reaching benefits.
For example, working with Unilever, we have helped entrepreneurs in Kenya grow their businesses by digitizing what were formerly cash transactions between shopkeepers and their suppliers. Those transactions become a purchase history, which can be used to secure micro-credit through a local bank. In Egypt, we’ve worked with the government to digitize alimony payments, making it faster and safer for divorced women to receive their money. Through these kinds of partnerships, we’re on the cusp of bringing 500 million previously excluded people into the formal economy. We continue to work with Queen Màxima of the Netherlands, UN Secretary General’s representative on financial inclusion, to encourage other companies to forge similar partnerships.

What is the World Economic Forum doing on cybersecurity

The World Economic Forum Platform for Shaping the Future of Cybersecurity and Digital Trust aims to spearhead global cooperation and collective responses to growing cyber challenges, ultimately to harness and safeguard the full benefits of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The platform seeks to deliver impact through facilitating the creation of security-by-design and security-by-default solutions across industry sectors, developing policy frameworks where needed; encouraging broader cooperative arrangements and shaping global governance; building communities to successfully tackle cyber challenges across the public and private sectors; and impacting agenda setting, to elevate some of the most pressing issues.
Platform activities focus on three main challenges:
Strengthening Global Cooperation for Digital Trust and Security - to increase global cooperation between the public and private sectors in addressing key challenges to security and trust posed by a digital landscape currently lacking effective cooperation at legal and policy levels, effective market incentives, and cooperation between stakeholders at the operational level across the ecosystem.Securing Future Digital Networks and Technology - to identify cybersecurity challenges and opportunities posed by new technologies and accelerate solutions and incentives to ensure digital trust in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.Building Skills and Capabilities for the Digital Future - to coordinate and promote initiatives to address the global deficit in professional skills, effective leadership and adequate capabilities in the cyber domain.
The platform is working on a number of ongoing activities to meet these challenges. Current initiatives include our successful work with a range of public- and private-sector partners to develop a clear and coherent cybersecurity vision for the electricity industry in the form of Board Principles for managing cyber risk in the electricity ecosystem and a complete framework, created in collaboration with the Forum’s investment community, enabling investors to assess the security preparedness of target companies, contributing to raising internal cybersecurity awareness.
For more information, please contact info@c4c-weforum.org.