Last October, Chief Executives for Corporate Purpose released its annual Giving in Numbers report. The most note-worthy finding: companies that align their business practices with their stated purpose reported 25% higher revenue and 22% higher pre-tax profit than those that don’t. Between 2023 and 2024, their median pre-tax profit grew 31%. Companies without those metrics grew 3%.

That gap is not a rounding error. This is a study of operating performance, and it answers a question that drives much of the skepticism around stakeholder capitalism: can you actually run a profitable business this way?

The answer, repeated across industries and geographies, is yes.

We have been mapping the collapse of shareholder capitalism — why its assumptions have expired, why its costs can no longer be externalized, why the logic that once drove growth is now accelerating fragility. This week, we turn toward what’s replacing it. The proof is operational. And it exists at every scale.

At the enterprise level:

Danone manages a portfolio of global food brands under a corporate structure legally committed to serving all stakeholders, not just shareholders. France’s Entreprise à Mission framework gave the company the governance architecture to embed that commitment into its operating model. Revenue growth followed. During the COVID-19 disruptions, companies with stakeholder governance adapted faster and shed fewer jobs than peers running on pure shareholder logic. The resilience was structural, not accidental.

Vancity, Canada’s largest community credit union, has spent decades channeling capital into affordable housing, clean energy, and small business development in communities that conventional banks pass over. It consistently turns a profit while doing it. Its model demonstrates what finance looks like when it’s designed to build community wealth rather than extract it.

These are not small experiments. Danone operates in more than 120 countries. Vancity manages roughly $35 billion in assets. The scale argument against stakeholder capitalism is running out of road.

At the national level:

New Zealand reoriented its national budget in 2019 away from GDP as the primary measure of success and toward a wellbeing framework. Early results included a 13% drop in child poverty and accelerated progress toward net-zero commitments. A national government operating on a different logic and producing different outcomes.

The European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive now requires tens of thousands of companies to disclose social and environmental impacts alongside financial performance. The infrastructure of accountability is expanding whether individual companies embrace it or resist it.

At the movement level:

The B Corp movement has been building this proof base for nearly two decades. Nearly 11,000 companies across 100+ countries have demonstrated that verified stakeholder performance and competitive financial returns are not in opposition. The 2025 B Lab standards raise the bar further, moving from a flexible points-based assessment to mandatory baseline requirements across seven impact areas, including climate action, fair work, and collective advocacy.

What the updated standards signal matters as much as the requirements themselves. The movement is not softening its definition of responsible enterprise. It is making that definition more rigorous, more consistent, and harder to bluff. Certification has shifted from assessment to implementation, from measuring what a company has done to requiring what it must do.

What the evidence tells us:

The record across these examples reveals something important about the transition underway.

Stakeholder capitalism delivers on financial performance. The CECP data, B Lab resilience research, and Harvard studies on high-sustainability companies all point in the same direction: integrating stakeholder accountability into governance and operations is not a drag on returns. Over time, it is a driver of them.

It also survives disruption. B Corps retained more employees and supported more suppliers during COVID-19 than comparable firms running extractive models. Danone stabilized faster. Vancity’s community lending held. When conditions deteriorated, stakeholder relationships functioned as resilience infrastructure rather than cost centers.

The model scales. From Greyston Bakery in the South Bronx to Danone’s global supply chains, from New Zealand’s national budget to Barcelona’s municipal procurement strategy, it demonstrates viability across sizes, sectors, and geographies. The argument that it only works at small scale or in favorable conditions is contradicted by the evidence.

Despite all of this, stakeholder capitalism remains the exception. Purpose-driven enterprises are still operating against legal structures, capital markets, accounting standards, and cultural narratives designed for a different model. The proof base is extensive. The infrastructure to make stakeholder capitalism the default does not yet exist.

That is the challenge ahead, and the subject of next week’s post.

What the transition requires:

The gap between demonstrated proof and systemic change is primarily a gap in infrastructure. The extractive economy has centuries of embedded architecture behind it: corporate law, financial market design, accounting standards, subsidy structures, educational systems. Stakeholder capitalism is still building its foundation.

Proof of concept is necessary but not sufficient. The next economy needs legal frameworks that reward long-term stakeholder value, capital markets that price in social and environmental costs, governance structures that distribute power rather than concentrate it, and educational pipelines that train leaders in a different operating logic.

At Council Fire, this is the work we pursue alongside partners like B Lab, UMCES, and the communities and institutions we serve across the United States and the world, translating the proof that exists into the infrastructure that doesn’t yet.

The transition is underway. The question is whether we build the scaffolding that makes it permanent before the old system’s contradictions force a reckoning on terms we didn’t choose.

Next week: What that infrastructure looks like, and why good intentions and great companies aren’t enough to build it.