This is prevailing practice for publicly traded companies -- I feel like these Benefit and Flexible Purpose Corps are more about allowing companies to be publicly traded without having to play this game through setting social expectations than through real structural differences. (To be taken with a grain of salt as I'm not a lawyer or a financial professional, just someone that's been an individual investor.)
>> I feel like these Benefit and Flexible Purpose Corps are more about allowing companies to be publicly traded without having to play this game through setting social expectations than through real structural differences.
As someone who works at what was, until Patagonia, probably the largest B-Corp around, I'll comment on this.
Yes the idea is that with these legal designations and social/environmental charters written in to the company by-laws it will allow for, someday, a B-Corp to go public and not have to change the way it operates. The oft-cited example of "what went wrong and why we need this" is Ben & Jerry's.
When Ben & Jerry's was bought by Unilever in 2000 the new ownership shut down a handful of their social programs and stopped sourcing products from local farmers, among other changes. Other companies were concerned about that happening to them in the future, and thus B-Labs.
This is prevailing practice for publicly traded companies -- I feel like these Benefit and Flexible Purpose Corps are more about allowing companies to be publicly traded without having to play this game through setting social expectations than through real structural differences. (To be taken with a grain of salt as I'm not a lawyer or a financial professional, just someone that's been an individual investor.)