A very old fashioned argument: increasing value, not profit.
Value is how much cash flow you generate over time – 10 years, 20 years.

Sustainability is the main value creator.

If you are not sustainable in business,
then you have reputation damage that will make you sell less
because consumers buy less from business with low reputation.
You are going to have higher cost because of liabilities.
You have to pay the liabilities , so you diminish your cash flow.
You’re going to be more risky,
so your cost of money is going to be higher.
You have factors that are worsening your net present value.

In the stakeholder model,
There are many more parties involved.

1. Consumers and customers,
2. Then business partners,
3. Then the talented people who work for the company
and create the product.
4. Then our suppliers who produce the coffee beans.
5. Then at the bottom, the shareholders.

Me, my son, my family at the service of the company.
Not the other way around.

Greatness is beyond being the best;
it encompasses the way you do things.
Our mission is about delighting people
who appreciate quality of life
all over the world with the best coffee
that nature can provide,
enhanced with the best technology.

And beauty.
Beauty is beyond goodness.
It is an enhancer of the coffee experience.

— Excerpt interview with Andrea Illy, chairman Illy Caffé SpA
taken from Bloomberg Businessweek, Oct. 14, 2019

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Read this interview article in Bloomberg Businessweek.  Though it is a comment upon a particular business model, it comes as close to a philosophy of life as I’ve read.  How could one not subscribe to such a sense of the world and of one’s place in it?

I find it persuasive.

If you’d like to read the entire interview CLICK HERE.