James Perry

speaker

571 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 27 Jul

James Perry’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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James Reed: all about business · 89. The business decision you'll thank yourself for in 5 years | James Perry · 27 Jul 2026 podcast

Well, so I got to the point where I was not very interested in a career doing that because- Maximizing profits.

Yeah, I had some really profound concerns about where that might lead.

So the word that I sort of now know, I don't think it really existed back in the day, was externalities.

But what are the external unpriced effects of ruthlessly and rigorously pursuing shareholder value?

It is what capitalism has become.

I think that there are... There are other variants.

There are other variants of capitalism, for example, in the family business community, in the B Corp community, but institutional business and institutional capital

is governed by an idea called fiduciary responsibility, which has come to be understood as the obligation, the duty to maximise profits for shareholders.

Well, I just felt that if you do that, you're essentially prioritising one kind of capital, which is financial capital, over the other capitals, natural capital, human capital, and you're giving it dominion.

And what it therefore does logically and reasonably, if you pursue that idea, is that it sees nature and people as...

mechanisms from which to extract financial value.

So planet and people effectively are just inputs.

And I didn't think that was a good idea.

I felt it was going to lead to negative consequences for planet and for people.

And what we now know that those are called externalities.

But when I tried to talk about those in my economics degree, they didn't want to talk about that.

I left the degree, actually.

Well, I did stay at the university.

To be fair, I mean, Manchester in the early 1990s was a really good place to be and a really fun place to hang out.

So I actually moved my degree from economics and ended up studying social policy and political thought.

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