What is true of the personal self is also true of the business self. Business leaders who emphasize the pursuit of profits and other material values excessively will damage the overall well-being of the corporation. The most common way this manifests itself is business leaders’ emphasis on financial returns to shareholders as the measure of business wellbeing. Here, business performance becomes defined exclusively in terms of profits, market capitalization, and other financial criteria that benefit shareholders. In this type of environment, customers and other stakeholders can easily fall from the forefront of business decision making.

The great danger in materialism that defines success narrowly in terms of profits is that many investors see a corporation as a means for maximising their short term financial returns. Free market capitalism that encourages such short term behavior is the treadmill within which anxious business leaders perpetually chase investor needs that are insatiable over time. Although one benefit of trying to please short term investors is that they efficiently allocate market resources among existing opportunities, its chief drawback is what Prajāpati (a character from the Upanishads) drew attention to: equating material wealth to the needs of the self is not the means to genuine well-being.

One way in which business leaders can begin to step off the treadmill of materialism is by emphasizing long term financial returns to investors. At first glance, this may appear impossible. After all, what is a business leader to do when the company’s investors focus on short-term returns? Would this not be like tilting at windmills?

However, the lesson for business leaders is clear. By arguing that investors are responsible for the leader’s own short term behavior, they have chosen to accept conventional wisdom without questioning it. The reality is that short term behavior by investors is often encouraged by the behavior of business leaders themselves.

Don’t just take my word for it. Researchers have studied the terms used in the transcripts of more than seventy thousand quarterly conference calls on earnings that were made by over thirty six hundred firms during 2002–8. They concluded that business leaders that are short-term oriented attract investors who fixate on quarterly numbers. When it comes to short-term thinking, it seems that it takes two to tango.

Stepping off the Treadmill: The Inclusive Materialist