It's not like Shareholder Value Theory single-handedly destroyed the world. I'm no fan of Milton Friedman, but "maximize profits for your shareholders" isn't crazy-talk. More importantly, it's easily quantifiable:
Compare and contrast:
Annual reports to that focus on what matters to employees of the corporation
Corporate purchasing for employees
Bringing democracy and transparency into corporations through
- Jury trials (of peers) within organizations for organizational violations
- Employee oversight of lobbyists
- Customer and employee participation on boards of directors
- Free presses within organizations (very different from a newsletter)
- Minimum values standards for vendors
- Efficient capital markets for non-profits
Go ahead and quantify "employee oversight of lobbyists."
The author would have you believe that everything was grand until Ayn Rand cranked out her pablum, Milton Friedman couched it in academic terms and the whole of Wall Street suddenly became short-term locusts. Yet he uses the example of the original Tea Party to demonstate rapacious corporations... 100 years before Ayn Rand was born. The real problem is that corporations have always been about maximizing profits (short or long-term) but since '71, we've had a massive Capitalist influx of neoliberal zeal (Milton Friedman among them) that has hacked away at the regulations designed to keep corporations in check.
I mean, you can try and make the world a better place by asking corporations to be nicer. Or you can, you know, actively restrain them from being dicks.
A corporation exists to make money and protect its owners and shareholders from liability. That's it. It is not a moral apparatus, no matter how hard you try. If you want a better society, don't ask the shark to stop biting... take away its teeth.