But, really, businesses would be better served by being more modest and focusing on what they do best–which is serving stakeholders as well as shareholders–instead of grandiose statements. First, stakeholders were first Back in January 1914, Henry Ford famously more than doubled the wages of his assembly workers from $2.25 a day to $5 a day. In later years this move took on mythic proportions, with claims that Ford wanted to pay his workers a fair wage so that they could afford to buy the very cars being churned out in his assembly line.

Advertisement