From the New York Times, I'm Michael Babaro. This is The Daily.

Today, for five decades, American corporations have prized profits for shareholders above all else.

Now, America's most powerful chief executives say it's time to do things differently.

Andrew Ross Sorkin, on what's driving that change?

It's Wednesday, August 21st.

Andrew, tell me what happened in your world on Monday morning.

On Monday morning, 5 a.m. in the morning, the business roundtable, which is probably the most powerful and influential lobbying organization for the nation's biggest companies.

Think Apple, think Amazon, Walmart, JP Morgan, all of them.

Came out and said that shareholders were going to be just one piece of a larger puzzle.

From the business roundtable, 181 of the top CEOs in the country have agreed now that maximizing profits in all situations cannot necessarily be the main goal of corporations.

The state has signed by almost 200 CEOs, including JP Morgan's Jamie Diamond, since companies should focus on all stakeholders.

For as long as I covered the world of business, every CEO in America said they had a fiduciary duty to shareholders.

Everything was in the name of profits.

So after decades of explicitly saying that shareholders were the highest end of a corporation, they point out the corporation's duties to their customers, to their suppliers, to their communities, and then they get to their shareholders a massive change.

And so the idea that any of these other stakeholders are even being acknowledged as part of the equation is a major shift.

But in many ways it's returned to an earlier era, an era almost a century ago, when these other stakeholders mattered in a way that they haven't for so many years.

If you go back to the 1930s, possibly even earlier, the biggest corporations in America genuinely thought about the full plethora of constituents.

Employees mattered, customers mattered, suppliers mattered, the profits mattered, but there was clearly a larger social compact that had been reached between companies

and the rest of society. And what did that look like and what's an example of a company that reflected that?

You could even go back to the early 1900s and look at Henry Ford and the Ford company and his decision to raise the average pay from $2.25 to $5.

Back in 1914, Ford had revolutionized assembly line production and to keep his workers from quitting, he announced he would raise their pay to a generous $5 a day, twice what they earned before, and twice what they could earn at any other auto company.

He believed that it was important for his employees not only to have a fair wage but to have a wage that might give them an opportunity to actually buy the car that he was selling.

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