Photo of Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield taken from Ottawa Citizen

In the short video we watched, R. Edward Freeman argues that for a business to succeed, the people managing the business must synthesize and not isolate all the stakeholders’ interests. I found it particularly interesting that Freeman considers “community” as a stakeholder. I thought that Freeman’s perspective is similar to Michael E. Porter and Mark R. Kramer‘s argument that the community’s, or general society’s, interests do not necessarily conflict with, say, the business’s shareholders, because their interests can align. An example of this perspective is Ben & Jerry’s: a profitable ice cream company that also has a reputation for being ethical. In this article, the founders Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield say that initially the company barely made any profits after they donated a large part of their revenue. However, Ben and Jerry managed to align community’s interests in quality ingredients and sustainable manufacturing with shareholder’s interests in profits after they adopted a new business plan of selling to distributors while also maintaining a clear set of values. In essence, Ben & Jerry’s involvements in campaigns “may have cost [the company] some customers […but] they also deepened Ben & Jerry’s connection to its base.” From this example, I interpret ethical business as a business that does not alienate or pit one shareholder’s interest against another’s, but rather a business that can serve all the shareholders.