the Fiduciary Duty for Business Speech – to Not Be Misleading

We Need Business to Honor Its Fiduciary Duties

Just Talking and Writing About it Would Put it on the Agenda!

A fiduciary represents the interests of others in a way that is NOT MISLEADING.

– Wikipedia/fiduciary

“In such a relation good conscience requires one to act at all times for the sole benefit and interests of another, with loyalty to those interests.“

“A fiduciary is someone who has undertaken to act for and on behalf of another in a particular matter in circumstances which give rise to a relationship of trust and confidence.[1]”

fiduciary duty[2] is the highest standard of care at either equity or law.”

– The wide implications relations based on fiduciary trust – JLH

  1. Professionals making decisions for others have a duty to act in the client’s best interests, to the best of the fiduciary’s ability, as the basis of trusting the fiduciary’s services.
  2. The law doesn’t limit “best interests” of others to short term financial gain, leaving open all other interests everyone has a right to, such as not being misled, living sustainably, respecting due process and receiving justice.
  3. What has changed in the modern world is that we face more threats and know more about them, so now we can hold our professionals responsible, demanding our universal human interests be respected as their fiduciary duty.
  4. Putting this on the human rights agenda would only take talking and writing about it.

– Current Law: The Fiduciary Duty for investors[i]

“Whenever you are dealing with someone to whom you will entrust your money, such as a registered investment adviser or a bank trust department, it is nice to know that, in the United States, they owe you what is known as a fiduciary duty.  This is not to be taken lightly because, under the American legal system, a fiduciary duty is the highest duty owed to another person.  It requires the fiduciary (the person with the obligation) to put the interest of the principal (the person to whom they owe the fiduciary duty) above their own.”

“This requirement to act in their best interest includes disclosing any conflicts of interest that may arise so they can be known ahead of time, leveling the playing field.  Breaching the fiduciary duty can result in draconian punishments, including being barred from employment in certain fields, being banned from working with certain types of securities, being forced to pay significant civil and criminal penalties, the loss of employment, and, in some cases, felony conviction with accompanying jail time.  To put it bluntly, the fiduciary duty has teeth.”      [see source for rest of article]

– What is “Fiduciary Duty”,… “Business Duty”[ii]

“A “fiduciary duty” is required of a person who manages money, investments, or other property on behalf of another person. When the situation involves a board of directors managing a corporation, the fiduciary duty the board has to the corporation’s shareholders and investors is known as a “business duty.” A person who has a fiduciary or business duty is known as a “fiduciary.”

“A fiduciary duty requires more than the ordinary reasonable care that appears in most personal injury and tort cases. Fiduciary duties are generally split into two categories: the duty of loyalty and the duty of care. In some cases, board members may also have a duty to disclose information. They also have a duty to avoid conflicts of interest.”

“The duty of loyalty requires the person who has it to handle money with the best interests of its owner in mind. The fiduciary must put the owner’s interests before his or her own and may not profit from managing the owner’s assets without the owner’s consent.”

“In a business situation, the duty of loyalty requires the board of directors to run the corporation in the best interests of the shareholders. Directors have a duty not to let their personal interests conflict with those of the corporation.”        [see source for rest of article]

 

 Note: there is no limit to what “best interests” a fiduciary needs to serve,

           1. There’s only a limit on their ability to serve them, and

           2. All “best interests” would require not being misleading

 

[i] Joshua Kennon 2016 “The Balance” Fiduciary Duty for Investors

[ii] Rottenstein Law Library 2017 What is Fiduciary Duty…

UN SDG’s and HLPF – the whole-system thinking needed

Setting Our Whole system goal,
Making the Earth our good home.

Much of my effort over the past five years fosuces on working with civil society organizations at the UN on the world sustainable development goals (SDG’s).   This year, needing to take care of other business, I’m sitting out.    It may be ironic, of course, as the challenges of implementing the UN 17 separate goals probably makes:

more and more participants think of how the goals need to all work together,
and can’t individually be achieved without the ‘nexus’ of the whole. 

Ultimately my years at the UN was mostly spent identifying the widespread absence of systems thinking in the SDG’s, watching somewhat painfully as the UN spent all its time creating lists of separate goals, as if unaware of their interlinkage. The interlinkage most neglected of course was that of *MONEY*, our main tool and problem.   So my writing of that time may be a little out of date.   I can tell that much of the systems thinking I found so absent before still is, however.

I have lots of other writings on how “systems thinking” for our world needs to become “systems making”, the next step toward true “homemaking on planet earth”.   Finding how societies can make their good homes on earth is the answer.   Like ecologies of other kinds do, we can invent our way out of the deepening trap we now find our world economy in, using nature as a guide.

I got fairly frequent applause at the UN,  enough to know people are listening, but to my knowledge no one ever followed up on my carefully  reasoned recommendations, and no one ever asked me to be on a panel discussing them either.   So here I’ve collected some of my old lists of observations on the process, and reiterate my offer to help people understand the guiding patterns of natural system design that I’ve spent my life studying.

A Youtube of one of my interventions for last year’s HLPF gets right to the heart of the matter too!

A good Youtube – Impacts Uncounted 2016 UN HLPF S4

 

Notes on how the “UN Development Goals… leave out the Common Needs”(1)

  1. The SDG’s Omit:
    1. how the centers of power can become foundations for a sustainable future
    2. what habits keep people entrapped in the web of ever growing economic inequity.
  2. It also fails to use systems biomimicry to help us design a world that works.
  3. They also ignore the need for a “soft landing” for the whole system, for
    a. creating a stable world commons…
    b. not just to giving competitive edges to the disadvantaged
  4. They don’t aim to “internalizing all externalities” like the “World SDG” offers.
  5. They also generally omit ideals for the earth as a whole, to make it our good home.
  6. and blindly continues to promoting compound global growth
    a. when we are already pressing hard the global natural limits,
    b. not looking to relieve of the strains but add to them.

 

Here are other short posts on the systems thinking to bring into the UN’s discussion to guide us toward the long term goal of making Earth our good home:

  1. https://synapse9.com/signals/2013/07/01/un-devel-goals-omit-common-needs/
  2. https://synapse9.com/signals/2013/04/27/missing-ecological-thinking/
  3. https://synapse9.com/signals/2013/05/05/whole-culture-led-not-tech-driven/
  4. https://synapse9.com/signals/2013/12/05/un-owg5-missing-topics/

 

JLH

Why is an economic tornado always on the road straight ahead?

I also can’t help returning to a central subject of collective organization I’ve studied my whole professional career, the seeming fate of economies to bring periods of high cooperation to an end with total disaster.   The main cause could of course be said that no one in particular is at fault.   But there is science enough to identify who could intervene, and do something about it.

My previous post was on the work of  Ernst Ising, the physicist who solved a range of collective behavior problems, and how pattern language design science might address the question of what kinds of environments are required for emerging local phenomena.   Why economic collapse is always on the road straight ahead for our form of highly cooperative modern  economies is one such subject I’d like find physicists using Ising’s work on with.

One might wonder about what keeps driving our highly cooperative world economy toward escalating conflict.

All of humanity seems driven by a “rat race” toward extremes of destructive competition all the time, unable to escape, with most everyone feeling they are reacting in their own defense.   That’s not a model for a safe and secure world.

Could we possibly trace how the economic forces, like those driving everyone to achieve rapid growth in economic productivity, and so for the earth and humanity, creating circumstances ripe for triggering grand economic collapses.   If we can identify the system doing that we could identify interventions well in advance, to engage a “general protection fault” to avoid the usual mad collective collapse.

Why is an economic cyclone ALWAYS on the road straight ahead

 

I for one think it boils down to demanding people do impossible things, demanding of our society to do impossible things, like continually doubling the speed at which we collect and use energy and expand our control of the earth.   That can only end in tragedy, like it has for economies again and again. Why economies are driven to it, to be ever more productive at ever faster rates, follows unavoidably from their organization for maximizing compound returns from investment, making ever more from ever less.   Like being forced to “make bricks without straw”, the regular investment of profits in escalating to create ever more daunting competition ultimately compels cooperation in cheating.   In the end that unavoidably disrupts the order, as one of the natural outcomes of pointlessly taking the compounding of returns to its natural limit.

We could do something else if we understood the problem…

 

jlh

The duality required for collective organization.

An interesting global question is, to me, raised by Ernst Ising’s work in physics – (see the arxiv pre-print on his life and work if interested. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.01764.pdf)

Ising’s main work in the 1920’s was deriving a mathematical explanation for ferromagnetism, the ability of atoms in certain solid metals to develop aligned spins, and exhibit permanent magnetic fields in there surroundings as a result.   The part of that might be of interest from a pattern science viewpoint is how his model has been successfully applied to numerous collective phenomena, both other emergent collective atomic behaviors like magnetism as well as emergent collective macroscopic behaviors like the emergence of organization in crowds.

Ising’s general equation

The math, honestly, is beyond me, but there’s an interesting assumption in the work that might be discussed from a pattern science perspective, that the math rests on treating such phenomena as arising from purely local interactions.

Ising Said: “So, if we do not assume [ ] that [ ] quite distant elements exert an influence on each other [ ] we do not succeed in explaining ferromagnetism from our assumptions.  It is [thus] to be expected that this assertion also holds true for a spatial model in which only
elements in the nearby environment interact with each other.”

What I suspect is that there’s more of a wave/partical type duality present, involving both local and contextual interaction
in bringing about collective organization.

In the collective phenomena we observe there is certainly has a strong local character, whether it’s snowflake formation, ecologies, social movements or probably also the punctuated equilibria of emerging species.  All such collective phenomena seem to arise in relatively small centers and then spread mysteriously.  They also seem to require specially primed and fertile environments, as global conditions that are receptive to the local accumulation of collective designs.

So my question is who else is talking about this pattern of nature.    Is this raised in Christopher Alexander’s “The Nature of Order” or other pattern language writings?   Is it raised in the work of anyone else writing in the pattern language field?  More specifically, does it need to be understood to know how to describe the contexts we work in, perhaps such that a calm and receptive and so fertile context is needed to be a good host for pattern designs to flourish?

___________________

jlh