5 minBusiness
Americans’ faith in capitalism hits 15-year low, but the problem is know-how, not ideology
Gallup tracking shows positive views of capitalism have slipped to 54%, a 15-year low. Yale research with over 200 CEOs suggests the issue is not ideology but a lack of know-how in managing stakeholder value, with Walmart, Starbucks, and Rio Tinto as examples.
Positive views of capitalism among Americans have fallen to 54%, marking a 15-year low in Gallup tracking data. The decline reflects a growing zero-sum perception that companies prosper by extracting value rather than creating it. Yet research from Yale’s Program on Stakeholder Innovation and Management, based on interviews with more than 200 CEOs over six years, suggests the real challenge is not ideological but practical: many business leaders struggle with how to align the interests of customers, employees, partners, and communities with long-term shareholder value.
The CEOs interviewed reject the zero-sum view. They describe creating value for stakeholders not as an alternative to shareholder returns but as essential to achieving them over time. What surprised the researchers was how many executives said this was the discipline for which they felt least prepared before taking the top job. They grasp the concept that these interests can reinforce one another, but they struggle to implement it at scale. The problem, the research concludes, is know-how.
Walmart’s transformation under CEO Doug McMillon illustrates the first principle: designing the enterprise around interdependencies that create value. When McMillon took over in 2014, U.S. comparable-store sales were declining, customer satisfaction had deteriorated, and the company was losing ground to Amazon. Employee turnover was high, and Walmart’s reputation as an employer was turning away potential customers and fueling community resistance to new stores. McMillon’s team concluded these problems were connected, so the response had to be as well.
The strategy required billions of dollars in multi-year investments in employees, lower prices, e-commerce, and technology, sacrificing near-term profits. When Walmart disclosed in 2015 how much these investments would depress earnings, its shares fell about 10% in a single day, erasing more than $20 billion in market value. Despite the backlash, the company stayed the course. In February 2026, Walmart became the first traditional retailer to exceed $1 trillion in market value. Comparable-store sales recovered and compounded, and in 2024 Walmart appeared for the first time on Fortune’s list of the 100 Best Companies to Work For.
Starbucks offers a second lesson: testing management decisions against the value they create, and for whom. The company’s previous approach included charging 60 to 80 cents for non-dairy milk, removing amenities, and expanding the menu and mobile business. Each decision could be defended individually, but together they degraded the customer experience and made baristas’ work more complex. When Brian Niccol became CEO in September 2024, he reversed course, restoring condiment bars, ceramic mugs, and comfortable seating, and eliminating the non-dairy surcharge even though customization had grown into a business generating more than $1 billion annually.
The surcharge change alone reduced North American operating margin by about 60 basis points in its first quarter. Niccol also cut roughly 30% of the menu, simplified store operations, and invested $500 million in additional labor and staffing. The early results show four consecutive quarters of comparable-sales growth, with global comparable sales up 7.9% in the latest quarter. Since Niccol took charge, Starbucks shares have risen more than 22%.
The third principle involves managing intangible sources of value with the same rigor as tangible ones. Mining companies are skilled at managing physical assets, but their ability to create value also depends on social license to operate. In 2020, Rio Tinto blasted the 46,000-year-old Juukan Gorge rock shelters in Australia. The action was legal, but the backlash was severe: Traditional Owners lost trust, governments launched inquiries, and institutional investors challenged the company’s governance. The reputational fallout forced the exit of three senior executives, including the CEO.
Jakob Stausholm, who became CEO afterward, treated rebuilding trust as a capability problem. Rio Tinto invested in community engagement as a core operational discipline. The company’s experience demonstrates that intangible assets, though absent from the balance sheet, can determine whether a company can create value from its physical ones. The broader lesson from these cases is that stakeholder value does not become mutually reinforcing because management declares it so; the enterprise must be designed that way.
