Back in the 1980s, the economist Al Rappaport captured the spirit of the times by devising a new goal for the corporation: the maximisation of shareholder value. The measure of a CEO's achievement was the total return achieved for shareholders during his tenure.

Bill Allen, Boeing's legendary leader from 1945 to 1968, once described his company's ethos like this: “To eat, breathe and sleep the world of aeronautics.” By 1998, the CEO there saw it differently: “We are going into a value based environment where unit cost, return on investment, shareholder return are the measures by which you'll be judged,” said Phil Condit.

This was happening across industries. Britain's ICI offered a lofty description of its ideals in 1987: “ICI aims to be the world's leading chemical company … [enhancing] the wealth and well-being of our shareholders, our employees, our customers and the communities which we serve and in which we operate.” But, by 1995, the threat of a hostile bid galvanised the management, and the company declared: “Our objective is to maximise value for our shareholders by focusing on businesses where we have market leadership, a technological edge and a world competitive cost base.”

And it happened across borders, too. When John Reed and Sandy Weill, Citigroup's joint chief executives in the late 1990s, described the purposes of the newly merged conglomerate's objectives to a journalist, Reed, the cerebral traditionalist banker, said: ‘The model I have is of a global consumer company that really helps the middle-class with something they haven't been served well by historically. That's my vision. That's my dream.” Weill, more attuned to the spirit of the times, interrupted Reed. “My goal,” he said, “is to increase shareholder value.”

It would all end in tears. Under Allen, Boeing came to dominate the aircraft business; under Condit, the company not only lost its market leadership to Airbus but was mired in scandal. The new value-maximising ICI attempted to rearrange its portfolio of businesses, but failed: its share price went into steady decline and a decade later the company was no longer an independent entity. Weill pushed out Reed, only to become the victim of a series of reputational problems that later hit the company. By 2008, almost all the shareholder value in Citigroup had been destroyed.

Enron, the paradigm of the new corporate model, went spectacularly bust in 2001. In 2008, the collapse of Lehman Bros, a company intensely focused on profit, nearly brought down the global financial system. These failures that bracketed the past decade have a lesson for leaders in the next one: to focus single-mindedly on profit is to risk losing the opportunity to make any profit at all.

John Kay, columnist