Succession Planning for Social Enterprises: Consider the Flexible Purpose Corporation or Benefit Corporation
This article was written by guest author Alicia Plerhoples. Ms. Plerhoples is a Visiting Assistant Professor at University of California at Hastings College of the Law and will be an Associate Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center, starting Fall 2012. This post is based on her article Can an Old Dog Learn New Tricks?: Applying Traditional Corporate Law Principles to New Social Enterprise Legislation, 13 Tenn. J. Bus. L. [_] (forthcoming 2012). Theoretically, the organizational spectrum has two extremes. On one end of the spectrum are organizations that pursue social and environmental missions and eschew profit motives, such as non-profit organizations. On the other end of the spectrum are organizations that focus solely on profit-maximization and disregard social and environmental missions—these might be called profit-maximizing businesses.[1] Somewhere between these…