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Anyone who pays even the slightest attention to business ethics couldn’t help but catch the scathing op-ed piece by Greg Smith in last week’s New York Times. Smith lambasts his (now former) employer, Goldman Sachs, for a company culture that he says put more emphasis on turning a profit than on respecting and serving clients. Sadly, this does not do much to boost business’ credibility in the eyes of the public.

It’s now a year since Michael Porter famously threw down his gauntlet by announcing from on high that all value needed to be Shared Value. That, as I wrote last year, we are moving into the Third Age of corporate-social relations. From old-style “philanthropy” – typically disbursed after corporate titans had made their pile -- to “corporate social responsibility”; from fairtrade to subtler alignments of brand and charitable effort; to something approaching the end of CSR and its sublimation into a revolutionary reshaping of mainstream business strategy.