IBM, at least after Thomas Watson senior took charge in 1914, has arguably been a case study in how to create shared value, both through its formalised giving, which is among the most generous in corporate America, but more fundamentally through its everyday business.And the comparison can shed light on the role of the wealthy in society.
Last month Nanjing in China played host to the first formal meeting between ministers from China and Taiwan in their government capacities since the end of the civil war in 1949 formalised the division.
"At some point, the models that work become formalised, and as they become formalised, they become businesses," says Tad Toulis, design consultant and former creative director at the Teague agency.
Much of what could be called corruption has become formalised, if not legalised, through official tenders, court rulings and bank-approved loans.
The Chinese will tell you that they invented football, and they have a point; there was a formalised way of kicking balls around fields in China two thousand years ago.
There can be little doubt that the political elites throughout the Caspian live rather better than they could on their official salaries (a minister in Azerbaijan earns about $600 a month).Mid-ranking corruption is more formalised.
It was first formalised in "Theory of Games and Economic Behaviour", a doorstop of a book published in 1944 by John von Neumann, a mathematician, and Oskar Morgenstern, an economist.
That seems more like policy-based evidence than evidence-based policy and bodes ill for talks on a new climate-change treaty, planned to take place in Paris next year.The new report is intended to measure how far governments have met their promises, formalised in 2010, to keep the global rise in mean surface temperatures compared with pre-industrial times to less than 2°C.
Far from the formalised, narrowly defined cases typical of business training, this felt pretty real.
Britain's seizure of Hong Kong was formalised, in perpetuity.
He also thinks the process of setting interest rates should be more formalised.
