Based on your first question, I think you might already know this, but just in case you don't: This is a myth.
> The idea that choosing a 1% strategic internal investment over a 4.5% T-bill constitutes actionable "financial malpractice" or a breach of fiduciary duty leading to successful lawsuits is incorrect. Courts recognize that running a business requires strategic choices and risk-taking, not just maximizing immediate, risk-free yield. A lawsuit would fail unless plaintiffs could show the decision was tainted by disloyalty, bad faith, or gross negligence in the decision-making process, none of which are implied by simply choosing a lower-yield strategic project.
> Hence why no one ever gets sued for this. It doesn't happen. It lives in the minds of HNers and Redditors to provide a very convenient excuse for their employers, or in general companies, making abhorrent decisions purely based on feels and short-term next-quarter profits/stock price, regardless of the negative externalities they inflict on society.
The only notions of empathy or trust you see from publicly traded companies nowadays is the over-engineered calamity of ESG. If you have a single example of a moderately-adopted trend which demonstrates a genuine desire to do right by their society, or to build long-term trust at the expense of short-term profits, I'll readily adopt it into my world model.
You can define the term that way, but then it doesn't apply to anything that actually exists. Firms do have enforceable legal obligations to their shareholders, but that isn't one of them.
(OTOH, for a widely-held publicly-traded firm, the set of incentives facing management will encourage much the same behvior that that mythical obligation would require, but the mechanism is entirely different.)
And some percentage of the rest will act like jerks once it's to their advantage.
But society still holds corporations to account on some societal values.
Mostly through legislation. But sometimes through consumers (and B2B) voting with their pocketbooks.