In today’s NY Times Joe Nocera’s column attempts to eviscerate Jerry Yang for his efforts to maintain Yahoo! as Yahoo! instead of letting his creation become watered down so that it ultimately is nothing more than a deadened brand inside Microsoft or Google. Nocera claims throughout his column that the only responsiblity Yang has is toward Yahoo!’s shareholders, and that by turning down various Microsoft offers that would have benefitted Yahoo’s shareholders momentarily, Yang has somehow “shafted” those shareholders. And of course, that would be true if the only stakeholders in Yahoo! were a particular group of shareholders who wanted some immediate one-time gain at the cost of the entire enterprise. But this is not what a public company is all about.

This notion that enterprises exist only to maximize shareholder value is one of those ultimately destructive myths that the business pages like to assert on a daily basis until far too many people begin to think that it must be some kind of basic truth. We need to ask ourselves from time to time — why do we have public companies? And one answer might be that as a nation we believe that large enterprises can be formed that can fulfill a basic need in our society.

Who are the stakeholders, then, in every major enterprise? First of all, there are the founders, those who saw a need and designed an enterprise that could fill that need. Next there are the customers who benefit from the products of the enterprise — in Yahoo!’s instance some 180 million users in the U.S. alone each month. There are the employees, the 14,000 people who work for Yahoo! around the globe. There are advertisers who reach the world through Yahoo!, there are the communities, from Sunnyvale in Northern California to other communities around the globe who have a stake in Yahoo! because Yahoo! provides jobs, employee education, pays taxes and provides stability.

There is one particular aspect of this group of stakeholders that make them different from shareholders: they are long-term stakeholders in Yahoo! Now what about the most transient of stakeholders, the shareholders?

The people who have at some time or other bought shares in Yahoo!, or may have only bought options to buy shares in Yahoo! can include people like Carl Icahn, who may have purchased his option in Yahoo! as recently as a few months ago. As a holder of options to buy Yahoo! stock, what are Ican’s shareholder “rights?” He has the right to speak out about management issues, he has the right to threaten to destroy the enterprise, he has the right to show up at shareholder meetings and complain. He has the right to receive full financial disclosure of the company’s condition.

Any shareholder, even one holding as little as one share, has these rights. But does that mean we as a society and stakeholder in Yahoo! don’t also have rights? We benefit from an independent and thriving Yahoo!. Is that right nullified by a speculator passing by who would make a quick buck by destroying the enterprise? Doesn’t seem logical, does it?

Finally, what is the responsibility of Jerry Yang? Simply to maximize shareholder value as the newspapers hector him to do every day ? Or is it to maximize the value of all the stakeholders? What comes first, the longtime role of Yahoo! in organizing the Web, or satisfying the transient needs of a particular “shareholder” who is, unlike all the other stakeholders, free to leave at any moment?

Yes, shareholders have rights. The right to invest, to be heard, to threaten, to put in more money or sell their shares as their whims dictate. But the enterprise is not theirs to dispose of for a short-term gain. The enterprise, whether Yahoo! or Compaq or Studebaker or Westinghouse or Google, has or had a life of its own, a destiny, a part to play in American and global society. When the founders of these enterprises, the Jerry Yangs, get bullied into managing for the benefit of the shareholders above all else, which usually means managing with focus on quarterly returns above long term purpose, the enterprise will surely be weakened, if not destroyed altogether.

Look at Apple, where Steve Jobs was driven out because some shareholders wanted better short term results and the company was nearly destroyed as a result, contrasted with where Apple is today, with Jobs having returned and restored management driven by a very long term strategy. And once again, all the stakeholders have benefitted, even the lowly shareholder.