Lawrence Kurzius of spice-maker McCormick & Co. spoke about his firm’s efforts to assist small farmers in developing countries. “The best companies, frankly, are not those who try to scrape every last dollar for the shareholder,” he said.

Vistra Energy Corp.’s Curt Morgan pointed to the company’s employee bonus program and efforts to subsidize or waive utility bills for low-income families. “It was easy for us to sign” the Roundtable’s statement, he said, “because we were living it.”

Marc Lautenbach of Pitney Bowes Inc. said the firm used half of the money saved thanks to the 2017 corporate tax cut to give employees a permanent raise. “You’ve got to get the balance right,” he added.

Douglas Peterson of S&P Global Inc. listed his company’s paper reduction initiatives, carbon offsets and data science training for workers.

And Mark Sutton, CEO of International Paper Co., said the firm’s work sustaining forests and reducing emissions isn’t getting in the way of investor returns.

“The shareholders are absolutely at the center,” Sutton said. “We’re just saying what was left unsaid but implied: You can’t keep the shareholder at the center if you’re not excellent with the other people affected by your company.”

Even hardened skeptics have acknowledged that the Roundtable’s statement, if nothing else, was a step in the right direction. But some say that corporate-responsibility initiatives -- while important and well-intended -- won’t fundamentally change the chase for stock returns that still largely dictate corporate priorities.

Take the more than $8 billion in 2018 charitable donations by firms overseen by the Roundtable’s roughly 200 members, which pales in comparison with the almost $400 billion the same companies spent on share buybacks that year.

There’s also the question of how a company’s commitment to communities should be weighed against other aspects of its business.

Johnson & Johnson, whose CEO Alex Gorsky led the committee that wrote the Roundtable’s new statement, has donated medicine that has helped treat over 100 million children, a spokesman said. But one week after the Roundtable’s new corporate credo was published on Aug. 19, an Oklahoma judge found J&J liable for fueling the state’s opioid crisis and ordered it to pay a $572 million fine.