Au-contraire, I think its naive to think that when such a large fraction of our lives (and economic activity) is built around particular types of for-profit businesses that we can somehow achieve our broader goals without them.
We must break that spell. For-profit business are not structured according to some immutable laws of nature. Everything about them is a legal construct and it can be tweaked. Corporate entities didn't even exist until a few centuries ago. There is probably an entire spectrum of entities one can have between a charity and a typical modern corporate.
Who's this "we" you're referring to that will enact these changes? Is it the shareholders of the companies? That's a no go - they won't go much beyond making token sacrifices for the sake of PR.
Is it the government? The regulators and the executives of the companies they regulate are frequently the same people - they do their time in private enterprise and then they become policymakers for the industry they were working in. The justification for this is that an industry needs to be regulated by people who understand that industry in depth (if you're a programmer - do things go well when all the rules around your work are made by non-programmers?).
Is it the people? Depends on the country you're in frankly. In the US popular opinion doesn't really support heavy-handed corporate regulation. There are some high impact issues like anti-trust where the public is fairly sympathetic to reigning in the biggest bad guys and I think those are good places to put your resources. Again, the best use of those resources is putting them into an organization dedicated to working on that issue. And the more capital you acquire from your business, the more impact you'll have.
My point of view isn't that we should have no corporate governance. But I have the hard-nosed realist view that the wishful thinking of "we" is ineffective. It has a poor track record. I'm saying a better approach is to go make money and then use it to alter the fabric of reality directly. Maybe network with other people who've made their money and convince them to do the same. This is easier than most people realize, I mean it takes a lot of work and time, but it's the type of work that will prepare you to vet organizations and make smart decisions about who can do the most with your contributions anyway.
By all means go ahead. People thinking and acting on these concerns mostly "have made their money", or at least feel secure enough to do so. The (large) complement of people who didn't are too distracted by daily struggle to relate.
Another reason for empowered individuals to act on their hunches is that there is no sure fire prescription of how to achieve change. We feel that things are "not alright" and we can reasonably suspect "nearby" alternate realities. Yet finding the pathways from A to B is basically by trial-and-error. In such context, the more trials and the more orthogonal to each other, the better.
More systemic processes might be slow but they are not "ineffective". Its a matter of timescale and perspective. The slowest of them all, the educational system, is actually the most effective in the long run.
We must break that spell. For-profit business are not structured according to some immutable laws of nature. Everything about them is a legal construct and it can be tweaked. Corporate entities didn't even exist until a few centuries ago. There is probably an entire spectrum of entities one can have between a charity and a typical modern corporate.