this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2023
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Nothing highlights this as much when your management actually says and believes that "the purpose of our organization is to make money". Totally clueless people.
No... the purpose is to deliver value to all stakeholders including customers, and society at large and by doing it well make some money. So it maters what you do and how you do it and the vision around it.
completely agree. the market system is just not the best model for resource allocation. we need a more socialised way of allocating resources. the first thing to do is to throw the billionaires into jail and seize their assets.
Some of this and maybe a lot of this is a reflection of ourselves. By this I mean the values we collectively espouse and that come to be represented in media, politics, education including what is learned in business schools, etc. When nothing is enough and competition and winner take all view points are highly valued, well this is what we get.
Reason I say this is that it strikes me that perhaps this is a lot more about ourselves than anyone wants to admit.
This culture/philosophy has been created over time and is called liberalism, it follows follows from the reformation (of the church) and feeds off support from capitalists(and political allies) themselves. This culture that upholds hard work as virtuous and discourages compassion is being taught to almost everyone even though it doesn't mesh with the real world all that well. Especially what is commonly believed to be the result of hard work is more often than not inheritance or sheer luck.
Yes we all propagate this culture nowadays, but it isn't actually part of humanity(in some human nature way) it's just very ingrained propaganda.Some mainland Chinese people might have a very different ingrained culture regarding these things.
I mean, legally, that is the purpose of a for-profit company. From a policymaker's perspective it has wider purposes, but to the managers that's basically "not their job"
That is kind of my point exactly. The purpise of companies was not originally so. I is just a view heavily promoted by elites. Even the courts believe it now. Was not always so. Hence it does not always have to be so.
Yes, but what the alternative is isn't so clear cut. Every corporation thinking through the impacts of their decisions on every other person in the world is obviously unfair (even governments have trouble tracking stuff), and even if they could how do you make them? Benevolent leadership is, if you look across history, a myth.
How do you allow a CEO to work against their shareholders without basically legalising embezzlement? You can't write every possible scenario into your law, and shouldn't ever try. How do you get random shareholders to care about a social issue, and how do you assure whatever social issue they pick is a good one and not "putting down the gays"? You could tear up the whole market system and start fresh but I've yet to see that done in convincing detail.
The solutions aren't obvious. I do think they exist, but I'm trying to quit value judgements on the internet, so I won't write a manifesto here.
PS on the history bit you mentioned, it seems to me a corporation is just an overgrown street peddler, and street peddlers have always been looking to make a profit. The occasions they don't have been flukes.