The Evil Corporations have us pinned down

#Occupy #Self #Goals #Morality #Success #Money

So the Occupy movement first targeted the banks as evil.  I struggle with the concept of true evil.  Even partly evil is bad enough and maybe working for so many years for banks has colored my perception.  But hard to think of anyone I've worked with over the years as evil.  Maybe self absorbed or arrogant in a few cases.  Maybe quirky and anti social in others.  But evil?  I don't see it.  No one on any of the boards or in the executive team seemed to be subtly manipulating other than for internal political purposes.  Most people were doing the job they were paid to do in a system they contributed too but didn't design.

Then the movement targeted publicly traded retailers as evil.  I have plenty of friends in retail.  They are mostly exhausted rather than evil as far as I can tell.

I struggle to see companies as evil because of that.  Misguided, poorly managed, and flawed.  Dishonest perhaps.  Manipulative definitely.  But not evil.  

I don't think it is corporatism itself that is the issue.  But rather the people running certain companies or working for them that cause the underlying problems. Google has 'Do no Evil' as part of their corporate doctrine but that was defined by people not by the company itself. Once it was defined it became clear to the individuals working for the company that they need to consider that moral stance in their daily work practices and they will adjust those practices accordingly. If Google's doctrine was 'maxmise profits at any cost' it would change the entire culture of the company and the resulting business practices.  It would change their products and the way people felt about the company.


There are some amazing companies out there which enrich the lives of the people that work for them, their customers, and the wider societies that they are members of. Or for some bigger ones they change the entire world by their existence. Whether a company changes things for better or for worse depends on how the people running them direct them.


I've seen first hand how leadership and culture and the people who work for a company define what it is.  As a consultant trying to help businesses plan on how to recover from catastrophic events I have had the opportunity to follow work flows and analyse business processes of multiple companies around the world. Business Continuity practitioners get to learn a lot about the companies they are creating strategies and plans for.


In every case the people were the toughest thing to build recovery strategies for. In most cases companies think it is too hard generally and just hope they wont have a disaster that takes out key people. But in every organization there are a few key people who are absolutely critical to the core business practices. During events where a lot of lives are lost in a specific company e.g. 9/11, the Oklahoma city bombing, the Tsunami in Asia, many companies go under and never recover because they lose those key people.


When you get a CEO change the entire company changes as a result. Just look at the last few years at HP and the ongoing debacle.

When you think about it a business is really no more than a vehicle for people to work together for a common purpose. The head or owner of the company sets that purpose and then hires people to come in and help them achieve it. So often the company culture will be reflective of the ethics and personality of the senior executive(s). If they have questionable morals then that will tend to flow downwards through the incentives and policies they set for the employees.


A culture of greed and excessive profits realized by making your work force compete with each other for bigger and bigger deals, usually goes hand in hand with excessive risk taking and unethical deals to maximize profits. If we had companies in general, and investment banks in particular, instead recognizing the impact their business and employees have on society, and rewarding or reprimanding employees accordingly, you would have a very different relationship between main street and wall street. More of a symbiotic one instead of a parasitic one. Think about that for a second. Deals that make a profit for the company but also generate jobs in the community being recognized and well rewarded within the culture of the bank over deals that generated huge profits with a net job loss to the community.


At the moment people have more power than they realize to change the culture of the corporations that they support with their hard earned money.  With social networking companies now more than ever are inviting feedback.  Use those channels.  Make them realize the kind of behavior you demand if they are going to receive your hard earned cash.  At the moment one of the biggest issues is still transparency and visibility of the companies we shop with.  What are they like? Are the good environmentalists?  Do they treat their staff well?  Those things don't turn up in the product reviews and customer service feedback assessments that are all over the web.

I'm hoping to launch a non profit at some point which acts as an independent assessor of all companies. We'd create scores to indicate the impact a company has in all areas and publish them so consumers understood whether their dollars were supporting businesses that had a net positive or net negative impact on the world from the customers moral viewpoint.


Rather than try and figure out what the weight should be for the various categories like taxation contribution, job generation, and environmental impact we'd just report on those and let customers decide. Same way some people are happy to buy shares in oil companies, tobacco companies, and firearms manufacturers while others refuse to on ethical grounds.


A lot of the information is already available in the public domain but your average person isn't going to read through hundreds of annual reports for companies before they go out and buy a pair of shoes. But if there were ratings or numbers on the shoes I believe this would affect their purchasing decision. Same way nutritional information does have an impact on what gets purchased in a grocery store.


In my view transparency = honesty. There will always be spin doctoring but at least its a start. It's one of the reasons I am pro real names policy on Google+. If someone can't stand behind their words under a public spotlight then these are probably words they need to think more about before they say them.

It all comes back to individual responsibility and accountability.  A good ethical person will make things work in a broken system or environment.  They will do what it takes to combat the inequality they see before them.  They won't fall prey to greed and avarice or try to game the system to their own advantage.  They'll take the higher road.  But a broken system can wear a good person down.  And it can give the less ethical more power than they should have which ultimately leads to an even more broken system.

There's hope though.  Most people are fundamentally good.

Make sure you are one of the good ones and don't be afraid to stand up to the evil if you see it.  As English philosopher Edmund Burke said, 

‘The only thing necessary for the triumph [of evil] is for good men to do nothing.’