Continuing the Greater Good discussion

[More on “A greater good,” Advice Line, 12/29/2007):

Normally, I am very impressed by Bob’s insights and thinking outside or beyond the box views.

This one seems a little off the mark.

I think Bob missed the (perhaps unspoken) theme here that we, or at least some of us, are completely disgusted and fed up with corporations that are becoming increasingly arrogant, mean-spirited, and repulsive.

His response is to hide behind an examination of Capitalist and Marxist economic principles. This is the kind of answer I’d expect from Ken Lay, not the normally enlightened Mr. Lewis! 🙂

Of course economic systems are amoral – they can’t have morals any more than they can be happy or sad.

But the extent to which “morality isn’t part of the discussion [of business success]” isn’t a consequence of which economic system we choose to (loosely) follow, it’s a function of what we, as a society, define as success.

Bob has chosen the “bottom line” criteria espoused by Wall Street and BODs everywhere, where the ends justifies the means, and greed is good.

Bad Bob, bad. If I had a newspaper, I’d hit Bob on the nose.

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Bob’s reply:

Fed up or not, disgusted or not, here’s the way things are: Businesses exist to provide value to shareholders; the managers of a business have a fiduciary responsibility to see that the shareholders get that value.

They have quite a bit of leeway in figuring out how to make that happen. That leeway extends to placing ethical boundaries beyond the legal boundaries of acceptable behavior, so long as doing so doesn’t cause shareholders financial harm.

It also extends to ignoring all conventional ethical mores, so long as the behavior is legal, in the same pursuit.

That’s a fact. I’m not responsible for it. I am responsible for not pretending that it isn’t the case.

If the managers who run a business want it to run according to their idea of ethics, it’s up to them to figure out how to do so in a way that makes the business at least as successful as any other choice. If they want employees to act for the greater good, they have to:

* Define in clear, appealing terms what that means.

* Build consensus that the greater good really is good.

* Structure the company so that employees who act for the greater good are more successful than those who don’t.

If someone works for a company whose managers haven’t done this, I’m not going to pretend that employees should act for the greater good anyway. That would be bad advice, for all the reasons I listed.

If you disapprove of how most companies are run, join the club.

It’s a big club, which doesn’t change my advice one bit.

– Bob

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