Subtitle: I’ll never look at Birkenstock the same way again
I pinched this title from a paper by Art Kleiner of roughly the same name. I’ll come back to Kleiner shortly.
Jason Kottke, kottke.org led me to thinking about this with a reference to a Michael Lewis’s article in the New York Times article The Irresponsible Investor
In an article that we highly recommend, Lewis argues that investors, by single mindedly seeking the greatest and fastest possible return on their money completely distort the behaviour of the corporations in which they invest. In words that resonate like a bell at chriscurnow.com he says:
- The investor cares about short-term gains in stock prices a lot more than he does about the long-term viability of a company.
- The American investor’s short-term greed leads him to be more interested in the appearance of a business than its substance.
- Investors, in their shortsightedness, encourage companies to neglect their social responsibility.
Lewis goes further to suggest that most of what passes as ‘Corporate Social Responsibility’ is in fact a thinly disguised attempt to make money by appearing to be good.
I won’t try and steal any more of Lewis’s thunder – he says it much better than I can summarise.
This will be a theme that I return to often. Corporations exist only by the goodwill of the state (read society at large). We give them protection against individual liability so they can do much bigger things. (Kleiner discusses the origin of corporations in ‘The Age of Heretics’.) Yet they now behave as if their right to exist and do whatever they like must be unchallenged. I could say much more about this, but I’ll leave you with the link.
Finally to return to Kleiner. He argues that the real purpose of organisations is to
“make life as wonderful as possible for the “core group,” the members, the people in the center.”
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This paper is great reading and is expanded on in his book, “Who Really Matters”