by David Akadjian
One of the best questions you can ask people in organizations that are struggling is:
If you could get rid of one thing, what would it be?
It’s a great question (and also one that should be asked in confidentiality) because:
- It’s hard to think about changing everything.
- It’s easier to think about one thing to eliminate.
People often have a really good idea about what that one thing is in an organization. Often it’s the elephant in the room that people can’t talk about publicly for fear of retribution. Sometimes, it’s a person. One thing clearly stands head and shoulders above the rest when you talk to many people in corporate America. It’s an idea that completely removes responsibility from many corporations in our society. It’s an idea that threatens not only our constitutional democracy, but also every value Christians hold dear and every value we hold dear from modernity and post-modernity.
It’s an idea so bad that Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric, called it “the dumbest idea in the world.”
The idea, called shareholder value theory, is that the sole purpose of publicly-held corporations is to return profit to shareholders.
Customers be damned. Society be damned. Families be damned. Results be damned. America be damned.
Where did this idea come from?
Ayn Rand was one of the first to hint at such an absolute in The Virtue of Selfishness in 1963. She saw altruism and selfishness as exact opposites. Belief in one precluded belief in the other.
Altruism permits no concept of a self-respecting, self-supporting man — a man who supports his life by his own effort and neither sacrifices himself nor others.
In The Virtue of Selfishness and her other works, Rand argued for selfishness (or profit) as the only moral needed and also held that somehow any acts of altruism were immoral.
No wonder people like Mike Wallace took Rand for a cult leader in 1959. Not only did she advocate against any and all ideas about the common good—she also insisted that selfishness was the only thing anyone needed.
The person who really brought the idea front and center, however, was Milton Friedman in a 1971 article in The New York Times titled “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits.” Friedman claimed in his article that executives who pursued anything other than pure profits were “unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society these past decades.”
Friedman saw the market as a machine that we should serve and optimize, rather than as a thing we create to make our lives better.
He also argued that executives should be responsible only to shareholders, and that shareholders want only one thing: Profit.
In a free-enterprise, private-property system, a corporate executive is an employee of the owners of the business. He has direct responsibility to his employers. That responsibility is to conduct the business in accordance with their desires, which generally will be to make as much money as possible while conforming to the basic rules of the society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical custom.
While critiquing his opposition’s views as lacking intellectual rigor, Friedman’s entire argument is based on a single assumption: That people have no interest other than greed, and that greed will somehow lead to a greater good.
He can’t seem to imagine that shareholders might want a better world. And he can’t seem to imagine how greed might lead to unethical behavior.
Read more
http://m.dailykos.com/stories/1476239
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