It is very obvious to me that corporations are not people. I'll deal with the fact that our US Supreme Court has deemed otherwise by supporting legal efforts to reverse their misguided opinion.
But if a corporation must be a person, what kind of person?
Let's acknowledge that humans tend to humanize our creations. Automobiles have faces. Masculine autos have hindquarters. We paint smiles on our airplanes and shipping boxes. Our businesses crush the competition, gladiator-style.
Marketing theory insists on businesses having personality. Kids know they're home at Chuck E Cheez with the friendly rodent. Grownups entrust their life savings to the wise, erudite patriarch who's earned it the old-fashioned way. Teenagers get all angular and rebellious while showing No Fear.
But a personality is not a person. A person has fundamental rights, regardless of personality, and a corporation is merely a business entity containing perhaps one, a few, or a thousand human persons. Each person within that corporation has rights, so granting the corporation additional personhood rights is quite literally "double-dipping". Enough about that.
Here's my question. Corporate leader, if you're going to personify your business, why must it be a sociopath? I'm not talking about the face or faces you show your customers in marketing campaigns. I'm referring to the soul of your company, the one that guides every business decision from hiring, to compensation, to ROI, to legal compliance.
At the heart of their business, the Koch brothers have implanted their philosophy of Market-Based Management. What is MBM? In a Columbia Business School document on the Koch website, David Robertson, president and chief operating officer of Koch, offers this:
Another critical dimension is to stay very rigorous in your discipline. All too often, you’ll hear public companies acquiring businesses for “strategic reasons.” For us, if we’re not earning an appropriate rate of return, it’s never strategic. Strategic should mean that you’re creating real value in society. If you’re not earning an appropriate return on your investment, by definition, you’re not creating value [my bold].
Let's loosely compare that last sentence with this definition of the word sociopathy:
A person with a psychopathic personality whose behavior is antisocial, often criminal, and who lacks a sense of moral responsibility or social conscience.
More beyond the bling.
Read More