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.
This month's Rolling Stone article about Koch industries paints an unflattering picture of a company having sociopathic tendencies. One source seems to be saying that while Koch did not set out to become a sociopath, its soulless MBM philosophy by design compels people to make soulless business decisions. If you're not earning an appropriate ROI, you're not creating value. By extension and at paycheck time, if you're not earning an appropriate ROI, you have no value.
The Columbia Business School document is compelling, in my opinion, because it reveals the company's sociopathy in the language of a business school publication meant for a business-school audience. It is the most honest statement of self-awareness that Koch can offer its peers. Koch believes it is doing nothing wrong, and if it is, then its best course is to change the rules to suit its own objectives. Koch is so confident in the Koch Way that they've written a book about it.
There are in fact other ways. New Rule: if you're going to create a corporate "person", please make it someone you would like as a son or daughter or neighbor. If your neighbor creeps you out, you probably don't want to be near that guy.
There are many ways to define value. Koch unapologetically defines value as ROI; make money at all costs. To me that's a creepy neighbor. That's the person who will chop down my tree at 3AM, because improving his view may increase his property value. That's the person who (according to the Rolling Stone article) patches only 80 of 538 faults in a decaying gas line, because the legal and PR costs of the resulting explosion and civilian deaths somehow pencil out to being a better ROI.
Koch Industries is way off the charts in its sociopathic personhood in my opinion, but more important, the problem is systemic. It's the reason why tomorrow's business leaders flock to Columbia and other business schools for nuggets of wisdom, and eventually gold, from the likes of Koch. It's why trickle-down gets a free pass, while viable alternatives like B Corporations are branded as voodoo economics by some.
What is a B Corporation?
Government and the nonprofit sector are necessary but insufficient to address society's greatest challenges. Business, the most powerful man-made force on the planet, must create value for society, not just shareholders.
Ah, Shareholders... Okay, there's ROI. Plus a nod to smaller government. What's this
other stuff about?
We envision a new sector of the economy which harnesses the power of private enterprise to create public benefit. This sector is comprised of a new type of corporation — the B Corporation — which is purpose-driven, and creates benefit for all stakeholders, not just shareholders.
As members of this emerging sector and as entrepreneurs and investors in B Corporations, We hold these truths to be self-evident:
That we must be the change we seek in the world.
That all business ought to be conducted as if people and place mattered.
That, through their products, practices, and profits, businesses should aspire to do no harm and benefit all.
To do so, requires that we act with the understanding that we are each dependent upon another and thus responsible for each other and future generations.
Now
that is a neighbor I can live with, and a child I would be proud to have raised!
Yes, if corporate personhood is a foregone conclusion, it is possible to create a compassionate person rather than a sociopath.
To knowingly loose a sociopath on society borders on criminal, and predictably, becomes criminal whenever that person inevitably loses control. Koch Industries has been accused of several misdeeds, and today the sociopath walks. They will continue trying to creatively ignore or rewrite the rules as it suits their "person", while their public personality touts 100% compliance.
In summary, we can do better than this. That's the best encouragement I can offer to anyone who interacts with corporations, whether as employees, managers or investors.