Twitteretter

The question is prompted by watching, in disbelief, the quick success of business ideas which, at least to my mind, contribute little to our society or way of life. It’s hard to find deep meaning in rising stars like Tik Tok or Facebook, to name a couple. Their success appears fast and huge. Of course, success is not only measured in economic terms, impact and significance carry the day long term, but I may be in a minority these days in professing this iconoclastic view. Even in financial terms, there are larger successes by more meaningful businesses, but they are less public. Meaningless enterprise relies on publicising its success to feed its progress, the proverbial emperor’s new clothes. Plus, our system is not perfect. Meaningless or even harmful businesses will always succeed, but not in numbers. Cocaine trade has succeeded for decades by feeding the need of some for mindless escapism, in the same way as Tik Tok succeeds today by feeding the need of some for mindless narcissism...

We know we have a problem with large multinational corporations not paying due taxes if they can by any means avoid it, which they indeed can. This seems immoral. When so many need solidarity, and when such huge profits are made, how can this tax avoidance be justified? But here there is a problem borne of our personalisation bias, the human tendency to personalise in order to relate and understand. Corporations don’t make a wilful or moral decision to put profit over taxes. The effort to minimise or avoid taxes is rather the result of internal incentives, for managers and financiers, which are not considered on morality but on efficacy. They are just the way things are done, the way business and management schools teach us to act. What is missing from corporations (nearly by definition or necessity) is dreamers, visionaries with the capacity to redesign received wisdom at all levels. All we need for corporates to contribute is for their leaders to focus on this, accept its importance...

Modern business thinking has no time for ethics. True, corporations refer to ethical business, but this is just another product. It is paid lip service, in most cases, as a marketing ploy to attract customers. Some corporations do seem to behave ethically, but not many consistently do. The maximisation of financial returns is the ultimate objective of most businesses and this is widely accepted in society as necessary. But this acceptance is a mistake, the result of an oversimplification early economists made to be able to model economic interactions and the system these build. No universal law dictates this must be the aim of businesses. We could choose to rate and value a business on ethics, or impact on the wellbeing and happiness of stakeholders it interacts with. This is more complex, but would have an incredible effect on our societies. Money has been around so long it is easy to forget it is just a convention to facilitate exchange and, thus, lacks intrinsic merit or substance...