On the business of life

[drwex]

I'm mostly dumping this here so I can reference it later, but commentary is welcome. This came out of a discussion of the relationship of WiiTID to the profitability of the enterprises that employ people like me:

Profit is like health, to a corporation. You have to have it, and more is good. But it's not the reason for existence.

Comments

[feste-sylvain.livejournal.com]

No, no, dear; that would be "government".

[drwex]

I've been re-skimming some Peter Drucker on this topic and he makes some interesting points I can't fully summarize in a comment but here's what I take him to be saying:

- the stated purpose of a corporation may be to make profit, and other concerns should not enter into the equation, except that...

- corporations are composed of, and must hire/depend on, moral beings (people).

Therefore, it is impossible to achieve profit goals without factoring in the very moral principles that corporations supposedly excluded by design.

What's not clear to me is how he thinks that ought to be implemented in practice. Drucker's mostly a theorist so I don't completely hold against him this lack, but my thinking is still cloudy.

[feste-sylvain.livejournal.com]

Here's a recommendation for you: Suicidal Corporation, by Paul Weaver. In it, he distinguishes between "company" and "corporation", and shows how some fast pussy-footing in the late 19th century was responsible for much of the corporate legal infrastructure we're saddled with today.

Weaver mostly decries the long-term effects of the overly-cozy government/corporate relationship, but he also unveils many of the post-Smith pre-Nash assumptions which went into the formulations of legal corporate infrastructure.

All this is a long-winded way of saying that Drucker overstates his case when he (correctly) claims that "other concerns should not enter into the equation". That's the way we've currently got it, but that's not the way that it should be (according to Smith's analysis of mercantilism distinguished from capitalism, and Nash's analysis of optimal outcomes).