What makes corporations bad or good - an anecdotal perspective.
This article is meant to analyse big corportaions while providing insights from an intangible leadership perspective.
While analysing big corporations in the public eye, we tend to focus on mainly 2 things.
- Financials
- The number of social movements they have contributed to
Financials would be everything that financially encapsulates a company, from the wages of an average blue collar worker, to the absolute yearly taxes paid.
Contribution to social movements would be deemed legitimate for consideration if the company has shown to be putting in efforts to slowly transition from traditional norms, towards pushing for things like climate change and LGBT rights. Such examples are like Google’s goal to run its operations purely on carbon-free energy by 2030, or even slow, small changes like Facebook’s Pride@ Development Summit.
However, I propose a 3rd metric to be used, and that is the innate characteristics of the current company’s leader. Note that I didnt say CEO or even CTO or even President as these may not be the true leaders, or controllers of the company.
Why the first 2 metrics are not the real metric
Financials are great, but they lack a tinge of humanity in them. Yes, one can pay workers minimum wage, provide them with great monetary incentives in the company (and this shows up in the quarterly financial reports when companies have dipped profits which translates to increase in worker welfare), but this will always be unable to depict the motivation and emotions present in an employee. Looking at employees solely based on numbers is the equivalent of saying that every life has a price. Financials are unable to capture the sole reason of what drives companies to do great, or terrible things.
Studs Terkel positions meaning as an equal counterpart to financial compensation in motivation at work (for the American Worker). “Work is about a search…for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor,” he wrote.
Contributing to social movements are excellent as well. In this modern day and age, who doesnt want to appeal to the masses, by sending company evangelists to curb the protestors and lobbyists. However, one must proceed under this train of thought with a tinge of caution, because appealing to the crowd does not equate to being good.
How many lobbyists truly understand what they are lobbying for? As the saying by Roy T. Bennett goes, do what is right, not what is easy. Its easy to give in to the masses, but is that necessarily right? Rather, shouldnt a company be focusing on targeting the fundamental root causes which has brought about these issues in the first place? The catch here is that these root causes are probably not easy to be found and digging it out requires more than just money. It requires dedication.
Greenwashing is also prevalent everywhere. With the current pecuniary power that big corportations hold, changing the media and getting access to famous politicians are nothing but easy. Examples can be drawn everywhere, from the famous Volkswaggon diesel engine scandal, to Seaworld’s alleged mistreatment of Killer Whales.
So since these 2 metrics are very surface-level metrics, how do we progress from here?
The real determinant of a company’s position on the good vs bad scale
To answer this, one must move away from the traditional shareholder theory by Milton Friedman and realise that the best companies all work for the people, and no one else. Rises in stock and revenue are all positive externalities that have occurred from the people-first mindset. Then, what is the main motivational factor for companies to adopt the customer-first mindset? Or should I say, what drives companies to adopt these mindsets?
The answer to that would be the company’s leader (in most cases, the founders. Note that founders might not be CEOs). The leader dictates everything about a company, from the company’s direction to the company’s branding strategy. Most of the time, this is done indirectly as a spillover effect from the leader’s words and actions in the company.
As the leader controls the company, it can be interpreted that the leader is the life of the company, and everything the leader says and does has a direct impact on whether the company tips towards being good or being bad.
Hence, a good leader = a good company and a bad leader = a bad company. Layman, but I would argue that it is accurate. Note that just because a company is bad, doesn’t necessarily make it not successful, vice versa.
To delve deeper, we’ll need to know what exactly it means to be good or bad.
What is good and what is bad
It is a shame that in today’s era, there is a huge lack of revolutionary leaders. There are 2 summarised factors which make up a leader:
- Absolute intellect
- Absolute personality in the good-bad spectrum
Absolute intellect is self explanatory, and all revolutionary leaders must be smart. Do note that intellect is not only a referrence to IQ but also to EQ and all other aspects which encompasses how a person thinks, talks, moves etc
Absolute personality is where the leader stands in the good-bad spectrun. A bad personlity (in our current conformed societal view) would be someone who only cares about themselves and will do everything to attain power for themselves. Imagine a maximum level of self-centeredness where the person believes he is god and everyone else is but a minion. In contrast, a good personality is someone who lives solely for the purpose of helping progress the world and every single action is geared towards that very 1 ultimate goal - Enriching everything around that person.
Only when a leader has high absolute intellect and a ‘good’ position in the good-bad spectrum can that leader be revolutionary.
High intellect and Good - Revolutionary
High intellect and Bad - Catastrophic
Low intellect and Good - Progressive
Low intellect and Bad - Destructive
So why are there so many bad companies nowadays
Simply put, it revolves around how society values education and the education-curriculum itself. Education and schools focus solely on the promotion of absolute intellect but not the propagation on having a highly-ranked ‘good’ personality (on the good-bad spectrum).
This is extremely dangerous because it allows the rise of many catastrophic leaders since the current society is only bent on tangible results, and has not geared towards the realisation of personality as a key determinant of a leader’s ability.
Yes, it has been advocated that being good is great and we should all strive to be good citizens etc. However, the emphasis on being good is simply not enough to create a revolutionary leader and most great leaders fall under the progressive category. Having multiple progressive leaders are good, but we just need 1 or 2 Catastrophic leaders to offset everything that the progressive leaders have done.
Only when Revolutionary leaders emerge, can we really expect society to change at an unparalled pace.
