Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation

1. Letting companies feel good about themselves

2. Providing something worthy sounding in the public eye that might defuse "bad publicity."

3. Doing a bit of investigation and complaint resolution in connection with the scummiest 5% of businesses, which often weren't members. Moral outrage? A desire to kneecap the most difficult competitors? Probably a bit of both.

I'll agree with earlier posters who are a bit cynical about all the factors listed in Reasons 1 and 2. But Reason 3 shouldn't be overlooked. I don't think the Business Roundtable will suddenly be concerned about how Exxon, Walmart, etc. make their money or deal with customers, employees, suppliers, etc. On the other hand, odds are good that they will take a stand against small-time chicken processors, toxic-waste dumpers, etc.

Back in my BBB days, we did some real work to crack down on fraudulent apartment-referral outfits, which not only ripped off newcomers to New York City, but also made life ugly for the mainstream realtors, building owners, etc. that were BBB members.

Even if such battles may seem like grandstanding, they can be of some use.

I tend to get harshly downvoted when I bring up Google on Hacker News (since it employs a disproportionate amount of Bay Area engineers that hang out here and then get defensive about it), but no other company did I see quite the disconnect between what they SAY they aspire to and how they ACT.

Google has built an incredibly strong PR brand on being the "good guys", a "not a conventional corporation", "don't be evil", etc. But in a way it's far more dangerous. At least we know what Goldman Sachs is about, making money, the employees there largely know it, the world around them knows it, people know to be on guard when dealing with Goldman because you know what their motives are.

With Google, having worked in NYC with finance companies and spent many years at Google, people are Google are as obsessed with money, success, and prestige as any finance employee. But they SAY they are about making the world a better place, responsibility etc. Where this leads is not, Google doesn't do bad things, but the much scarier, they do wrong things but saying they can't be wrong because Google is the one doing it, and Google is supposedly good! Taking a page from Nixon, "when the president does it, it's not illegal."

This came to a head during the Maven debate over using Tensorflow to build auto-aim killbots. The most common ethical defense amongst employees was "well, if we don't do it, Amazon will do it, and that would be worse! Because we're Google, and we're the good guys." Now if a crack dealer said, it's alright for me to sell dangerous narcotics to these children and addicts, because if I don't do it, someone else will. And that person could be even worse! Would ANYONE accept that argument as ethically coherent? Of course not, yet these otherwise very intelligent Google employees seemingly swallowed up Google's absurd logic without thinking. You become the good guy by NOT doing the bad things, not by doing the bad things while claiming it's alright because you SAID you're the good guys.

Now, to pre-empt people accusing me of derailing, I'm not because this is extremely relevant to the original article being discussed here. This is banks leaders like Jamie Dimon following Google's lead. You don't have to actually take any REAL moral stand, you don't have to make any real ethical decisions, all you have to do is TALK about it a lot. Control the message. It's dishonest and it's hypocritical but it's worked out very well for Google. Compare Google to Uber. If you just look at the facts, between the Kelly Ellis accusations, the Andy Rubin thing, many more examples, Google's sexual harassment FACTS are actually WAY worse than what Uber was accused of. Yet Uber now has this awful reputation for being terrible to women while Google gets way less flak in both the tech community and the broader world - why? All because Larry and Sergey played the PR game way better than TK, they were the cool hip burners who cared about progressive stuff, while really they run their companies with the exact same corporate malfeasance, profit at any cost strategy of any NYC financial institution.

Bottom line, we need to hold companies accountable with ACTIONS, and if they give us WORDS instead of ACTIONS we should be MORE critical, not drop our guard and be LESS critical.

My web service client is a JSON consumer, but I'm a store's customer. It doesn't work the other way.