The Myth of Corporate Greed

I heard it again today. With the so-called "financial crisis" making hot and heavy headlines, the phrase has been running rampant: corporate greed. "We must fight corporate greed." "We must not reward corporate greed." The problem with these understandably emotional verbal skewers of corporate greed is that corporate greed is a myth. It doesn't exist.

Surely that is a ludicrous statement to make, that corporate greed doesn't exist. Corporations are well known for shipping jobs off shore, fixing books, lobbying for corporate-friendly legislation, and now, taking tax-payer dollars to bail them out of financial crisis. Only an idiot would say that corporate greed does not exist, right? Maybe. I mean, I could be an idiot, but that assessment is a separate issue from the myth of corporate greed.

Here's the thing: a corporation is just a legal classification and grouping of assets and people. A corporation is inanimate. It cannot be greedy. You want a villain? Here they are: people. People are greedy. Is this a distinction without a difference? I don't think so.

When we make a monolith of something we bascially create a black box around the facts. The black box effect is one that I observed in my time as a technical writer. Software developers would refer to any system or part thereof that we had to interact with, but didn't need to understand, as a black box. In other words, we didn't need to understand the inner workings of the thing, we just need to know what input or output was necessary from our system to interact with the black box. Our whiteboards were full of drawings of black boxes.

When we make a black box of corporations we fail to understand that people and, in many cases, individuals make the decisions for a corporation. A person or group of people can be greedy and often times are. These are the people who may well deserve our wrath and certainly deserve our scrutiny. These are the people that we must seek to remove to ensure that our corporations are healthy and can serve their higher purpose.

When we allow ourselves to believe that corporations are bad, we miss out on all that they do and can do for us. When ethical people run corporations, or a business of any size, they provide jobs for us and our neighbors. They pump not only money, but products and services into our economy. They solve problems. A business under ethical leadership that pursues its goal of profit with a broad definition of that term -- one that encompasses not only CEO and stockholder profits, but also profit to the employees and community in which it is situated -- is a boon to all it comes in contact with. It is, in a very real way, the key to the American dream.

The things that plague us in our time and every time -- evil, greed, hate -- are individual sins, if you will. To attack the vehicle by which individuals or groups of individuals commit their acts of evil is to miss the target. Corporations, competition, the search for profit, these are not inherently bad things. In fact, they can be quite beneficial when they are run or pursued with ethical energy.

You want to attack greed? Attack greed in individuals -- including yourself. That is where the problem lies. When individuals pursue more than what they need or just more than what they can reasonably use, bad things are sure to result for those left in the wake.

I don't know if that is compelling to you. It may still seem to be a pedantic difference. It matters to me because for a long time I believed business was bad. I didn't want to have any part of it. But this irrational view kept me from being able to improve both my economic condition and my life in a broader sense as well. Taking an active role in an ethical business is one of the most rewarding experiences, not only on a financial level, but from the sense of accomplishment that comes from solving a problem or actually creating something.

I know too many good young people who want nothing to do with business because they view it as a greedy blight on the world. The problem is, that attitude robs business of truly talented and ethical people who could actually make a difference by contributing to a well-run business, thereby making not only their own lives, but the lives of others better. That's a difference worth making and that's the difference that results from making the distinction between corporations and the greedy people who sometimes run them.