Quoting Mehmsy from 23:23, 16th May 2007
Whoa now. A business/corporation/whatever's primary and only responsability is to its shareholders. Sure, companies should try and be eco-friendly and all that jazz; but at the end of the day they do that because it increases their customer base, or keeps from alienating groups.
Bullshit.
First of all, your claim that a business' sole responsibility is to its shareholders is a personal opinion of your own, not a fact. It's also inaccurate, since many businesses don't even have shareholders. What you mean is that businesses are accountable to their owners, which may be a private equity firm in the case of a private company (e.g. the Arcadia Group), its employees if the firm is a partnership (e.g. John Lewis), or the members if it is a co-operative (e.g. the Co-operative Group), but they are only shareholders in the case of a public company.
Your opinion on this matter is nevertheless one that I broadly agree with. However, the conclusions you draw from it couldn't be wider from the mark. As someone who actually works in business, I can tell you that if you think businesses, for instance, take steps to look after the environment - not that I said anything about this, but we'll use your own example for the sake of argument - solely because they want to protect their public image and thus be profitable, i.e. that it's all a sham, then you've fundamentally misunderstood the nature both of business and of human nature, and, I can also tell you, these are attitudes you're going to have to re-adjust if you hope to achieve any kind of responsible position in business yourself. Whilst I appreciate I work for a business (not a 'company', as it happens) that is uniquely placed to do this kind of thing as a result of its ownership model, already I've worked with people from backgrounds in all kinds of different businesses, and I can tell you that corporate social responsibility is taken very seriously indeed. So it should be.
Responsibility to the owners is also what makes customer focus of paramount importance. Business owners demand not just the quick return - they have too much capital invested for that - but a business model that is sustainable in the long term, and this requires a relentless focus on the needs of all customers, to the exclusion of nearly all other concerns. Treating a large group of customers who happen to be vegetarian with what could most charitably be described as casual indifference does not send out a positive message to the rest of the customer base at all, and is therefore a bad policy; customers would be right to wonder which of them the company would turn its hostility to next, and on what basis.
My point - and again, I'm referring to the way business actually works, not just the way you think is works - is therefore that Mars should be ashamed because its decision has already failed its customers, and because of that it has failed its owners too. It will be very interesting to see what effect this has on the direction the company takes in the immediate future.
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Psalm 91:7
