This sounds good in an edgy r/im14andthisisdeep sort of way. But in reality, having integrity and ethics in business is actually more profitable over the long term.
That really depends on the size of the fish and the size of the pond. If you're a whale in an ocean of minnows (hello Amazon) you can effectively dictate the terms of business, ethics be damned.
> But in reality, having integrity and ethics in business is actually more profitable over the long term.
This seems like a fairy tale you tell young naive business majors with no experience. The real world isn't like that.
You think oil companies, tech companies, defense companies, tobacco companies, banks, etc have been profitable for decades because of integrity and ethics? No you become profitable and wealthy by being amoral and cutthroat then paying PR firms to spread the news about how good you were all along.
Do you think Google, Facebook, Apple, etc are so profitable because they are moral? Do you think Nike became Nike by having integrity and ethics or by exploiting cheap labor overseas?
Thank you for thinking I'm deep an edgy....
But why is long term important?
people need to see long term effects to know that it's more profitable. But right now, people see success without ethics, so why should they think long term?
There might be a day of reckoning, where these short term gains result in long term catastrophe, but until then, people do what works.
And today the only measure of what works is money.
> > It's easy to lie without lying. As a society we replaced any sort of value for our value proxy, money.
> But in reality, having integrity and ethics in business is actually more profitable over the long term.
Both your parent's view and your view could spring from a belief about how the world is, rather than from non-anecdotal hard data. I'd like to believe the more optimistic version, but I find it hard to do so. Do you have some data to support it?
That doesn't sound right. It can be a sustainable way to run a business, but some publications do fine despite a well-earned reputation for dishonesty, such as British tabloids.
More generally, plenty of companies cause negative externalities, profiting by causing damage that they don't have to pay for.
They're known for this because both activists and entrenched business interests benefit from promoting that narrative. Gates and Bezos both regularly talk about the impact they have on the world and why that matters more than just money - there are reasonable arguments that they've done bad things, but the idea that they're completely amoral voids is just silly.
"The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel. That is basically it." - Bezos
Gates's philanthropy is fine, but my comment was on his business dealings. He has a long history of anti-competitive behavior, completely void of morals.
Fallacy of relative privation (also known as "appeal
to worse problems" or "not as bad as") – dismissing
an argument or complaint due to what are perceived
to be more important problems. First World problems
are a subset of this fallacy.
Nestle is evil. Microsoft is evil. Nestle kills more than Microsoft. Microsoft is still evil.
My bar for evil is a lot higher than "signed exclusive distribution agreements with some OEMs in the 90s."
Illegal? Sure. Evil? So some other millionaires didn't get to become billionaires. Meanwhile the world got a single API to write software against for almost two decades, how many ISVs existed because Microsoft provided an insanely stable (in regards to API churn) platform to develop against?
Hell right now with 2 major mobile OS players there is a huge tax on developers, imagine if the 90s had been a wild west and there had been 4 or 5 major players.
One can also note that given how mobile played out, there is a good chance that the desktop market would have coalesced around a single dominant OS and a secondary minor OS anyway.
And yeah I know everyone is pissed about BeOS, but they also had their chance to be a player until they tried to hard bargain with Apple and Apple walked away!
While I agree with the general feelings about the evil threshold, Microsoft in the 90-ties built and took advantage of a natural monopoly in order to crush their competition and expand in new markets.
Let's not go to the other extreme and downplay what they did. If they had their way, the Internet wouldn't be an open platform and open source would be illegal.
Personally I don't care about exclusive OEM deals. What I care about were the dirty campaigns against open source and them trying to leverage their huge patents portfolio against Linux and later Android. Or them planting shills inside Nokia, weakening it enough for a takeover of their mobile division and then running it into the ground, thus destroying one of Europe's top tech companies. A conspiracy theorist would say that this was economic warfare, maybe sponsored by the US, but for me incompetence is enough for blame.
Or how about their long battle against open standards, like ODF and their use by public institutions?
And the Microsoft of today, in spite of popular belief, isn't very different. Their priorities may have shifted, but even post Balmer they continued to use their patents portfolio against Android and they continued to fight against the adoption of ODF. Their predatory culture is still there and as seen by the ads and aggressive telemetry in Windows 10, as soon as they can gain some economic advantage, they'll take it, regardless of cost to society.
Their "Microsoft changed" marketing campaign has been genius in its execution. On the other hand I'm glad that they are doing well, because otherwise they have the potential to become the biggest patent troll. Just like when their Windows Phone failed to gain traction, "if you can't innovate, litigate" seems to work well.
Nobody earns a billion dollars; the only way to get that kind of money is to pay a whole lot of people significantly less than the economic value of their labor. The internet economy has just made it easier to abstract away ethical problems such that you don't recognize them as hugely problematic when you're making them.
With the current system, we're reliant on the whims of a couple of billionaires. Some are relatively benevolent, but far more are on the level of the Kochs, Larry Ellison or the Sacklers. Business schools have taught the "fiduciary duty" doctrine for a long time, which is basically "maximize profit above all else, or we'll find someone else who will".
I don't see the ethical problem. I'm paid significantly less than the economic value of the labor; this is because my company does a lot of coordination work to connect my labor to clients who need it, and I'm not particularly good at that kind of work so I can't effectively do it myself.
I don't think "reliant on the whims of a couple of billionaires" is a fair characterization. In what way does the average person rely on the whims of Larry Ellison?
