It may seem that way from the outside, but once you're actually involved with a leadership team at the top of such an organization, you realize it is 100% a human endeavor.
I cured myself of these beliefs when I looked at how reality actually works (and when I stopped smoking weed). When Louis Gerstner turned around IBM as the company's first outside CEO, that was a result of his decisions and vision, not the emergent decision-making power of IBM. More fundamentally: people can think about companies, companies can't think about people. There are no collective minds, only individual minds working together.
The actual article in interesting. It sounds like Russian/Chinese/non-Western multinationals are growing in power, and with significantly less scruples than their Western counterparts.
My point is not really to present the thought as a deep explanatory insight into the universe but more to get people to apply an existing mythology of powerful otherness to corporations. An interesting POV to consider, nothing more.
And I think that while corporations don't quite think, they do use business rules and abstracted information about individuals to trigger actions. The humans writing those rules are probably reasoning differently about the rules than they would the individual decisions. The corporation can become more than the sum of it's parts through very simple mechanisms.
In my experience the reason is often that the rationale for the decision, say shareholder perception, is not something that the majority of people working actually spend their time caring about. As the actions move further from the rationale, you start to get emergent behaviour.
This is exacerbated by the tendency of managers to feel a need to do something even when not doing anything is demonstrably better. So I often see cases where someone senior make a fairly throwaway comment of the form "What are we doing about X?". Even if the answer is nothing because nothing was a perfectly reasonable thing to do, the effect of the question is that something gets done. The higher the level of the questioner the more activity it tends to generate.
Throughout my career I've been amazed at how differently things looked from different levels of the organization. That is in part due to information compartmentalization (required in publicly traded companies) and in part due to variation of practical versus vision type goals. Sort of "keeping the lights on" vs "staying ahead of the competition."
That's actually good news of a sort. It might imply that corporate behavior might still be governed by a program of targeted .....?
Just thinking out loud here folks...