Comment by gibsonf1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gibsonf1 | Hacker News Reader

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"If they teach otherwise in business school, they're making things up."

This is an understandable belief given all the publicity the bad companies get. But what about the companies that do well and actually act in a moral way? There must be many of those as well, but not nearly as exciting to report on. Here's a rising bank that makes a very large point of their moral approach to running their business: http://www.bbt.com/bbt/about/philosophy/values.html

Maybe with the increasing leveling of the business "playing field" and the increasing openness of communication, businesses that actually act in ethical ways will gain ever larger advantages in winning and keeping customers over their less ethical competitors. A business that gains a reputation for integrity in its field that focuses on providing customer value will be hard to topple.

There are two fundamental problems here.

One is that the customer can't easily discern between a good company and an evil company without doing business with them. Once they hit a certain size and have a large enough customer base, reputation helps.

But companies that act in their own short-term interests without regard to integrity are likely to out-compete companies that try to behave ethically -- so all other things being equal, if a large company doesn't make a fuss about ethics and integrity, odds are it's evil.

The ethical company has the long-term advantage, but the unethical company has the short-term advantage. If the unethical company can use the short-term advantage to its benefit, it can build up enough of a business that it's hard to topple despite being unethical.

The second point is that the larger the company, the more its inherent trend towards self-serving (probably evil) behavior. Bureaucracies are inhuman, because the responsibility for the evil act or evil policy can always be passed on elsewhere or euphemized away, and a large number of problems turns into a statistic. One person screwed over by the company is a real problem; ten thousand screwed over by the company justifies the budget for the complaints department.

It takes a very principled, very public stand to avoid both of these problems.

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