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Comment by whatshisface | Hacker News Reader

It's repeated very often that companies maximize shareholder value, but that's not really true. Companies follow the personal interests of their management and employees, in proportion to their power within the institution, which sometimes involves shareholder value.

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Ye. The belief in the "invisible hand" is strong. Boards and executives are not more rational than employees in general. Why would they not do things because they e.g. feel good about it or want revenge - like they were some super human well oiled machine.

Furthermore (and I think this is the strongest evidence), if companies were really "amoral impersonal shareholder value maximizers," enterprise sales would consist of leaving a box outside their front door and billing them a day later. The fact that enterprise sales is the exact opposite of that, opposed to it in every form, is very strong evidence against the robot-corporate way of looking at it. Of the many techniques for getting corporations to do things, as practiced by professional influencers of corporate choices, all begin and end with relationships. Not relationships with the company; relationships with its members.

In my personal and admittedly startup-prevalent experience with boards, I definitely think they operate more emotionally than most might think. Even companies I’ve worked with in the double to triple digit millions of worth function on far more emotional and interpersonal levels than most might think. Sure, money is the major motivator, but it’s all a machine driven by humans that are gut-based emotion bags.

It's not just startups. I've seen execs at old-school companies act worse than a 5 year old, alas.

People are not rational actors, and the myth that we are is incredibly harmful.

And here I though it's an obvious point. Board and executives are not more rational than employees in general, but are also as much - if not more - constrained in their actions. They can't just do whatever they want, not if they want to keep their jobs and high salaries, or hold any similar jobs in the future. The part where a company becomes an amoral profit maximizer is a combination of:

- Interests of the shareholders and other stakeholders, who most likely cannot agree on most of their goals, but they will agree on "money = good";

- Competitors who wait for the company to make a mistake they can exploit to get ahead, or possibly kill the company

Combined, these forces all but ensure the company has no choice but to be a amoral profit maximizer, or die.

A different analogy, that doubles down on "corporation is essentially an AI" view, but may make it easier to explain the main point: if you apply Maslow's pyramid to companies, most of them do not have their Physiological and Safety levels met. They operate in survival mode. Rarely, a company "feels" secure enough to ponder long-term visions or some ideals that aren't directly survival-related.

And yet this AI company can be undone by a single good salesman who's friends with someone in Purchasing.

How and why? I don't get the point about salesmen here.

Companies are not perfect optimizers. Arguably not even that strong. If someone in Purchasing is willing to reward their buddy instead of picking the best vendor for the job, well, that happens. It's noise. Doesn't change the overall behavior of the company. And it only happens within limits - do it too much, and the person in Purchasing will find themselves fired, maybe even charged with a crime. If they're too good, maybe they can kill their own company - much like a sickness can kill a human. Other companies will then be more vigilant.

Also worth noting that companies strive to improve their process and develop various means of ensuring and enforcing accountability - this, in essence, is trying to reduce the "noise" of individual humans within the larger AI of the company.

People who professionally influence companies, i.e. those whose job it is to understand corporate decision-making, focus almost exclusively on the dynamics of personal relationships. Salesmen, B2B marketers and even activists all use human behavior as the foundation of their techniques. This thing about corporations being monolithic being-like entities is a "theory without a practice;" we can look to the people who empirically deal with corporations to see that they do not find it useful to think that way.

Given higher-ups are either invested to some extent, or otherwise feel their prospects are aligned with the stock price because the investors will have them out if it doesn't do well enough, so I'd say the considerations always involve shareholder value. It might not be the only factor, and sometimes other factors win out, but it is always a factor.

But there are strong incentive structures in place that introduce a correlation between the interests of these individuals and the company's success at driving up share price or even making money. It's not as straightforward as that in reality, but a noisy profit/shareprice maximizing agent is not the worst approximation of a corporation you could come up with.

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