Hughes Krupica: Making kindness a key business objective

After one of the most difficult years in recent history for many, reflection on how states, private persons and the most powerful global forces – companies – conduct themselves seems a worthwhile exercise, albeit in this piece a fairly short one. At a time when mental and physical wellbeing, environmental concerns, causal analysis of pandemics, evidence of selfishness, greed and callous regard for human life and safety are rife, a revisit to the potential purposes of our existence beyond primal basics could be helpful to reset or refocus human direction.

Perhaps surprisingly for non-lawyers, ‘law and nature’ are at the heart of an issue that continues to determine a misguided long-term objective of some societal controllers and participants, continuing a belief from the Milton Friedman and business management schools of thought that the almost exclusive, and certainly primary, purpose of a company and its owners should be to make a profit. Companies are undoubtedly the most powerful long-term forces in all of our lives. They work with government to provide essential utilities and services, they produce or provide the food we eat, the transport we use, the digital services and information we consume at an ever-increasingly rapid rate, and are evolving to automate or build in artificial intelligence to many systems of our existence.

In the past, corporations have been rightly vilified for their human rights and environmental abuses, with a great but obviously lens-specific summary provided in Joel Bakan’s ‘The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power’, which touches upon many of the issues concerning the lack of accountability and acknowledgment of responsibility that corporations should have for disasters and management of humans. Some laws change in a nod to the issues that arise, attempts are made to foster a sense of ‘global responsibility’ through initiatives such as John Ruggie’s ‘United Nations Guiding Principles’ for corporate responsibility. However, major problems with this are apathy, the effort and resource required to adhere to such wide-ranging principles, their opt-in / opt-out nature and a distance between those that operate companies and the intergovernmental organisations and states that declare approval of such polices.

My basic suggestion for a generic solution is not an original thought by any means. My inspiration for encouraging thought on redefining the purpose of companies emanates from two major sources. First, Colin Mayer’s book ‘Prosperity’ provides modern and deeply-thought-out analysis on how evolutional biological thought can be applied to the treatment and use of corporations in our society. By adopting a co-operative and altruistic approach to operating corporations, a boomerang of kindness will start to resonate through our interactions with corporations, and each other, thereby improving society. Second, both my young children, studying at different schools, have embedded in their early curriculum the concept of ‘kindness’ which is pivotal to their development. They are not alone. However, kindness also ought to be taught in business, economics, law, management and vocational school environments; there should be no ‘on-off’ button for kindness which switches between family/personal life and business life. Shock, horror! But how can anyone still ‘make a profit’, I hear the Friedman followers say…

Well, it is possible to set up systems that combine obligations and objectives of kindness with duties to companies and shareholders/owners to make profits. This requires taking the legal form of a corporation, and embedding new legal rules, flexibility, freedom and constraints to execute ‘kindness’.

If directors can choose or make decisions based on a combination of principles of kindness with legal tolerance for certain ‘losses’, or just lower profits, of an organisation, then it might become more fashionable to walk the walk of what are currently characterised as ‘do-good’ activities: Environmental Social Governance and Corporate Social Responsibility.

Although these are good concepts, they fall woefully short of the global directional shift required to radically improve the way we live, treat others and are treated.