(no subject)

[drewbear]

Okay, so 3 people saw the car today. 2 rejected it, hoping to find a better deal elsewhere and 1 was scouting for his son but thinks that he'll want it. I have 2 more solid leads by phone that haven't seen the car yet, but will be coming by tomorrow. And I'm still waiting to hear back from the guy who was interested in the apartment. We'll see.

Now on to less personal stuff and into the realm of esoteric thought processes!

People frequently complain of corporations as being soulless or heartless. To which I say, well DUH. If we consider a business of any sort as an entity (which we do, legally), then we must also be ready to accept what kind of entity it is. All businesses and corporations are memetic organisms, by which I mean organisms that are idea-based rather than physically-based. They consume goods, money is their life-blood, and the larger ones (loosely) replicate by spinning off subsidiaries.

However, like all simple (i.e. non-sapient) organisms, the ultimate goal of a corporation is to stay alive by whatever means necessary. Now, there may be constraints on the fiduciary evironment in which it lives such as ecological regulations, equal-opportunity laws, anti-trust legislation, etc., but a corporation will do everything it can to circumvent these contraints and thereby allow itself to grow just a little bit more. Of course, corporations will occasionally do things that seem unlikely to further or seem to act directly contrary to growth, such as Phillip-Morris running the no-smoking ads, but these kinds of actions tend to promote goodwill among customers, who will then be more likely to use the corporation's products, thereby feeding more money into the machine.

Yes, corporations are composed of and theoretically controlled by individuals, but extremely large corporations develop an inertia of internal and external policies and "corporate culture" which makes it very difficult for individuals, even highly placed ones, to make significant changes to the corporation with any degree of speed. After all, how easily can a single cell, even a brain cell, force you to immediately do or not do something?

So of course corporations seem heartless or soulless. That's because they are. A corporation "feels" nothing about you save for how you can further its ultimate survival and growth.

Comments

[bgaam.livejournal.com]

...So of course corporations seem heartless or soulless. That's because they are. A corporation "feels" nothing about you save for how you can further its ultimate survival and growth.


And that's what I tried to explain to my sister, brother and best friends (then officers and share-holders) when I created Brugama Art And Music Inc. a Florida Corporation in 1987. That is, we were all supposed to leave our hearts and souls at the door when we went to work. They didn't get it.

[drewbeartx.livejournal.com]

Now, while I realize that a successful business/corporation may require that those running it leave the hearts and souls at the door, as you put it, that doesn't mean that I have to like it. Oddly, the larger a business becomes and the less influence that any given individual therefore has, the less necessary this "leave it at the door" policy becomes, for any given person.

And this is why I am the wrong person to be running a company; I really doubt that I would be able to make the "heartless" decisions that need to be made.