Yearly Archives: 2005

The Social Responsibilities of Corporations

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In previous posts I have professed my support for integrated corporate philanthropy and the model of devoting 1% of employee time, profits, and pre-IPO equity to a charitable cause. I believed at the time – and still do – that corporations can do good by doing well and that there are a number of unquantifiable morale benefits in the workplace when employees feel like they are part of a bigger cause above and beyond profits. That being said, I admit to drifting right in my support for free markets and minimal government interference. (In general, I find some liking in some neoconservative tenets.) So, I found Richard Posner’s recent posts (part one, part two) on the social responsibilities of corporations provocative to say the least. As you can imagine, Posner, given his propensity to link everything to markets and economics, thinks corporations provide maximum social benefits by maximizing return to shareholders. There is a lot to be said for this viewpoint. Both he and Becker venture into other areas of corporate law and economics on which I do not have sufficient understanding to comment intelligently. I will, though, excerpt this quote from Posner where he veers off course:

One comment that I am quite sympathetic to is that the social return to profit-maximizing activities may actually be higher than the social return to corporate philanthropy, when “corporate philanthropy” isn’t just a fancy name for public relations. As I argued in an earlier post, philanthropy directed at poor countries may actually reduce the welfare of those countries, and the same is probably true to an extent of purely domestic charity. The general effect of charity is to postpone the making of difficult decisions. For example, philanthropic gifts, private or public, to the arts retard serious efforts by artists and artistic organizations to create work for which there is a genuine interest on the part of the public, and philanthropic gifts to universities help to shield them from competitive pressures.

A commenter has smartly replied: “Who decided that popularity was the purpose and overarching goal of art? Did I miss a meeting? The primary rationale for supporting arts with philanthropy is the desire to encourage art that is potentially unpopular but hopefully mind-expanding.”

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We're All Postmodern Now

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In the latest Columbia Journalism Review (no online edition) there’s a great essay titled “We’re all postmodern now: even journalists have realized that facts don’t always add up to the truth.” It says basically that the postmodernists have won and that journalists are just starting to concede that a utopia of pure objectivity and factual reporting is not reality. “Spin” is here to stay. Excerpts:

In the final third of the 20th century, journalism had seemed the last bastion of certainty, of hardheaded realism. While the arts, the humanities, elements of the social sciences, and even aspects of the sciences, were grappling with notions of interpretation and uncertainty, most reporters held onto the very 19th century notion that facts were independent of interpretation; that they were discrete and merely required “collecting.” …Journalists were content to ignore postmodernism – a loose collection of philosophical ideas and aesthetic notions that have in common a revolt against the belief that any one perspective, any one view of reality, has ultimate priority. Deconstruction [is] perhaps postmodernism’s most dynamic incarnation…Deconstruction and other postmodern theories have long argued interpretation is inextricably bound with reality….

The ideology of no ideology took hold in American journalism and maintained its grip long after the limits of realism became clear in art, literature, philosophy, and even, to an extent, physics. The “inverted pyramid” – a perfect vessel for contextless, virginal facts – was seen as holy. In the second half of the 20th century, objectivity became the American journalist’s creed….

News sources, too, have been helping pile interpretation upon interpretation. Developing alongside the great journalistic fact-gathering machines in the 20th century was the great science of public relations. Newsmakers now spin with enough dexterity and industriousness to make us all dizzy. Everyone senses this. Is there any better evidence both of the ubiquity of spin and of the recognition of the ubiquity of spin than the name that is now universally applied to the space outside our quadrennial national debates – spin alley? To allow yourself to be spun while knowing you are being spun in a quintessential postmodern experience.

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Managing Expectations Critical in Human Interactions

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In my very first focus group with a city manager he told me “A big challenge for me is managing the expectations of my citizens in an age where consumers can now order a book online today and receive it tomorrow. That’s not the case for fixing potholes.” We have a number of features in my company’s software that makes it easier for administrative officials to manage citizen expectations around customer service.

But expectations are terribly important in any life interaction. The word “disappointment” is completely relative to what a person is expecting. You don’t have complete control of someone’s expectations on projects/jobs/communications, but you can certainly do things to manage them. Most people try to lower another person’s expectations so they can “under promise, over deliver.” This is fine, but it makes it harder for you to keep raising the standard for yourself because a key way that happens is by other people pushing you, by saying “I think you can do it one notch better.”

When high flying executives suffer a major crash in morale and self-esteem, it is usually because they contributed to meteoric rise in others’ expectations in their performance by not being as candid about their vulnerabilities and weaknesses. If you lead other people to believe that you are superman, then the smallest of small mistakes will not be in line with others’ expectations, and you will fall. It’s human nature to cheer for the underdog, and see the hero fail. Hence my distaste for larger-than-life CEOs.

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Friends of Ben: Steve Silberman

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I’ve been remiss in not updating the Friends of Ben series (where I profile interesting friends of mine) as often as I should but after a deeply thought provoking conversation with today’s feature I resolved to update it.

Network: Ben Casnocha > Cole Valley Neighborhood/Blogging > Steve Silberman

Google: Steve Silberman

Steve is a contributing editor at Wired magazine where he’s been for 10 years. I first met Steve more than a year ago when he emailed me saying he was a fellow Cole Valley resident in SF. Since from time to time I do interviews with press people I was expecting another of the same. It turned out that Steve was unlike any other journalist I had met with – he wasn’t interested in business as much as the people behind them. He wasn’t interested in Comcate as much as me, the person; a living breathing person with experiences and feelings and complexities.

Talking with Steve reminds me that life is about people, corporations are about people. I’ve always had appreciation for anyone who has studied human behavior, cognitive science, or psychology. No matter how many layers of suits one hides behind, no matter how staunchly one projects a certain identity to achieve a certain goal, at our core there is something very primal and authentic and common about the way humans act. Few people in this world are able to penetrate the barriers we put up around ourselves that only are disarmed when we are sitting in bed in darkness, unable to sleep, engulfed in our own conscious. We are the only ones who know what is rattling around in our inner-selves. It is a great struggle (and an innate urge) for humans to communicate these inner thoughts to people close to you. Most of us fail, and the sane people of the world can manage this failure of communication by living in the company of their own thoughts and feelings that others do not understand.

What’s remarkable about Steve is his ability to get as close to those inner thoughts as anyone has, for me at least. Through razor blunt but gently kind questions we grappled with some of the issues I’ve written about on this blog – narcissisism, college, relationships with peers, and so forth.

The most heartening take away for me from our chat was that many of these life developmental issues require two sets of skills – a skill to develop a framework for thinking about it (being able to have conversations with others or yourself about them), and then the skills themselves – like empathy, love, etc. – which we all have the genetic capacity for, but only some of us develop to the fullest extent possible.

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Book Reviews: Plan B and Lawrence Kohlberg's Approach to Moral Education

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I’ve read 24 books this summer which seems like a lot but isn’t when compared to the stack of books on my desk and the 82 books on my Amazon wish list! So, I’m going to try to “turn it on” in the 30 days left of my summer.

I’ll put Aristotle: The Desire to Understand (wasn’t dumbed down enough for me) and Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (not my kind of humor) to one side because I’d rather talk about Anne Lamott’s Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith and Clark Power’s Lawrence Kohlberg’s Approach to Moral Education.

I excerpted from Plan B a few weeks ago and listened to the audiobook on some long drives I had recently. This book was full of touching stories and humbling reflections on life and Anne Lamott’s spirituality. At times it got a little too touchy-feely for me (and she went on far too long bitching about George Bush – give me a break) but on the whole this is Lamott at her best. Her prose is awesome – I even scribbled down some of her phrases on my Blackberry at a red light: “Laughter is carbonated happiness” or “Life works because not everyone is nuts on the same day” or “Are you drowning in uncried tears?”

Clark Power’s review of Lawrence Kohlberg’s approach to moral education was equally engrossing, for I have always wondered what the best way for schools (or any formal institution, for that matter) should teach/talk about morals and values. This is a very tough topic for self-described “aggressively secular” private schools like the one I go to. First, the book recaps Kohlberg’s six stages of moral judgment – starting with avoiding rules backed by punishment, to following rules only when it is in your immediate interest, to “being good” and living up to expectations, and culminating in the sixth stage of following self-chosen ethical principles and acting on the principle even when they conflict with a certain law or social agreement. Few people ever reach the sixth stage. After learning that even by age 18 one’s cognitive development is not nearly complete (Yay! The more brain cells the better, baby!) we are taken into the heart of Cluster School, a school founded by Kohlberg that is premised on complete democratic governance with each student and teacher having one vote in school decisions. It is clear that by providing students the opportunity to grapple with tough administrative decisions, they are developing moral reasoning skills that otherwise go undeveloped until they are out in the real world and decide to, you know, fudge the numbers or perform some other great moral deed that is Enron/Worldcom/Arthur Anderson.

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