The Primary Purpose of Business Is Not to Maximize Profit
Quote:
Originally Posted by
michimoby
Ah, that's why. Your perspective on saving companies differs from that of the market. Yours is "every job is safe". The market's is "the customers are safe".
A company's #1 mission can never be profits. Its mission can be to serve its customer as best it can while profiting. But the profits are a byproduct of serving the customer, not the other way around.
A municipality's mission cannot be to generate the most amount of tax revenue. It has to be offering the best services to its citizens. [[Notice, providing jobs is not the primary or secondary purpose to a municipality.)
If Compuware wants to be safe, which I hope it is, it becomes safe by being the best at its mission. Michimoby is right. When the customers are safe, the company is safe.
http://articles.latimes.com/2009/dec...ik31-2009dec31
Quote:
Drucker showed that there is no "inherent contradiction between profit and a company's need to make a social contribution," but that the former is indispensable to achieve the latter. He also warned that an enterprise that fails to "think through its impacts and its responsibilities" exposes itself to justified attack from social forces. Consumerism and environmentalism, he taught, are not enemies to be vanquished, but symptoms of business' failure to understand its broad social role.
"Peter was talking about this in the 1950s," or long before corporate social responsibility became a formalized management principle, says Rick Wartzman, a former Times colleague who is executive director of the Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University.
His views placed him in conflict with classical economists of the Milton Friedman stripe, who considered profit maximization the be-all and end-all of corporate behavior.
Profit may be the motivating force of the businessman, Drucker wrote, but it fails as "an explanation of his behavior or his guide to right action." Worse, this narrow view of the corporation's role inspires the hostility toward profit that is "among the most dangerous diseases of an industrial society."