Even though Businesses are owned by their shareholders and thus responsible for giving them a return on investment, the focus of a businesses must not become turning a profit, but how they are going to make a difference in the world.  Once a business begins to focus on their profits and losses, they lose focus on the things that make the business unique and valuable and this opens the door to anything that turns a profit being OK.  Unethical behavior can then destroy the business.  When a company is staying focused on its purpose, the profits will be incidental.

          When I was growing up in the 1970’s in upstate NY, I remember having to stay up until after 11:00 PM to talk on the phone with my Grandfather in California where for him it was 2:00 AM.  This was because ATT, “The Phone Company,” had a monopoly on phone service and the daytime rates were prohibitively expensive.  Also, the telecommunications technology in use was basically the same as it was forty years prior; ATT had controlled all telecommunications development through its subsidiary, Bell Labs.  A small company in the Midwest named Microwave Communications Inc. (MCI), which had sold two way radios to truckers, wanted to provide better and less expensive long distance service so they challenged ATT’s monopoly. (Saint 2001) This led to the breakup of ATT and today my wife calls her mother in Ft Worth TX, from San Jose CA several times a day and we just pay a flat rate of $24.00 a month using our internet phone connection.

      Through a series of mergers and acquisitions, MCI became WorldCom.  Today, if you were to ask the average person on the street, they probably wouldn’t identify WorldCom as the company that took the stand that allows them to call their friends and family at any time, inexpensively. They wouldn’t necessarily discuss how MCI’s challenge of ATT resulted in the technology that allows them to chat on their MySpace Page being available. They would likely be thinking about the accounting scandal that brought down MCI / WorldCom and how it’s CEO, Bernie Ebbers, is now in jail for twenty five years for fraud

          In the early part of the 20^th century, a young architect, when challenged, handled things quite differently.  This architect had lost his young daughter to illness.  The architect, like many a parent who had lost a child, had blamed himself because in an economic downturn he had lost his job and was forced to move his family into sub-standard housing without proper heating.  The architect had decided to kill himself.  With nothing left to lose, at the last minute, R. Buckminster Fuller chose instead to conduct an experiment to see how much of a difference one human being could make to humanity.  By the time he did pass away of natural causes in 1983, in his late 80s, Fuller has made several archeological, scientific and sociological breakthroughs such as The Geodesic Dome, “Bucky Balls”, The Dymaxian Map, The Dymaxian car, The Hunger Project, The World Game Institute along with  several others.  He was also the person who had coined the terms synergy and Spaceship Earth.  In 1980, Fuller had stated, “For the first time in history it is now possible to take care of everybody at a higher standard of living than any have ever known. Only ten years ago the 'more with less' technology reached the point where this could be done. All humanity now has the option of becoming enduringly successful." (Fuller, 1980 www.worldtrans.org)

           Business can be a path to all humanity becoming highly successful. Business is essentially a form of communication.  I communicate to the clerk at Subway $5.00 and the clerk communicates back a foot long sub sandwich, there is an exchange of ideas at a certain level.   The more people who walk into Subway for this exchange, the more profits Subway makes.  They then open more stores, hire more people who go out and buy stuff at other places.  As markets expand and ethical company will expand.  As it expands, it brings more and more into the fold until it is all encompassing. 

          Thriving businesses also keep us at peace.  If there were a Subway in Baghdad and Baghdad gets bombed and 20,000 people are killed, that is a potential loss to Subway of 20,000 foot long sub sandwiches.  If each of those people would have just had one foot long sandwich a week that would be a loss to Subway of $5,000,000 a year, not to mention that the survivors would probably be a bit more afraid to go to the mall and thus  buy even less.  It is bad for business to have a war and kill off potential clients so expanding ethical businesses will also make war obsolete.  It is necessary however, in an ethical company is for someone to have a vision.  One example of the power of a vision is that of Professor Fredrick Terman and two of his students.

          In the 1930’s, The Santa Clara Valley in Northern California was world renowned for its fruit orchards.  It was called, The Valley of the Heart’s Delight, as a large variety of fruits grew there.  Stanford Professor Fredrick Terman had a different vision.  Terman was a professor in what was then known as Radio Phenomenon, now a part of electronics engineering.  Terman knew that for this field to grow into its potential, The Engineering Department of Stanford would need to surround itself with electronics businesses to have a symbiotic relationship.  He convinced two of his students, William Hewlett and David Packard to start a business in Palo Alto California, in Stanford University’s back yard.  Hewlett Packard was started in the garage of the house that Packard had rented.  Today, when you fly over the Santa Clara Valley, instead of seeing miles and miles of orchards you see miles and miles of office buildings filled with electronics companies and there is a sign in front of the old HP Garage on Addison Street in Palo Alto, California that reads, “Birthplace of the Silicon Valley.” (1996, Packard)

          David Packard of Hewlett Packard also had his own vision.  Packard wanted to change the way Management / Employee relationships worked.   In the day that HP had started most businesses were highly hierarchical in there structure.  While working as an intern at General Electric in their Quality Assurance Department, Packard had found that when he was out on the floor in dialog with the engineers, there were fewer defects in the end product.  “That was a very important lesson for me,” Packard wrote, “that personal communication was often necessary to back up written communication.” (Packard, 1995 p 27) Over the next several decades, Packard had developed this discovery into what he had called The HP Way. The HP Way is a very flat management structure of self managed work units. Hewett and Packard placed their trust on their employees.  During Packard’s tenure at HP, they only had one layoff in the 1950’s.  When he passed away in 1996, employees at HP held impromptu memorials for him in the lunch rooms. After Packard passed away the problems began at HP.  The management team put the HP Way on the shelf and concentrated on the bottom line was brought in to run the company.  They merged with another company over the objections of the Hewlett and Packard families causing thousands around the world, from both companies to get laid off.  When that action did not prove successful, another management team was brought in.  The chairperson and some board members were indicted for spying on other board members.    

          Hewlett’s and Packard’s live were about how a business can make a difference in the world just by the way they do business.   A business’s products, of course, can also make a difference.  When Bill Gates was a boy, he would run home from school every day to watch the TV Show, Star Trek.  He was fascinated that Captain Kirk had a computer on his desk and decided that it would be his life’s work to put a computer on the every desk in the world.  Several years later, when he saw that the Altair 8080 was on the market, he started Microsoft (Gates 1995) and now there is a computer on almost every desk most of which run some Microsoft Software and Gates is one of the top two wealthiest people in the world.

    Young Gates set his goal to put a computer on every desk.  He did not set the goal to be the richest person on earth.  That was just incidental and as a result of being generally successful in attaining his goal.  He wanted to do something that would improve the lives of others; he wanted to make a difference in the world and for that he was rewarded by having a profitable company.  The question to ask therefore is not what can I do to make money?  But rather, how can I make a difference in the world with my business or product?    Gates then took the money he earned and started using the money itself to make a difference.  Through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Gates is using his profits to work on improving education in the United States and also ending Aids in Africa.  In 2005, Bill and Melinda Gates shared the Time Person of the Year with Bono from the band, U2    

          Fifteen years ago, CVS Pharmacy was a small chain of drugstores in New England.  During that time, its CEO Tom Ryan has “transformed the company . . . into a national health care colossus.” (Boyle 2009 pp 42 -49)  It is now one of the top twenty biggest companies in America.  Ryan did not build CVS by concentrating on profit but rather his goal, “to help transform America’s expensive and often ineffective health care system.” (Boyle 2009 pp 42-49) This is something beyond Ryan himself, this is what drives Ryan and while working on transforming the health care system he has incidentally built CVS in to the giant that it is today.

          Of course, having a greater good in mind for a business and wanting it to make a difference in the world is not a guarantee for success.  Today, in 2009 we are at the brink of one of the greatest financial meltdowns to have ever happened.  Several banks have closed or have been rescued by the federal government, who has committed close to a trillion dollars to save the banking industry.  One of the causes of this was that the banks were making loans to people who were not necessarily qualified.  It is easy for us to think that the banks did this because they are all run by lazy goniffs but some of these bankers actually wanted to make a difference by allowing the little guy to achieve the American Dream and own their own home.  They figured that with the price of Real Estate continuing to sky-rocket, the overloaded home owners would be able to refinance in a couple of years and even get some cash out of their homes.  After all, real estate prices couldn’t possibly ever go down because the population was going up so the laws of business and economics could just be ignored

           Yes, it is a good thing when businesses work on attaining their purpose and also work to make the world a better place but they have to remember that to achieve their goals they would need to follow the principles of business and economics just as a scientist or engineer must follow the laws of Physics and Chemistry.  If NASA had decided to ignore the Law of Gravity they would have never put someone on the moon.  If Grace Hopper would have ignored the laws of binary arithmetic and symbolic logic, she would have never invented the FORTRAN computer language.  By ignoring the laws of business and economics the banking industry has put itself into serious danger.    

          Indeed, while businesses are owned by their shareholders and thus are responsible for giving them a return on investment, businesses have a responsibility to not only turn a profit for their shareholders, but to also "turn a profit" for their communities and for humanity.   They do this by having a purpose and by staying focused on their purpose.  It is also important that a business follow all of the laws of society and nature.  Once a business leader becomes focused on profits and losses instead of its purpose, the door will become open to stupid, unethical behavior and failure.

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References

Boyle, M (2009, Feb 23)  CVS Dispensing Drugs and Health Reform. Business Week, 42-45

Gates, B ( 1995 )  The Road Ahead New York, Viking

Packard, D  (1995) The HP Way New York, Harper Collins

Saint, S (2001, September 2^nd) Telecoms Rise and Fall.  ATT’s Breakup Created an Opportunity

          for Telecommunications,  The Colorado Springs Gazette, Retrieved February 28, 2009

          from  http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4191/is_20010902/ai_n9991845

Shockley-Zalabak (2009) Fundamentals of Organizational Communication San Francisco

          Pearson

http://www.worldtrans.org/whole/bucky.html