Corporate Anti Hero

I know, I've barely written about this blogs headline meme since I started it and now I'm going to fob you off with a link. For now just think about turning the concept of customer relationship management on it's head, and producing 'vendor relationship management', with all the tools of interaction history, promises made and kept/broken, discounts available and so on all on your side of the fence.

Christopher Carfi has.

More here.

and in some small way this is what the corporate anti-hero is about, taking corporate tools, tactics and approaches and turning them to other, different, more useful ends.

Since I've been blogging away for a few weeks now I suppose it's fair to say that this blog might have a shelf life of a year or two, and so I should probably start trying to justify the title. Before I get down to the business of who, or what a corporate anti-hero might be maybe I should think about the corporate hero. Who is he?

Joel Bakan's excellent book The Corporation is based on the following premise. In US law a corporation is a legal entity, a fictional person with real rights. A corporation can be harrassed, stalked, intimidated or threatened. It can in turn sue, take out restraining orders, file charges or litigate; it is in the eyes of the law, an individual. What kind of individual is a worrying question, a corporation is bound to pursue shareholder value at the expense of anything else, the same laws that make it human also restrain it from caring about anything other than itself. The corporation might be legally constructed as a human but it is also legally constructed as a  sociopath.

At business school I came across a few business men who ran companies large enough that they could easily have floated on the stock market, making the transformation from Ltd or LLC to full fledged corporate monster. In almost every case the owners said that they had chosen not to do so in order to retain their freedom of action. Sometimes they explicitly linked this to a desire to do good things without hinderance, sometimes it was just about not having to justify their strategic choices to a room full of analysists. It doesn't matter, the point is that once floated, once launched into the world a corporation is a self propelling, inhuman entity. Managers exist to serve it, while shareholders are denied any opportunity to exercise moral control over the beast through a series of laws which explain that even though they own it, they may not attempt to stop it from earning the maximum possible profits. Often these laws reference the rights of minority share holders; if the law didn't create these unchecked, immoral monsters, well then, we might end up with unchecked immoral majority shareholders and who knows where that could lead?

What kind of man is the corporate hero then? Who would or could champion the cause of such an entity?

The answer, emblazoned across the pages of business week for the last ten years is, of course, the Superstar CEO, aided and abbetted by his loyal league of corporate justice; Economic Orthodoxy Man!, Guru Boy!, The Caped Lobbyist and of course The Political Champion. Corporate heroes come in all these guises, and many more. Legal Apologist probably has a whole raft of graphic novels devoted to his deeds, all printed on wafer thin paper, the details of clauses and sub-clauses packed in next to noirish scenes of courtroom drama and backroom dealing. PR Girl can be found seducing and bamboozling the press across the pages of a dozen or more shrink wrapped publications.

These thoughts are not radical, and not at odds with what the experts think about the corporation. Here's what  Arthur Levitt Jr had to say about how companies are run in a 2003 speech.

"Over the past 15 years, a bull market built up wealth just as quickly as it tore down ethical standards.

The symptoms first arose in the executive suites – and came to our attention two years ago this week with the bankruptcy filing of Enron. What was uncovered at Enron, WorldCom, and the rest brought to the public’s attention the sad truth that CEO’s were managing the numbers, not necessarily managing their companies."

This is a rather polite way for the former head of the Securities and Exchange Commission to say that the bosses of corporations spent 15 years defrauding their investors. What he can't quite bring himself to say is that they were legally obliged to, if the risk / reward calculation looks right, if the expected fines are small enough, then any good CEO should ride roughshod over the law. Shareholder value is the only thing that matters to his insatiable master.

Ladies and gentlemen of the western world, these are your heroes.