“Making Money like the Bee”
Who should profit? This is the question posed by Anna Roddick the founder of The Body Shop. Automatically my response is that the shareholders should profit, as they are the owner’s of the firm and that the goal of the firm is to create profits for them. Upon further consideration brought on by reading this article, I realize that profit is a more complicated issue. In some examples given in the chapter, companies’ sacrifice monetary profits for other profits, which I think we can term as societal and environmentalprofits. I think the complication of this issue is that we have to decide what is more important and how should we wait our efforts towards each. Personally, I agree with the authors in that I feel that for large publically traded companies it is unrealistic to expect them to put much wait into creating any other types of profits other than monetary ones, as they are always at the mercy of share holders and share holders will always care about their returns. On the other hand I think what the smaller companies are doing in terms of being socially responsible is amazing and should be supported completely and that we should have more programs and laws that support their actions like in Europe.
Another simple idea that really struck me about this article was the idea that one of the reasons that people act socially irresponsible at work is because they are compartmentalizing their lives in to work and home. The question that always bothered me in terms of social responsibility in corporations was that I didn’t understand how people who I assume have some kind of values individually can come together in a business and act unethically or with not thought to social responsibility. The idea that people are separating their work selves from their home selves brings me a little bit closer to that answer.
Not her market niche, everyone’s responsibility...