CITYBOYCorporate social responsibility sucks! |
It’s a scam created by managers, as it makes financial sense to play along.
LONDON - To paraphrase Hermann Goering, when I hear the words "corporate social responsibility" I reach for my gun. Unfortunately, I heard those heinous words non-stop at a conference I stupidly attended recently. Frankly, the idea that huge, rapacious corporate entities think we're naïve enough to believe that they're not just out to make as much wonga as humanly possible as quickly as possible makes me cry into my beer. The fact that management teams, advised by trendy consultants, believe we're so stupid that we'll buy their horse crap that they actually care about things like the environment makes me want to massively short the shares of every single company in the "FTSE4Good" index ... for eternity.
When I was a lad you knew where you stood with industrialists and tycoons. They were the nasty bastards who smoked huge cigars, poured chemicals into rivers, employed tiny children at sweatshops in faraway countries and exploited the workers whilst paying themselves preposterously massive salaries. These guys meant business in every sense of the word and weren't going to allow namby pamby ethical considerations disrupt their never-ending mission to exploit this sorry planet and its poor inhabitants as ruthlessly as possible. They were old-school capitalists whose greed was only matched by their lack of consideration for anyone who wasn't a member of their gentlemen's club ... but at least they were honest! They didn't pretend to be something they weren't. Their guru was Ronnie and Maggie's hero, the economist Milton Friedman, who famously advocated that a corporation's purpose was solely to maximize shareholder returns (though they probably thought he was a bit of a leftie).
Cut to your modern day blue chip chief executive. He's having a chat to his company's PR department and they've told him that his huge oil company needs to give the impression that it gives a crap about something other than lining its wealthy shareholders' silk pockets with fat dividends. Barely suppressing a giggle the corpulent CEO asks why he should even consider doing something so patently absurd. Initially, the PR goons talk about how it makes "business sense". They explain that it will aid recruitment because students are really interested in what a company's carbon footprint is and that it will also improve staff retention as it enhances the internal perception of the company. They may even cite some dubious report by some comedians called Orlizty, Schmidt and Rynes (crazy names, crazy guys) that claims there is a correlation between social/environmental performance and financial performance. Of course, they won't mention that statistics can be used by cunning analysts to find correlations in pretty much anything.
Seeing that the boss is still not convinced the PR clowns decide to tell him the truth: nothing is really going to change! The whole caboodle is just a scam to make out the company is moving with the times. It's a ruse so that the company can curry favour with politicians by pretending to be part of Gordon Brown's "stakeholder society". Perhaps there's a threat of tighter regulation and pretending to be socially responsible may just prevent it happening. CSR credentials can be used like a shield to protect a corporation from public disapproval which is important since such hostility may eventually manifest itself as financially harmful political policy. They may point out that morally dubious companies like British American Tobacco use their CSR programmes to cunningly distract the public from the ethical questions posed by their core product. If they're feeling particularly naughty they might remind the CEO that Enron laughably came out with a yearly "Corporate Responsibility Annual Report". If that doesn't convince him the whole thing is a meaningless joke exploited by greedy tossers for their own evil purposes then nothing will!
Companies that make a big song and dance about CSR are just like Neanderthal men who've become metrosexuals in order to get laid. They think that talking about the environment and the community (e.g. moisturizer and hair products) will make potential shareholders and employees (e.g. modern ladies) think they're soft and lovely. These jokers are misjudging their potential "stakeholders" and underestimating the intelligence of their target audience just as metrosexuals have done with their female quarry. People who go and work for big corporations are generally more interested in accumulating wealth than bettering society - just as most modern women don't actually want men to talk about hemlines and shampoo. The graduate trainees from Oxbridge at my bank consistently told me that the vast majority of their acquaintances are trying to get into the City since "that's where the real money is". When I left Cambridge many of my contemporaries had worthy ambitions beyond buying a massive pad in Kensington but left-wing idealism is long dead and we are now surrounded by Thatcher's children. Society has polarized and all the pinkos who are banging on about the issues CSR seeks to address are not only relatively powerless but also unlikely to be either shareholders or employees of major corporations. Adam Smith has won the day and the people working at investment banks and FTSE 100 corporations are unfortunately more interested in having enough cash to buy that fanny magnet of a car than what it emits.
I'm the first to accept that nostalgia ain't what it used to be. Still, I look fondly back at the days of Gordon Gecko, Michael Milken and Jimmy Goldsmith when corrupt moguls were more honest about their never-ending mission to make themselves and their companies' shareholders ever richer. To me, CSR is akin to putting lipstick on a pig or polishing a turd - neither of which actually changes the underlying entity. It's a scam that came into being because prescient managers saw that it made financial sense to play along with it. I'll accept that as with other scams, religion for example, it has taken on a life of its own with certain poor, deluded fools. Unfortunately, what these dopes don't understand is that Satan will be selling ice-creams long before a chief executive makes a decision that suits CSR at the expense of his profits. "Greed", for want of a better word, is still definitely good in the eyes of executives whose fiduciary duty is to maximize shareholder returns. It is only when CSR doesn't happen to get in the way of greed that corporate executives permit its existence. Call me old fashioned but altruism contingent on self-interest ain't really altruism at all!
*Cityboy also goes by Geraint Anderson and is a former analyst in the City of London. He is the author of the international bestseller Cityboy: Beer and Loathing in the Square Mile." Buy the book online at our Moneyweb Shop http://tinyurl.com/mnyshop) or find him at www.cityboy.biz
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