Purpose-Driven

For some reason, I find corporate discussions about “purpose” nauseating. I read the book “Start with Why” by Simon Sinek and it made a lot of sense that truly successful companies have to have a purpose beyond just making money. I could see why “purpose” became popular with the millennials after the Great Recession, but the corporations themselves getting on the “purpose” bandwagon seems a little fake. I buy the premise behind Sinek’s why but I don’t buy that corporations, especially the large ones that have been around for a while and are public companies (in other words, they have shareholders), are really on a “purpose” mission.

Why do I have such cynical views? Well…

Example 1: Facebook

Facebook’s original purpose was to foster communications around the world and create joyous connections, but over the years the company seems to have segued into a) forcing you to share everything about you to the world and b) collecting massive amounts of data on you and sharing it with other companies without your permission. The purpose became about getting your data and thus manipulating you rather than assisting in the creation of connections.

Example 2: Exxon Mobil

Exxon Mobil has lately been advertising on YouTube about how they create jobs. Technically, they are not talking about their purpose here but they would like you to think they are benign because they create jobs. Um, no, they’ve been outsourcing and offshoring jobs and automating work. I read recently that the recent upturn in the oil and gas business cycle did not mean a return to hiring laid off software workers because before the downturn, they had automated a lot of the work and did not need them anymore. Another article intimated that Houston will be losing a lot of jobs in the near future due to further automation in the oil and gas industry. Besides, let’s not forget the industry is regarded as a big contributor to the climate change and a couple of years ago, the New York Times and Los Angeles Times had articles about Exxon Mobil misleading the public about climate change.

Example 3: Paul Polman

And now we have a third example by way of this article via Kenneth Mikkelsen’s LinkedIn. Deep down in the article, there is a story about Dutch’s Unilever retired CEO Paul Polman winning awards for his purpose driven work. But then this virtuous work was ultimately contradicted by his lobbying role in reducing taxes shareholders pay on dividends. Most of the voters were not in favor of this particular tax scrap – it was viewed as a giveaway to the rich and would further exacerbate the divide between the wealthy and everyone else. In the end, it turned out that Polman was driven more by the shareholder mantra. This article is a good read on the hollowness of the “purpose” mania and provides many more examples.

So the Paul Polman story shows us that…

A few days ago, and I’m sorry I didn’t save the article, I read a LinkedIn post about one person’s evangelical work in spreading the “purpose paradigm” and it was nauseating. I was like, “Oh, puh-leaze!! (with an eye roll)”. I’m sure the author meant well, but I’m not so sure she realizes that as long as we have the shareholder dogma and the philosophy that businesses’ only responsibility is to make a profit (Milton Friedman’s rule), CEOs and their top executives will not be doing social responsibility except in a cynical way, a la Paul Polman.