[Gust Hubb]

My wife and I were discussing hospitals and their business models this morning. One of the things that bothers me about American healthcare is that the focus is on making money and pleasing investors (corporation) not on being the best healthcare system possible. I have heard that other models exist (a hospital up in Wisconsin that is strictly doctor run that probably isn't doing well from the corporation stand point, but is making sufficient money to run itself and pay all of its employees very well with good vacation/benefits).

And that is what I am asking the forum. Why don't more systems exist that focus less on making money hand-over fist and focus more on being renowned for being a top of the line "whatever" in their field (which by the way involves equal distribution of the profits to create happy, exemplary employees; and involves investing in all facets of running the business and not skimping on second-rate materials).

I know I am missing things, but I think there is too much fat cat greed running things and I wish their was a way to change it all...

[Illuyankas]

Capitalism~

[Dadding]

CEOs are fired for not doing everything possible to "increase profits" regardless of the ruthlessness of such actions, the system reinforces this sort of behaviour. But there are a few companies that are starting to tread new waters: Netflix has some interesting new ideas, and so does Valve to name a couple.

Steps like these require a lot of fundamental frame shifts in terms of how you think, and its hard to implement these sort of ideas in environments where they've been following the same set of rules for the last 20 years. A lot of it comes down to how you think of learning, and training employees, and how communication occurs in a company. Hierarchical companies are incubators for this sort of mindset; we should be moving to flatter kinds of arrangements, like wirearchy!

Shameless (almost)self-promotion ... that last link is from my dad's website- he talks about this kind of stuff a lot. Who knows, I might be brainwashed, you pick up a lot from supper-conversations.

This post has been edited by Dadding: 19 April 2015 - 07:08 PM

[nacht]

If we start with Maslow's hiearchy of needs

http://en.wikipedia....rarchy_of_needs





What you are asking for is probably a "corporation" that is acting in the "self-actualization" stage.
The larger the corporation is, the lesser the chance of this happening.
But as you said, a small group of people (like a group of doctors) can probably pull this off.

[Studlock]

We can also consider the idea of inverted totalitarianism first put forth by...I want to say Sheldon Wolin. Inverted totalitarianism is basically where corporations have eroded democracy through corruption (buying politicians, deregulation, privatization etc) and in doing so treat every natural resource and living being as something to be consumed for the goal of ever increasing growth and profit. This is on the assumption those things are good and natural, actually we increasingly see the naturalization of capitalism (and to be fair capitalism is not inverted totalitarianism) as the only way, or the 'right' way (which I assume mother natural will violently disagree). Corporations are rational, self-interested entities in the sense that their only goal is to make more profit, and to continually grow that profit (we can discuss the irrational goal of simply accumulating wealth another time). There is some debate if they could do this within limits with stopgaps put into place to regulate them (I'm of the persuasion that you really can't put limits on this kind of system--the negative externalitys, like pollution from industry, if felt in the hands of corporations to deal would literally bankrupt them. Imagine if BP had to clean up it's oil spill in the gulf? It become undone thus not doing it internal-rational goal of making profit thus they don't deal with it--so it lands on the governments, and thus the tax payers to do so. I'll get back to this).

If we allow of this inverted totalitarianism to be a given I feel like there is strong historical argument in how it came to be. In the late 70s and the 80s, the governments of at least America and the UK (probably Canada as well) try to return to classical liberal ideals. This gives rise to what sociologist like to call neoliberalism (and which economists like to call bullshit--I'd suggest you look up scholarly work on both sides of field--it's a debatable term) which has policies that are focuses on the deregulation and privatization of the economy, and opening up the world to free trade (things like NAFTA come out of this). This gives pretty much unprecedented power and control of the society over to corporations whose goal is, again, to make money and to grow that money ever year. And as we can't vote for corporate boards we don't really have the say in how they're run. And because the government has deregulated the laws control them, and increased privatization so more industries are controlled by these corporate they themselves have become impotent in dealing with illegal or at least unethical actions of them. So essentially we are left with a society in which the democratic system is now: vote for a party that has to have the backing of a corporate partner to possible compete with the opposition, running yourself which again you'll need to deal and have support of these corporation to succeed, or simply not participate in society if you can to stop this process. This leaves out some stuff with globalization and the nature of multinationals.

That all being said I did say 'If we allow of this inverted totalitarianism to be a given' and I don't know if it is. Or at least for some of the population (that population being the old colonial superpowers the UK and France, Germany, Japan, China, the USA and places in between like New Zealand, and Canada). I do think for a large part of the worlds governments though are participating in this type of inverted totalitarianism simply because they aren't strong enough to compete with foreign multinationals (free trade zones for instance are becoming a huge problem in impoverish parts of the worlds, essential in some of these FTZ corporations are given land in which the workers working on that land are essentially given up their rights as citizens to make a very low wage--look up Life and Debt--it examines the FTZ in Kingston) and the foreign sovereign governments supporting them (like the USA who now have an easily exploitable market without competition in which they can sell their goods which they can tax).


Though, I guess the easiest answer would be: the time of Gods and Kings are over, the new holiness is the market and boons that it brings. Greed, to some people in the world today, is not only good for godly.


I hope I came off as informative and not ranting. I don't always want to shouting about racism here.

[Dadding]

nacht, on 20 April 2015 - 05:03 AM, said:

If we start with Maslow's hiearchy of needs

http://en.wikipedia....rarchy_of_needs

-snip-

What you are asking for is probably a "corporation" that is acting in the "self-actualization" stage.
The larger the corporation is, the lesser the chance of this happening.
But as you said, a small group of people (like a group of doctors) can probably pull this off.

I like your point nacht, that the larger something gets the less "nice" (maybe not the right word here) it is - and I think it touches on another important idea, that all these huge companies are so resistant to (real) change because of their size. Some bozo puts forth this novel idea with no scientific backing, and the corporations go "Yeah! I like it" because it packs a complex idea into a nice little box with a ribbon on top. Companies (and the education system - but don't get me started on that) build their entire system around this, and when it comes time for change, the infrastructure is already in place and too difficult to adapt. So you have these corporations built on ideas from the early 20th century and expecting to get by in the 21st.

To name a few that really bug me ... I guess these are more relevant to the education system, but they're still in use in the psychology of business

Bloom's Taxonomy (1956)
Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (1943) - I like what Steve Denning says about it: "the hierarchy of needs has only one problem: it is plain, flat, dead wrong"
Piaget's Theory of Development (1920s ish)
Vgotsky's Theory of Development (1920s ish)

I guess what I'm trying to say is that trying to change even basic behaviour in large companies is like trying to dam a river with pebbles.

[Tsundoku]

Anyone here read Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy?

For me the interesting parts weren't so much the terraforming of Mars etc (which were amazing, to be sure), but showing how incremental changes in technology lead to (or even force) changes in business, society etc. His take on "Mega Co-ops" for instance. How The Model changed. I can't really explain it since I read it when it came out, but I'm sure there's a decent blurb out there somewhere. Hell, when you think about it, the business model for media corporations is undergoing a radical shift right now. Who knows where it will go?

http://en.wikipedia....ki/Mars_trilogy

This post has been edited by Sombra: 21 April 2015 - 07:46 AM

[Macros]

I liked this story:
this one here

[LinearPhilosopher]

Michael Sandel hit the nail on the head when he said that we have shifted from a market economy to a market society where market values permeate everything. Because we've gotten used to markets over the last few decades, market thinking has slowly seeped into every part of society. Pretty good episode on his book at the partially examined life podcast. Check it out if you've 2hours to spend.

This post has been edited by BalrogLord: 21 April 2015 - 01:05 PM

[stone monkey]

As has been said, a corporation's raison d'etre is to make money. They'll do it however they can. It's a rare corporation that will not do something ethically dodgy, but technically legal, if they think they'll get away with it. Arguably they'll happily do ethically dodgy, completely illegal, stuff if the cost of getting caught is lower than the money they'll make. As Illy says: Capitalism.


There's a reason we have antitrust laws and laws against cartels; the last thing any corporation wants is competition. Neoliberal fanatics who believe government should stay out of the markets entirely and let free market forces hold sway are obviously living in a complete fantasy land. What every single corporation desperately wants is a monopoly. That way they can extract the maximum money from their customers for the minimum outlay. "The least we can do is the most we will do."

[Nicodimas]

stone monkey, on 21 April 2015 - 08:14 PM, said:

As has been said, a corporation's raison d'etre is to make money. They'll do it however they can. It's a rare corporation that will not do something ethically dodgy, but technically legal, if they think they'll get away with it. Arguably they'll happily do ethically dodgy, completely illegal, stuff if the cost of getting caught is lower than the money they'll make. As Illy says: Capitalism.


There's a reason we have antitrust laws and laws against cartels; the last thing any corporation wants is competition. Neoliberal fanatics who believe government should stay out of the markets entirely and let free market forces hold sway are obviously living in a complete fantasy land. What every single corporation desperately wants is a monopoly. That way they can extract the maximum money from their customers for the minimum outlay. "The least we can do is the most we will do."

Cartels! And borrowing. Market based economy vs Value based.

Offshoring being valued, but production of America being bound by red tape, taxes, paperwork, more rules, etc...

[Gnaw]

Nicodimas, on 22 April 2015 - 03:54 PM, said:

Offshoring being valued, but production of America being bound by red tape, taxes, paperwork, more rules, etc...

Nico please expound upon how any of that would explain General Motors and their faulty ignition switches. Over a period of ten years a single decision was made over and over again at various levels in the organization. That decision was that a few dead people were less expensive than recalling their products and fixing the switches. A year ago GM emphatically stated that the results of that decision were "only" 13 fatalities. 5 months ago the GM CEO told Congress that there were almost certainly no more than 19 dead people.

They're at 87 as of last Friday.

Spoiler

 Screen Shot 2015-04-22 at 12.29.17 PM.png (78.61K)
Number of downloads: 0

How would less red tape, lower taxes, less papertrail (er, paperwork), fewer rules, etc... kept greed from making that same calculation again?

[Nicodimas]

Gnaw, on 22 April 2015 - 04:38 PM, said:

Nicodimas, on 22 April 2015 - 03:54 PM, said:

Q1) Offshoring being valued, but production of America being bound by red tape, taxes, paperwork, more rules, etc...

Q2)Nico please expound upon how any of that would explain General Motors and their faulty ignition switches. Over a period of ten years a single decision was made over and over again at various levels in the organization. That decision was that a few dead people were less expensive than recalling their products and fixing the switches. A year ago GM emphatically stated that the results of that decision were "only" 13 fatalities. 5 months ago the GM CEO told Congress that there were almost certainly no more than 19 dead people.

They're at 87 as of last Friday.

Spoiler

 Screen Shot 2015-04-22 at 12.29.17 PM.png (78.61K)
Number of downloads: 0

Q1)How would less red tape, lower taxes, less papertrail (er, paperwork), fewer rules, etc... kept greed from making that same calculation again?

A1)This is specific problem which probably is a different problem then suggesting it has anything to do with the above. The above is more about the quality of labour and jobs in America. Them shipping them overseas allows corporations to make more profits to show the market they are competitive.

A2) Cartel Behavior I believe would include Corruption and collusion between GM, NHTSA and the other government agencies. Furthormore, this company maybe should have been allowed to go bankrupt was kept alive by said Government. Think about that timeline and how the company was already failing, they cut corners. The goverment bailed them out..knew about said cut corners and allowed this to continue for years so they could support this investment...

http://www.autosafet...2014%20Full.pdf

This post has been edited by Nicodimas: 25 April 2015 - 12:36 AM

[Gnaw]

Yeah, GM making the calculation that profits are more important than lives is specific and rare. Ford, DuPont, Pfizer just off the top of my head.

Capitalism and corporations are not evil. But greed is endemic to the human condition and that fact is reflected in our corporations. Libertarians like to forget the things Adam Smith wrote on that subject when they're praising his genius (just as so many religious people forget the inconvenient things their favorite shaman uttered) and I get so very very tired of hearing randite blabber about how corporations need less accountability not more. It's bullshit.

[HiddenOne]

I had to look up the word "randite," I'd never heard that one before.

[Silencer]

Corporations exist in a short-sighted lifecycle that is self-perpetuating.

In my experience, which is not overly long but has been very informative, any form of corporation has several basic flaws in their structure:

1. CEO pay increases and bonuses are largely tied to company "performance". The definition of performance being how much you increased profits year-over-year.
2. Company performance is largely measured by increased profits year-over-year. Yes, this gets a second point as it is problematic in itself, but if CEO/other executive leadership pay wasn't tied directly to it, it wouldn't be as much of an issue.
3. Shareholders. No matter how determined a given CEO is, they are answerable to a board of directors and, yup, shareholders. If company profits were primarily for use internally, employees and the company as a whole would often be better off. As it is, those profits are earmarked for paying out shareholders - and the only way to get more money from shareholders/shares, is to get more profits.
4. Management disconnect. By the time you are a manager with any influence (in an established company of medium+ size, at least) you are at least 30, more likely 40+, and have spent much of the past decade or more working in a corporation, likely with management as your career path. Because you've been handed the shit end of the stick for most of that time - no say, forced to toe the line, pressured for performance - you aren't the same idealist you were when you worked the front line. You won't have the same energy to fight bad ideas you did. Your worldview will be sufficiently warped that you've started to think of the profits = success equation as being Truth, and that ANY expenses = failure.
5. Short-term views only - it's sad but true that many managers in large corporations are there for the pay/experience instead of the company. This means anything they can do in the short term to increase profits prior to moving onto the next job (hopefully with more "prestige" and more pay) is worth it. Screw the future of the company - if it falls over one or two managers down the line, no one will trace its collapse back to decisions made five or ten years ago, and that's not even counting the likelihood that your successors engaged in the same practices.
6. Business Culture. This one is more insidious - it is essentially the practice of spin doctoring your internal affairs as if it were PR (and the fact that spin doctoring is common and accepted in PR is...depressing but a separate topic) to sell a certain image of management/the company to your employees. You know those annoying, meaningless, industry buzzwords? Yeah, it's inserting those kinds of things into everyday low-level management practices. Let's "focus on continually improving", "visual board that idea!", "[insert catchy phrase referring to some mundane process like saving paper here]-program". "Team building" is one of the most common types of BS that exemplifies this.

The point is - no one in a corporation is willing to spend money to save money. By the time anyone with alternative ideas gets anywhere near authority, they've been worn down by YEARS of bullshit management practices. Half of the companies out there still practice pre-80s schools of thought about human resources, and the rest just pay lip service to the latest theories instead of actually practicing them.

While there is merit in trying to be efficient, what a lot of corporations don't realize is that you simply cannot survive at the minimum level of expenditure for very long. Sure, they will continue to move along, but that's not really the same thing - that's appearing to be fine, even while you rot from the inside. Having a team which needs 7 people to do a job, and then having only 7 people in that team? Mistake. Annual leave = 1 person on leave. Sick = 2 people on leave. Now your team is operating below capacity by 30%, and you are almost guaranteed to have at least that many people away under normal circumstances. Now stretch that out over a year, and the team members are exhausted because they've been having to do 30% more work all year - next thing, you have a poor staff retention rate, a high sick leave/absence rate, overflowing overtime, and disgruntled staff.
Similarly, if you fail to provide a buffer in your budget, you're going to be running a lot of teams into the ground.

There are other consequences to the "profit first" mentality - higher training expenditures, loss of staff knowledge (especially when things are left out of SOPs, or SOPs don't exist because, hey, no-one had time to write them), inter-departmental fights (seriously - get two departments who are frustrated with management trying to talk to each other about a shared process, and watch the sparks fly/knives come out - out of pure misdirected anger and a poorly worded email).
Sure, year-over-year your profits are going up, so everything looks fine on paper. But that's where Ivory Tower syndrome comes in - you can't see the mood of the staff. You don't hear the complaints, bitching, moaning, grumbling. And because we're all old-school up in the management echelons, when signs are that something is wrong, the response? Just like a certain Imperial Moff, grips are tightened. More micro-management, leading to more alienation of staff. In this day and age, staff are more likely to just leave than bother to try for dialogue, especially if the manager is bad.

That's the other thing - there is a nigh-suicidal tendency in corporations to 1) not engage staff feedback for new plans (at least not until money has been spent and there's no going back), and 2) contract outsiders to do business analysis and try to improve things. This is another holdover from the 80s - the belief that an outside perspective is better. While there is a certain objectivity, if you don't balance that with knowledge and experience of the day-to-day? You're dooming any project from the start.

And that's corporations in a nutshell. I'll be kind, and not lump the full blame on management - some problems are caused by staff with terrible work ethic, lack of commitment, and general incompetence. Of course, solving those problems or working around them is technically a manager's job, so...yeah.


The solution is to stop focusing on profits as the bottom-line indicator of performance. Just like governments need to stop focusing on GDP. With a business, it's easy - as long as you're keeping your efficiency in check and not bleeding money, there comes a point where you need to stop belt tightening and focus on other methods of improving your company, and measuring that improvement - re-invest capital (just, don't throw it all at IT like that is some sort of cure-all, it's not. Be Technology Responsible and only invest in things that actually help the business), engage staff, worry about whether you're giving the best service to the customer, not just the best you can do without spending any more than absolutely necessary. And stop acting like it's still 1980. Oh, and remove executive pay increases. I'm sorry, but if you're earning more than 10x the average wage in your company, you are being paid too much. If you are earning more than a million dollars a year, you are being paid too much. If you can halve your wage, and still be earning as much as the President/Prime Minister - you're probably earning too much. And no, you do NOT deserve a pay rise or exorbitant bonus just because you squeezed another hundred million per year out of the company. Pay rises are for people whose pay is still within the realms of being affected by minimum wage increases and might not be able to afford to live for a year if they suddenly lost income. >.>

[Mentalist]

From a legal point of view, a corporation is an "imaginary legal person". i.e., from legalese, the entire point of a corporation is diffusion of responsibility. As such, one can never trust any corporate-speak, as by default, the very reason for corporation's existance is to bend the rules as much as possible, in order to maximize profits in an absolutely senseless short-term gains, usually with very little actual strategic planning.

The idea that we moved to a "market society" is very true, and we have a near-century of media to thank for that-generations have grown up being defined by the amount of their yearly income. Add to this the debt-driven economy (looking at you, housing markets), and you are essentially being compelled, at every level, at every point of your life, to join the free-for-all. The idyllic image of the successful person involves living in your own house. Except owning such a house generally means you are shckled to your job for 10-20 years (if not more), where your biggest fear in life becomes losing said job, as that automatically means losing "the life" you've painstakingly carved out for yourself. Majority of people, including moderately successful ones, function on this slim margin, and most any minute disturbance can essentially ruin a person's life-in a sense of an abrupt lifestyle change to something commonly considered as less desirable.

(I may be slightly biased here, since my job essentially involves working with such people who usually find themselves losing this equilibrium. I also get to deal with plenty of corporations at their less than pleasant sides).

[Powder]

I haven't posted on these boards for a couple years now. I am back and I see most of the same people posting still, and from the same camps. Do people really change their minds that infrequently?

[Mentalist]

Powder, on 27 April 2015 - 06:36 PM, said:

I haven't posted on these boards for a couple years now. I am back and I see most of the same people posting still, and from the same camps. Do people really change their minds that infrequently?

Once you reach a certain age, peope tend to become inflexible in their beliefs, meaning it'd take an epiphany or a life-changing. Event to alter one's opinion. Otherwise, we tend to identify sources of information that confirm our beliefs, and dismiss or ignore those undermining them

Edit: in fact, you could say that the unwlingness to entertain the possibility one could be wrong is another trait of the "market society" we find ourselves in

This post has been edited by Mentalist: 27 April 2015 - 07:38 PM

[worry]

Personally feel like I've successfully convinced everyone of all my points.