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Re:What Companies Are For by bko on Sunday August 25, 2019 @01:39PM (#20794285)
Although a corporation is soulless entity, the people working in an organization are not. I'm fairly certain that the corporations I've worked for technically had only shareholder value optimization as an objective, but that doesn't mean that the managers treated me unkindly. I was given leniency with partial days off, working from home and leisure time when things were slow. The managers wanted to make me happy because they wanted me to continue to work there. Also my job consisted of problem solving which required a creative element that cannot be extracted by force. The same is true for the corporations I do business with (e.g. fast food restaurants have to obligation to give me free water)

For that reason, I don't think there needs to be an explicit statement of maximizing stakeholder well being.

I'm not surprised that many managers and business owners like this idea, as it gives them more flexibility, but that's not necessarily a good thing. It allows them to finance pet projects, grow bureaucracy and overall be immune from business concerns.

Re:What Companies Are For by majewsky on Sunday August 25, 2019 @07:07PM (#20796230)
Without disagreeing with you:

> Although a corporation is soulless entity

A corporation (like any large group of people) certainly has a "mind of its own" as an emergent property, so calling it "soulless" is kind of odd (unless you have a narrower definition of "soul" than I do).

Re:What Companies Are For by amirkdv on Sunday August 25, 2019 @08:37PM (#20796659)
It would have been odd if corporations were democratically run and had internal mechanisms for reflecting the values and aspirations of the large group of people that work for it.

At a traditional corporation however the emergent "mind of its own" is there but it is effectively only influenced by the minuscule group of people who control it. And in this sense it is soulless in the same way that an army is soulless.