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Google, in my mind, is the quintessential "You Either Die A Hero, Or You Live Long Enough To See Yourself Become The Villain" story. (To be fair, since this al

• fghtr 7y ago
  >> are there ways to stay true to values (which in some cases might be in direct opposition to growth and profit taking) with the way our society is structured? Purism is trying to do exactly this by being Social Purpose Corporation: https://puri.sm/about/social-purpose/ https://puri.sm/about/social-purpose/. However, I would not call them a "major company" yet.
  • travmatt 7y ago
    Also called social benefit corporations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation If the company doesn’t have their values and goals listed in the articles of incorporation, then they have no legal obligation to follow them.
    • fghtr 7y ago
      >> Also called social benefit corporations Wikipedia says it's not the same thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_purpose_corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_purpose_corporation >> If the company doesn’t have their values and goals listed in the articles of incorporation, then they have no legal obligation to follow them. But Purism afaik does have them listed.
      • travmatt 7y ago
        I didn’t know there was a difference, thanks. And I’m not disputing purism’s (I looked at their website), just noting that if a corporation doesn’t list their values in their articles of incorporation, then they aren’t really anything more than lip service when push comes to shove.
    • kevingadd 7y ago
      One common criticism I've heard of benefit corporations is that a hostile takeover or series of leadership changes can result in a situation where the values/goals are just stripped out intentionally, rendering it a normal corporation. Alternately, strip the assets and rights to leave the benefit corporation a husk and transfer everything to a non-benefit corp. It definitely makes me wonder how robust a setup like a B corporation can actually be once unrestrained capitalism gets to act on it for 5-10 years.
      • travmatt 7y ago
        Those are definitely realistic scenarios. But in the case of a company that relies heavily on attracting and maintaining talented employees, those actions would probably engender significant blowback as well. At the very least the abandoning of values is a discrete step that is taken, as opposed to an vague degradation of some executives feelings. I do agree that it isn’t a total solution, but I do think there are some other interesting developments in the area, like the Long Term Stock Exchange and Generation Investment Management.
      • gowld 7y ago
        It's not robust, B Corp is mildly a defense against activist minority shareholders, and largely PR sham.
• Ididntdothis 7y ago
  It’s much easier to stay true to your values if you don’t take in as much investor money. Google shares are priced with an exception of rapid growth so management has to chase any profit possible. There are a lot privately held companies where the owners don’t demand continuous growth.
• LiquidSky 7y ago
  Or that "Don't Be Evil" was all PR nonsense from the beginning that we naively gobbled up.
  • nickv 7y ago
    Call me naive, but I genuinely believe Sergey and Larry believed in it (especially Sergey)
  • skizm 7y ago
    The article does say Google risked all their China money at one point to stay true to their "don't be evil" mantra. They turned heel only recently. I'd say they genuinely believed and practiced it for a while, but once the upper management started to get infected with business types instead of technologists, that was the beginning of the end.
    • kevingadd 7y ago
      There's a question to be asked, though: Is it not PR nonsense just because employees believe it enough to act on it? Or put another way: If it's really something the company believed in, why didn't the early moves out of China come from the top down ('do no evil' is a company philosophy so obviously the company heads like larry and sergey would be on board, right?) and why didn't the modern moves back in get rejected by the company heads? In practice it seems like it was aspirational ('let's be nice!') instead of a true mantra or rule or even a guideline. If it was really core from the beginning would they really have dropped it wholesale?
• skizm 7y ago
  I wanted to point to Etsy, since they were a b-corp, meaning they were held to higher "social and environmental standards" than a typical company, but I just Google'd them to see how their stock is doing and it looks like they gave up their b-corp status sometime in 2017 and their stock price is up 400% since then (price was flat and declining previously).
• ronilan 7y ago
  One way Google, a software company in the broad sense of the term, could have avoided a blog post with such a title is to never hire a “Head of International Relations” in the first place. Which leads to my attempt at answering the question, of how one could stay true to ones values - know the things you’ll never do. Then don’t. Ever.
• suddenexample 7y ago
  I'm always a bit taken aback by the heat that Google gets for even thinking about breaking into the Chinese market. Microsoft is in China and has active US military contracts. Apple is in China. Yet it's Google that gets the bad rap for trying to get into China and then ultimately turning down billions of dollars in revenue and data.
  • hpoe 7y ago
    The rest of them have been open about the fact they are ruthless profit making centers focused only on money and you shut up and stay in line or else you're toast. Google's model was "don't be evil" and for years went on the image that they are fighting for the public good and that they were an example of the ability to be principle centered, do good for the world, and get stinking rich at the same time. Now that the pressure starts to turn up on how to be profitable it turns out that everything they said they stood for, and more importantly the ideal that they represented, turned out to be a lie. They were able to cash in on this image of moral superiority and principle first for years and it gave them a leg up, now that they have abandoned that fall more for it.
    • throwlaplace 7y ago
      >They were able to cash in on this image of moral superiority and principle first for years and it gave them a leg up okay but honestly how silly is it to take a company's branding to heart? like are we all children that believe in santa claus too? >do good for the world, and get stinking rich at the same time i'm old enough now to understand that these two things are mutually exclusive because the latter necessarily involves exploitation (thereby doing net evil rather than net good).
      • bg4 7y ago
        In hindsight, it was naive, but it wasn't just branding. It really was a strong sentiment at the time long before the Internet consolidated around a few extremely powerful companies.
      • amylene 7y ago
• Haul4ss 7y ago
  Stay private. I don't think publicly traded companies can be values-driven, but if you maintain control over the ownership of the company, you can. Here I'm thinking of something like Wegman's grocery stores. If Wegman's went public and had to meet the demands of Wall Street investors, I think they would lose what makes them special. I can't think of an example of a large, closely held firm in tech.
  • Enginerrrd 7y ago
    Costco has done a really good job of maintaining their values in the face of pressure from shareholders, so I'd argue it is definitely possible.
    • hinkley 7y ago
      New Belgium Brewery is supposed to be amazing as well (they also have/had some cool cogeneration tech to reduce carbon footprint, and employee ownership). They incorporated as a B-Corp which was an attempt to create private and public companies that were beholden to society as much as the shareholders. But the last time I looked I wasn’t sure if those were still a thing or it fizzled out.
• hpoe 7y ago
  There is an interesting book called Maverick by Ricardo Selemar I think is his name, who took over Brazil's largest steel company in the 80's. One of the points he makes in the book is that we have this obsession with growing business, if the company does $200 million in revenue this year, it has to do $250 million in revenue next year, etc. That kind of thing, I think this is a big part of the problem is this mindset of competition and continuous growth for no other sake than growing. Part of this is a healthy desire to improve and for a while a company can make legitimate improvements for a while, years, decades, if you keep forcing people to improve a metric, revenue or share price in this case, there comes a point where there can be no more legitimate improvement, then people start to play to the numbers and as pressure increases start to turn towards means that are unethical and illegal. We can see this in every facet of life, cheating in sports because we are reaching the peak of human capabilities, banks and "financial engineers" that spend all of their time trying to invent instruments and methods for funneling money from one group of people to another, or a more concrete example software engineers that start producing shoddy code because they have to meet a deadline. I don't blame the investor's for this and I don't think the problem is capitalism itself either, I think we'd have a different but no less destructive set of problems if we had the government running or intervening, e.g. New lifesaving drugs take 10 years a $1,000,000,000.00 to get to market because of FDA regulations that primarily benefit incumbents. I don't know a way to fix this or solve this without changing the way people decide and prioritize things, because at the end of the day what we like to call "systems" usually just end up being a reflection of an aggregate of human desires, and bad people will ruin any system, good people can make any system work. To tie it all back, if I were to do it the only way I could see not becoming the villain is to content yourself with not being the absolute best and not comparing, or in other words, "Thou shalt not covet." either as a CEO deciding the fate of a company or as an individual in your life. If someone has a better option I'd love to hear it, but right now it seems that the incessant desire to have more and be bigger in every material thing is at the root of the problem.
• mkolodny 7y ago
  The only way I've thought of so far is to create a not-for-profit. Your not-for-profit can still make money. But since no one owns equity, no one has incentive to optimize for profit over values.
  • gowld 7y ago
    The managers paying themselves salary have an incentive. This is how most "charities" work. But that is naturally a lower ceiling than a for-profit corp.
• jedberg 7y ago
  I know I'm biased because I worked there, but I think Netflix is still true to its values. It's always been about sharing stories with as many people as possible. They green light stuff that no one else will, some bad, some good, but they give a lot of storytellers a voice when no one else will. I remember that the legal department was surprisingly small, mainly because they don't go around suing everyone all the time. Overall I'd say they have managed to stay true, but to their advantage, their values have always been the most profitable path, so they never had to really choose between profit and ethics.
  • gowld 7y ago
    I thought Netflix was about super annoying auto-play video ads, and funneling users into cheaper IP regardless of their expressed desires.
• catalogia 7y ago
  Google has been an advertising company since when, 2000? I think it was naive for any of us to expect an advertising company to be an ethical company. Live and learn..
• DoofusOfDeath 7y ago
  > The question I have is are there ways to stay true to values (which in some cases might be in direct opposition to growth and profit taking) with the way our society is structured? If we assume that a company's[0] values are determined in part by whom it decides to hire, I'm not sure this could be done legally in the U.S... In the U.S., in most cases it's illegal to consider a candidate's religious beliefs when making a hiring decision. In my experience, a person's values are closely related to their religious beliefs, so hiring based on "values" would invite lawsuits regarding religious discrimination. [0] I'm only guessing what's meant by a company's values, in this context. I know "values" means for an individual person, but not for a collection of persons.