The December issue of Harvard Business Review had an excerpt of an interview with John Mackey, founder and CEO of Whole Foods. The complete interview is available here: http://bigthink.com/ideas/25555
That interview led me to an article where Mackey wrestles with the likes of Milton Friedman on the "soul" (if you will) of a corporation. The article, titled "Rethinking the Social Responsibility of Business" is a fascinating debate between 3 free-market libertarian types.
Milton takes the classic cold-hearted approach where the sole raison d' etre is to maximize profits for its shareholders. And everything else is secondary to that role.
Mackey takes the broader, worthier and pragmatically smarter (IMO), approach that profits are a means to an end, not the end itself. That business needs to create value for not only its investors, but also customers, employees, vendors, communities and the environment. And that by putting the well-being of customers, employees communities etc first, actually improves the business's profit potential and its own long term well-being.
I guess to show that even in libertarian ideology there is a leftist and right-wing spectrum of thought, there is also an opinion thrown in by T.J.Rodgers, CEO of Cypress Semiconductor. T.J.Rodgers pretty much takes the low-road, starts by calling Mackey a Ralph Nader in libertarian clothing and his opinion piece pretty much becomes manure quickly after that.
To me, the core idea of Mackey that struck a chord with me is that ultimately, the entrepreneur should be the one to guide the behavior of the organization she founded/created. The next layer is that the business cannot operate in a selfish cocoon and to succeed it needs to positively affect all who are involved. Or as Martin Luther King Jr put it "We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. "
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