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It's not that that they're more interested in *doing* good than making money, but they're more curious about the mysterious of moral mazes than the mysteries of money.
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Both money and morality are endlessly interesting and take on entirely new characters at each new scale. "How does money work" is a different question at $100k/year than at $1B/year. "What does it mean to do good" is a different question at 1:1 scale than at 1:billion scale.
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Most corporate ethics theater reflects a condition where moral questions have been relegated to middle management. They're simply not being really thought about at all above a certain scale. Money though, is usually thought about all scales.
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Truly morally curious leaders tend to run experiments to explore moral dimensions of their orgs at the largest scales they can, in ways that might even cost money -- which they then use their political/charismatic capital to force through.
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By contrast, manifestoes, B-corpism, "percent of profits to this cause"... all that is a sign that there is zero moral curiosity in the C-suite, only moral self-certainty.
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One reason I tend to pretty much entirely ignore moralizing criticism of big companies of the sort I work with is that the criticisms typically come from people who are themselves morally incurious at *any* scale, and have locked into certainties at a *small* scale.
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If they have experience with big orgs and large-scale morality dynamics at all (rare), it is as failed mid-level types. Which is not an ad hominem, but not irrelevant data either.
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Their failures may or may not have to do with failure to scale moral curiosity alongside other traits required to wield power and agency at the highest levels of big orgs.
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The usual cope is to conclude that everybody who has more success than them is an immoral sociopath, and that they failed due to their piety. Umm. A little digging usually reveals this to be untrue.
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