Recently,
practitioners of experimental philosophy (trendily known as x-phi) described two
different scenes to a randomly selected audience.

In the first, the vice president of a
company explains to the president he has a new plan for the company that will
maximize profits but will harm the environment. The president replies that he
understands the environment will be harmed but doesn’t care; he tells the vice
president to proceed.

The selected audience are then asked
whether the president is harming the environment intentionally. On the one hand, his intention is only to maximize
profits but he is conscious that this also involves harming the environment. 82%
said “yes”.

The second scene is identical to the first except the word harm is replaced
with help. The vice president of a company explains to the president he has a
new plan for the company that will maximize profits and will help the environment.
The president replies that he understands the environment will be helped but
doesn’t care; he tells the vice president to proceed. The people are then asked
whether the president helped the environment intentionally. Interestingly, only 23% say “yes”.

There is a huge discrepancy here since,
to a philosopher at least, the two examples are identical.

One interpretation of this is that, while
an action based on self-interest that has bad effects is (unsurprisingly) seen
as a bad thing, an action based on self-interest which has good effects is NOT
seen as a particularly good thing.

This reveals an essential asymmetry in
human perception.

What it seems to show is that people are
overwhelmingly intentionalists, not consequentialists. In other words, once
they suspect an individual’s intentions are largely self-interested, it
colours how they perceive the outcome. Hence they are far readier to attribute
a bad outcome to self-interested behaviours than a beneficial one.

To anyone working in business, and in
particular to those working in the many thousands of organisations which have
spent the last fifteen years in thrall to a narrow, reductionist obsession with
short-term shareholder value, this seems an important – and worrying – finding.

For it suggests the spectacular achievement of
capitalist free markets in producing cheaper, better goods is often perceptually
wasted, since most of us simply don’t much respect the selfish motivation
behind the achievement.

To Adam Smith’s “It is not from the
benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our
dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” We should add “But don’t expect
anyone to like the butcher very much.”

In short we have an economic system that
is much better at delivering efficiency than it is at inspiring affection. The
obsession with shareholder value has perhaps created autistic businesses – of a
kind that nobody much wants to work for or buy from.

By nakedly pursuing a narrow obsession with
profit, companies are damaging brand value – and ultimately shareholder value.
Or, to put it another way, the problem with all this naked greed isn’t the
greed, it’s the nakedness.

At a societal level, it means the
benefits of competitive free market economics (choice, low prices, innovation)
don’t really translate into happiness, gratitude or affection – as they are
tainted by the self-interest with which they have been obtained.

And if you have ever wondered why people
show such affection for public-sector brands (such as the BBC, the Post Office,
the NHS) even when their levels of service are, um, questionable, there’s your
answer – for all their failings, they are untainted by perceptions of greed.

The
perception of a non-selfish motivation seems inherently valuable. Or,
put another way, nobody buys German cars because the Germans
are greedy – they buy German cars because they believe that Germans are
obsessively, indecently, neurotically obsessed with cars.

In the words of Jack
Welch, widely seen as the father of the Shareholder Value movement, but now one
of its harshest critics. “Shareholder value
is an outcome – it’s not a strategy.”

Or as Eddie Izzard remarks,
“I’m not a capitalist, I am a creativist. I want to make money so that I
can create things. Suddenly all these people have come along who want to create
things so they can make money.”

It’s an important distinction. Which are
you?

Certainly the best brand owners are
creativists. Nike, Ford, Kellogg, Apple, Virgin were all created by people
whose ambitions went far beyond self-enrichment.

There’s an interesting lesson here. Maybe greed is bad for business. It’s certainly bad for brands.