It is commencement season and there is a new crop of idealists who will be graduating from Universities. Here is an ideal worthy of dedicating one's life to, or perhaps, one's blog to: Reforming the Corporation!

In his movie, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, director Joel Bakan, makes the point that the Corporation as a legal entity has the personality profile of a Psychopath. (see my movie review here). He says that corporations are designed to “externalize” costs, social costs, environmental costs, etc. Just as sharks are killing machines, corporations are externalizing machines.

Basically, he is saying that corporations operate without a conscience. He brings in Milton Friedman, the famous economist,  as an advocate of this kind of corporate behavior.  (In one clip, he has a Friedman choir sing praise to unfettered self interest!)

Peter Drucker, the management guru,  also appears stating that if you have a CEO with a social conscience, “get rid of him quickly!” Why?  Presumably it is because you need a CEO who puts business first and who won’t get sentimental over a little bit of corporate externalizing.

In an interview on CNNFN, Bakan describes why he made his movie. “My motivation in writing the book and making the film.. is to try and reveal the true nature of the corporation… it is to recognize that we have a purely self interested institution and to revisit the notion that .. it needs to be democratically regulated…this project is an argument against the current thinking that says deregulate and let corporations do what they will, and trust them to be good. We can't trust them to be good, we have to make them be good.”

Bakan is looking for accountability -- for the Corporations to be “good”. His view is that we cannot trust them to be good so we must force them to be good through government regulation. My feeling is let's try reforming the Corporation instead!

So, Bakan is wrong to advocate government regulation as a means to controlling corporate externalizing. However, I think he hits the nail on the head with this statement from his book,

“"human nature is neither static nor universal. It tends to reflect the social orders people inhabit. Throughout history, dominant institutions have established roles and identities for their subjects that meshed with their own institutional natures, needs and interests: God-fearing subjects for the church, lords and serfs for feudal orders, citizens for democratic governments. As the corporation comes to dominate society-through, among other things, privatization and commercialization-its ideal conception of human nature inevitably becomes dominant too. And that is a frightening prospect. The corporation, after all, is deliberately designed to be a psychopath: purely self-interested, incapable of concern for others, amoral, and without conscience-in a word, inhuman-and its goal, as Noam Chomsky states, is to "ensure that the human beings who [it is[ interacting with, you and me, also become inhuman… A century and a half after its birth, the modern business corporation, an artificial person made in the image of a human psychopath, now is seeking to remake real people in its image." (Bakan, 2004, 134)

I think this critique has great substance. Corporations often do function in a dehumanizing way whether it is with respect to worker rights, product liability or environmental damage, the effects of corporations can be devastating for individuals (Silicone Breast implants) and communities (Bhopal, India)

A Christian business leader who has picked up on this is Dennis Bakke.  In his new book Joy at Work, he quotes from John Steinbeck's novel in the Grapes of Wrath, to illustrate the power that corporations have, how it is dehumanizing and  how it seems so out of control.

“Sure,” cried the tenant men, “but it’s our land. We measured it and broke it up. We were born on it, and we got killed on it. Even if it’s no good, it’s still ours. That’s what makes it ours – being born on it, working it, dying on it. That makes ownership, not a paper with numbers on it.”

“We’re sorry, It’s not us. It’s the monster.  The bank isn’t like a man.”

“Yes, but the bank is only made by men.”

“No, you’re wrong there – quite wrong there. The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.” (Bakke, 2005, 158)

Steinbeck is making a similar critique as Bakan and Bakke is using it to illustrate how corporations dehumanize people. Joy at Work  is about his story of how he revolutionized the way decisions were made at AES, a giant energy corporation that he confounded in 1981. It is his account of empowering people "To create the most fun workplace in human history and to teach the world the real purpose of large organizations, including businesses" which is to "serve the world in an economically sustainable manner." Bakke’s story is full of possibility for a new way to work in a corporate environment that is humanizing.

In a commencement address to a grad class from Eastern Mennonite University he challenged the students towards new possibilities of "living and proclaiming the gospel" in the marketplace by doing business differently and providing a humanizing way to work. Check out the address: "Here I Come Ready or Not" - Close your eyes, count to twenty and -- guess what -- the global mission field has changed. It’s time for a new breed of marketplace missionary.

Michelle Malkin mentions a recent Commencement Stanford speech by Steve Jobs of Apple Computer Corporation. who says, "Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."  This is good advice for young idealists who want to reform the way Corporations are run.

Don Tapscott, author of  The Naked Corporation : How the Age of Transparency Will Revolutionize Business takes a different approach than either Bakan (regulate reform) or Bakke (inspire reform from within) . He believes that it is in a corporation's self interest to reform and to be "Good."

EnRoute Magazine profiled Tapscott’s book in a cover story entitled “The New Good!” The story is about consumer concern for corporate social responsibility and how that is influencing the fashion industry. In an accompanying article, "The Corporation Has No Clothes" Tapscott states, "Thanks to information technology, companies now face unprecedented scrutiny, not just by consumers but by their employees, shareholders, business partners and society in general. These groups can now look deeply into the performance, management, operations and values of corporations. And if these people don’t like what they see, they’ll take their business – and their trust – elsewhere. "

Tapscott is addressing the problem of corporate accountability positively unlike Bakan. His basic premise is "if you are going to be naked (accountable), you had better be buff! Tapscott runs a website - www.ageoftransparency.com which is “a comprehensive portal for information and discussion on how companies harness the power of transparency for growth and success. “

Further to this issue of accountability, Hugh Hewitt, author of BLOG – Understanding the Information Reformation that’s Changing your World. has described the blogosphere as an “accountability mechanism.” He uses this in relation to the main stream media (MSM) but it is equally powerful as an accountability mechanism for capitalism and corporations in particular.

Along these lines, Tapscott has written an article specifically about this phenomena "To blog or not to blog?"  Also, he blogs about a Business Week Cover story, “Blogs Will Change Your Business” To read excerpts from the article you can visit this blog. For a Faith & Business comment click here. For bloggers interested in reforming corporations check out Social Media Group & Stormy Corner & Wirearchy.

As a result of this story, Business Week has launched its own blog. Now their resident, blogger Stephen Baker is blogging about Bono's challenge to Corporate America to address extreme poverty "Tech Steps Up to Back Bono - The Irish rock star's mission to fight poverty in Africa is getting serious support from the likes of Sun, Cisco, AMD, and more.

So in summary, Joel’s Bakan’s critique of the Corporation is, I think, a widespread cultural phenomena. Some Corporate leaders, like Dennis Bakke, are rising to the challenge of addressing this critique. If the critique is properly harnessed, as Tapscott suggests,  it can  radically alter the way business is done in the 21^st century, providing for a more humanizing way to work. Following Hewitt’s example, blogging is one of the means for harnessing this cultural phenomena and organizing it towards that meaningful end.

What we need is corporations that care and commerce with a conscience: in sum, what we need is nothing less than the conversion of capitalism!

Such a change would certainly require a huge paradigm shift. Faith at Work leaders like Dennis Bakke, who get this, have the possibility of leading in this paradigm shift because they are hopefully already predisposed towards it as a consequence of living their faith at work. They can be the ones who lead their workplaces into a new way of doing business. Dennis Bakke is an example of just such a leader pioneering new ways of working that are humanizing for work.

My passion is for young Faith At Work idealists to connect and blog their way into the hearts and minds of their fellow workers so that their workplace, company and industry is transformed. (See Michael Hyatt’s blog (Thomas Nelson) as an example of a CEO reaching his company and his industry.)  

Fundamentally, we prove our faith, by “doing it” (living the gospel) so we can recommend it with integrity. (proclaiming the gospel). The marketplace is THE place to “do it.” The culture is crying out for us to “do it!” As young idealist this is your opportunity to change the world. Steven Jobs thinks you can "do it"! So in the immortal words of a corporation Nike, which is now having it's feet held to the proverbial fire of transparency, lets JUST DO IT!