Name: Is Being Fair in Business a Choice? | Justin King
Uploaded: 2020-10-25T19:40:04.000Z
Duration: 6 min 44 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

oh way are undergoing the most profound reassessment of the role of commerce in society in 150 years.

The mid to late Victorian era was the last time we saw as significant to change.

Adverbs of degree

Indeed, it's one of the reasons many of the brands that we know and trust in love today.

Retail brands Consumer brands were founded in that era.

Urbanizing population, detached from the ability to buy goods directly from producers, needed brands.

Trustworthy intermediaries to help them trust the food Sainsbury's founded less than a mile from here.

They said quality perfect prices lower on their business was born off milk adulteration scandals where milk has been adulterated with arsenic and was literally killing people.

I'm not sure that there is much evidence that corporate behaviors got materially worse in the last 5, 10 15 years.

These things tend to be progressive over time, but I think our ability to see it to spot it toe, hold it to account toe, have conversations about it as consumers are greater than it's ever be.

Um, I think that there have Bean a number of very high profile instances where businesses have wrapped themselves in clothes, which turned out not to be true.

And if you think about the current debate about three users of our data, it's very focused on the big international, largely American tech companies.

But this is true, more widely of corporations using data.

People thought the deal when they handed over their data if they realized that, indeed is what they were doing was very different from what they're now discovering the deal to bay.

Behavior on the part of the corporations that acquired that data is being acquired under false pretenses, I would argue, and is being used against not with and for the consumer.

So I prefer to think as the challenge, being corporations, having to work with the consent and support of the society and the communities that they serve on.

That's much more about trust than it is about fairness, although of course, behaving fairly undoubtedly leads to trust.

But the nature of competitive business will always leave to unfair outcomes for some people.

When a corporation makes a decision to make a number of people redundant, that will feel incredibly unfair to the individuals involved.

Yet for the survival of the corporation, the wider group of people that work within it on the communities that that corporation serves, it might be the fairest decision.

Even though many of people impacted by it won't feel that it was fair.

And that's why I find the word sometimes quite unhelpful in arriving at the right decision.

But I think that the changes profound, and I think that this conversation is incredibly important on.

I don't recognize the idea that corporations exists to maximize profit.

I think that in the long run, if you do that, you will not maximize profit you because you will lose the ability to act either through the general consent of consumers or through legislation.

We've seen MAWR corporate legislation in the last 10 to 15 years than in the previous 150 years now, if that doesn't tell you that the Legislature and politicians have kind of worked out the only people held in lower esteem than there business people, so picking on business people is not a bad thing to do if you're a politician and held in pretty low esteem is a starting point to my sense is that if you if you run a of your CEO of a company like you were saying spirits, then you are involved on almost explicitly in recognizing that there is a balance to be struck between the demands of investors to maximize profit but also your loyalty thio your customers your loyalty to your workers, loyalty to the communities that you serve.

I guess my question is that if you are merely an investor, you don't have that loyalty your focuses upon the return on the money invested Andi, that's the tension that that's true.

But in a public company, investors combined sell the shares at almost no friction cost on.

Of course, they come by themselves to a position toe, have a view, whether it be through asking for a seat on the board or ultimately buying more than 50% of the company and therefore controlling and directing it.

Clearly when you have a dispersed shareholder base, as we did in ST, which 120 or 30,000 shoulders are you gonna have every view you could possibly have in the room, but that's where it comes back to communication on demonstrating the decisions that you're taking are in the round for the well being of the corporation, for we announced our sponsorship of the Paralympics.

Heralded, uh, I think, largely with hindsight is a neck sectional piece of corporate responsibility in 2000 and nine for at least a year, if not longer.

The only question I was ever asked by Shelters is why I was wasting the company's money on a flight of fancy.

And the answer was because you don't understand our business, the colleagues that work in it and the customers that we serve in the communities of which were part of the things that our customers are worried about.

If you think being involved in sponsoring about him but is a bad idea, you just don't.

And where is the leadership of this organization of doing?

And we profoundly believe it's the right thing for the business to be doing now.

Eventually, that view changed, but it changed largely only when evidence was available on.

That's why, in the end, it can't be you think about algorithms.

I couldn't disagree more because ultimately, the decisions today that have the biggest delta for corporations mawr than has ever been true are those that have taken where the numbers can't take it for you.

Because if you only take the decisions that numbers take for you, then ultimately you must lose.

You have to be prepared to take decisions that have a point of view.

That's why purpose is important because that's the definition of your point of view.

 That's why values are important because they are, if you like, the sign posts in that decision making the ground on which you intend to tread and also the ground on which you will not tread. 