You Can't Judge a Lizard for Being a Lizard

"We simply had no idea what it was like being an extremely large lizard, and neither for that matter did the lizard, because it was not self-conscious about being an extremely large lizard, it just got on with the business of being one. To react with revulsion to its behavior was to make the mistake of applying criteria that are only appropriate to the business of being human.” – Douglas Adams

Why are these companies doing this? Are they evil monoliths bent on subjugation of the global human population? Of course not, they are in fact more similar to “extremely large lizards” themselves, except instead of “eat and be safe” as their driving instinct, it is “maximize value for my shareholders”.

The behaviour of corporations is governed by subconscious instinct in the same way individual’s lizard brains are. Also, similar to humans, corporations undertake the simplest, most aggressive, most effective actions to maximize their basest instincts. Their business processes, labour and technology operate as their execution machinery in the same manner as subconscious synaptic and nerve activity do for individuals. As business processes become more and more automated this comparison becomes closer and closer.

However, just like we can’t truly “eat and be safe” in the 21st century by fostering xenophobia and buying trucks, corporations can’t truly “maximize value for their shareholders” by engaging in scale manipulation and deception of the global population, but damn that dopamine hit from trying feels good. Corporations do have a dopamine equivalent; share price. Naturally, share price is the reward mechanism of the “maximize shareholder value” brain. Just as the individual’s lizard brain will consistently make short term decisions that maximize dopamine release even if they are harmful in the long term, corporations will routinely make short term decisions to bump short term share price even if those actions are harmful in the long term.

However, there is one critical difference that is one of the cruxes of this book; while an individual human can override their lizard brain in real-time and train it to use their execution mechanisms to put themselves in the “flow”, corporations aren’t built with this level of flexibility and honestly, we’ve never really asked them to try. We have thousands of years of philosophy, religion and science dedicated to re-training human brains and giving them alternative goals and instinct to achieve, what do we have in terms of corporations? Stakeholder maximization? Social IRR? Corporate Social Responsibility? Carbon credits? Impact investing? All well intentioned, but never fully thought through and never fully executed.

In corporations today rules are hardcoded, middle-management safeguards bureaucracy, procedures are documented and the machinery of execution is purpose built for efficiency towards the one goal of shareholder maximization. Any flexibility built in is optimized towards re-allocating resources and efforts towards further maximizing shareholder value, not towards making complex decisions about what goals they SHOULD instead be maximizing for.

As our paradigm is built today, corporate instincts can never evolve past their basest state because we don’t expect them to, they don’t have the machinery to execute on alternative goals, and because we don’t even have the frameworks in place to evaluate what those alternative goals might be.