| Five facts, and one generally-held assumption: Fact 1. Companies’ brains (for this level of executive decision-making) are their boards of directors. Fact 2. Boards of directors are made up of people elected by shareholders. Fact 3. “Making the shareholders money” (either through dividends or equity) is the most obvious “platform” on which to get elected to this position; and “not making the shareholders money” is usually a quick way to get replaced. Fact 4. Unlike government elections in America—but like elections in Commonwealth nations—corporate “snap elections” can be triggered at any time from a shareholder vote. This means that a board-member can be removed pretty much instantly if they start to look like they’re not serving the shareholders’ interests. Fact 5. Members of the board usually want to stay on the board, because it confers advantages. Even if there are no explicit advantages to being on the board, they get the ability to vote in ways that work toward their own personal interests, perhaps even getting themselves sweetheart deals. Even if they don’t go for these, there might be “lobbyists” (internal to the company, from industry-organizational bodies, etc.) that are willing to bribe them to vote certain ways. And now, the assumption, that tends to hold in cases of publicly-traded companies: shareholders in the company are, by majority, pure investors that want their share value to increase, with some making short-term plays and others going long, but neither all that interested in the company outside of its portfolio value. Putting the facts and the assumption together, you can derive that the board is structured in such a way, and members of the board are incentivized in such a way, that their behaviour is extremely predictable, operating almost according to an algorithm, rather than acting like a “group of people” with human whims. This emergent behavior of the group, and the clear algorithmic model that can be used to predict it, are what people mean when they talk about “what corporations want.” It’s very similar to how a person can want things that are at odds with the “wants” of the cells that compose them (such as doing things like drinking that damage those cells, despite each cell embodying an algorithm that steers toward that cell’s own survival.) |
Fact 3 is also a fairly fanciful interpretation. Large public corporate board membership can be lucrative, but is in practice not competed for by a talent pool the way that say, a CTO or VP of Sales or CFO role would be. New board members are almost always vetted and nominated by the existing board. Hence new board members are nearly always either 1. in-group members (a cynic would say "cronies") with satisficing business acumen from the same social/business milieu as the incumbents, or in the exceptional case, 2. high visibility outsiders (a cynic would say "window-dressing") from other endeavors, such as former politicians, admirals and generals, etc. A new movement adds a third possible vector in, namely being a highly qualified business person with a politically / optically desirable diversity characteristic. But once that candidate comes in, they quickly will learn that the means to stay in the Inner Ring and gain lucrative additional such opportunities is to toe the line...
I'm sympathetic to your idea of emergent behaviors of the group arising from knowable axioms about the individuals and their motivation but I think you've got some incorrect axioms about the selection and incentives of those individuals.