Profit motive vs. LO LO23621

Brian Gordon (briangordon@livetolearn.com)
Tue, 14 Dec 1999 21:06:07 -0700

Replying to LO23544 --

Eugene wrote:

>Do you
>expect, or want organizations to act according to contributions to
>society? If so, how does that balance with profit issues?

Answers: Yes, and an organization must remain solvent to carry out its
mission.

>the values management bring to the organization determine it's
>behavior. Profit simply reflects how well an organization carries out it's
>own mission.

Profit may measure how well an organization carries out its mission, but
it does not measure how valuable that mission is to society, whether the
mission is corrupt, or even whether the actual mission corresponds to the
espoused mission. As it is not a direct measure of what I want
organizations to accomplish, I would not consider it a primary metric. To
me that would be like measuring customer satisfaction by number of items
returned.

Brian

briangordon@livetolearn.com
Live to Learn
www.livetolearn.com

-- 

"Brian Gordon" <briangordon@livetolearn.com>

Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>