Profit motive vs. LO LO23635

Eugene Taurman (ilx@execpc.com)
Wed, 15 Dec 1999 15:46:46 -0800

Replying to LO23621 --

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.

This is true . What you say is important to move on. It is helpful to
separate the evaluation of the organization purpose form evaluating how
well it carries out the 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. Consider two
separate metrics. One for evaluating the purpose and another for how well
the processes work.

et

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