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Maybe age has turned me into a cynic

Nah man. Even a half-honest business person will tell you the business incentive for making and funding diversity goals is about expanding the hiring pool.

The fact it overlaps with a popular social goal is just an added bonus for marketing and internal feel-good. Maybe the businesses are true believers in diversity, or maybe they're cold, calculating, and just hiring the true believers to diversify their business.

It's like when Google lobbies the government and their goals happen to overlap with ends an everyday engineer clued into the topic also likes. They're not doing it out of the goodness of their heart. But they'll make the strong principled argument for it.



> The fact it overlaps with a popular social goal is just an added bonus for marketing and internal feel-good.

This gets to the core of the issue: in a late stage capitalistic society, meaningful social change ONLY happens when it is aligned with business incentives.


Late stage?


everyone has access to quality goods and services at historically cheap prices, so purchasing decisions are based more on "want" than "need."


everyone has access to products the consumption of which threaten the ecological underpinnings of the society in which they live, but generally consume more of these products anyway


The individuals probably are acting on a moral belief, but an organization can't do things out of the goodness of its heart.


> but an organization can't do things out of the goodness of its heart.

Why not?


A public company may not be able to, because the board may be sued for doing things that do not increase shareholder value in the short term?


The company's mission is to fulfil its purpose that may or may not related to immediate shareholder value. I recommend to read the Flow's author's other book called Good Business: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Good-Business-Leadership-Making-Mea... . He describes quite well what bugged me with the concept of “a business entity is to maximise the profit”.


Because orgs are amoral.


If companies can have “culture”, they can have personality and morale / ethics as well.




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