Word: profits
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...Rodgers may be many things--tough taskmaster, Green Bay Packers fan--but reticent he is not. And if anything gets the pugnacious founder and CEO of Cypress Semiconductor talking, it's the notion that corporations ought to exist for more than the pursuit of profit. In the simplest terms, that idea--called corporate social responsibility, or CSR--invites companies to consider their impact on people and the planet on a par with their traditional quest for profit. Rodgers considers that bunk. Not that he opposes conscientious corporate conduct or occasional acts of charity. He's quick to point out that...
...imbued philosophy that guides Whole Foods, calling it similar to those of Karl Marx and Ralph Nader. Mackey, an avowed libertarian, replied that his approach has brought a lot more wealth for Whole Foods' investors than the one embraced at Cypress, which, he noted, has struggled to be profitable. Indeed, though Cypress made a small profit in 2004, it booked losses in the three previous years...
...their job as a lawyer is to maximize billing for their firm. Law school preaches the ideas of fairness and justice. Every other profession has a deeper purpose to it. So does business, only it's been taught that it doesn't, that its only purpose is to maximize profits." Critics say, however, that when profit is the sole measure of performance, managers can be held eminently responsible. "In a nutshell, the problem with CSR," says Stephen Bainbridge, a corporate-law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, "is that managers who are responsible to all of their constituencies...
...Cypress's Rodgers, all this talk about purpose higher than profit also seems like a Trojan horse for the eventual piling on of top-down government controls on commerce. The virtues touted by CSR, in his opinion, come just as easily if markets are left to run freely. Rodgers points to the initial public offering last month of Cypress's solar-power subsidiary, SunPower, and asserts that investors chipped in not to make an environmental statement but because they believe clean solar power is a potentially profitable enterprise. He is running a business, he notes, whose motivation is profit alone...
...Natural Resources Defense Council, the Sierra Club and Terra Pass, Skoll asks viewers to lobby Congress for more investments in renewable energy and presents ways to reduce oil dependence. With three movies under his belt--and a box-office hit or two--Skoll may now persuade even the most profit-hungry investors to join his crusade to change the world...