26th August:

Age focuses the mind, and I have found myself becoming increasingly choosy over the last 10 years. Choosy about how my time is spent, who I associate myself with and what companies I am happy to support as a customer. Choosy, also about how my living is earned. I may also have become less tolerant over this decade, but we’ll gloss over that and move on…

As a plucky young man in my mid-twenties, I joined a company and threw myself into learning all about the products and all the reasons why they were better than the products made by the competitors. Unfortunately, it didn’t take me long to learn that the founder of the company was an arrogant and nasty son of a bitch whose life revolved around making money for himself and telling his employees that they were all idiots. How I cringe now when I look back at all those times I was interviewed by magazines and, being the loyal and dutiful company man, said how great it all was.

In order to be satisfied in a job, you generally have to care about what you are doing and why. As soon as either or both of these factors is missing, the seeds of dissatisfaction will undoubtedly start to creep into your daily routine. You end up wearing it like a perfume – people can smell it on you. I’m not sure what the fashionable Human Resources term is for what happened to me, but after several months of increasingly vocal belligerence, I was summoned and given suitable incentive to leave. Which I gladly did.

Having discussed the thorny moral and philosophical issue of what TV is all about in the last couple of posts, the spotlight now turns to private companies. Realistically, almost all of us are in business to make money in order to pay the bills. Which is fine. Profit is not immoral, but neither should it be sought at any cost. Nor excessively. The older I get, the more I feel the need to seek out companies and people whose values resonate with my own. I therefore don’t want to work for, or buy anything from, companies who exploit children, abuse human rights or suppress the Palestinian people. Amongst other things.

If you were being cynical, you would say that corporate responsibility only amounts to companies spending money on good causes in order to either generate positive PR for the brand or off-set some damage that is being done elsewhere. And yes, it is probably true that many companies rushed off to draft a corporate responsibility policy in the early 1990s because it was the fashionable thing to do. However, the companies who take responsible trading to heart, do so from an understanding that their profit-making activities have an impact on, for example, the environment or people in poorer countries. And why should either of those things be exploited?

Ethical profit is not some kind of charitable or altruistic goal. It is a genuine belief that there does not have to be a winner and a loser in the commercial environment – we can all gain by looking after each other better.