Hey Apple and Chipotle: Get Real About Corporate Social Responsibility!

Have you heard
about last week’s annual investor meeting for Apple? Head honcho
Tim Cook told investors who questioned the company’s commitment to
sustainability to go piss up a rope and dump the stock.

Is that a good idea or a bad idea? I’m not sure but, as I
write at Time, a lot of the discussion about corporate social
responsibility is just good old-fashioned B.S.:

Can we get real about corporate social responsibility (CSR), the
idea that businesses shouldn’t just increase returns for
shareholders but also benefit for free the larger world around
them? Between Chipotle’s cryptic warning that global
warming threatens the planet’s guacamole supply chain and
Apple CEO Tim Cook seemingly forsaking return on investment (ROI)
for social causes, CSR’s stock is spiking like Pets.com in the late
1990s.

“People, not profits” may be a powerful slogan
but it’s a really stupid business plan, mostly because it assumes
the two priorities are mutually exclusive – and that businesses
that go belly up have any chance of helping anybody. So when
a “visibly angry” Tim Cook told Apple investors who
question man-made climate change to “get out of this stock” at the
company’s annual shareholder meeting last week, he wasn’t really
putting ideology over profits. In an economy where many people are
willing to pay a premium to feel good about themselves or morally
superior to less-enlightened souls, he was bidding up his company’s
stock price.

Read
the whole thing.