Seeking moral guidance

What's worse, profit motive or virtue signalling?

“I am not a destroyer of companies. I am a liberator of them! The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed -- for lack of a better word -- is good”.  - Gordon Gecko, Wall Street (1987). 

These were the famous words spoken by Gordon Gecko in the now ephemeral movie “Wall Street”, released in 1987. I wasn’t alive then and frankly I find it difficult to even fathom a time when the ethos of corporate America was governed by profit and nothing else. I was around however, to witness Leonardo Di Caprio’s famous chest bumping scene in The Wolf of Wall Street when it came out in 2013.

In that same year, I joined the Wharton School of business, where the cracks in the ideology of corporate greed were already starting to show. I recall distinctly walking from my business ethics class, where our professor openly questioned the Friedman doctrine, across the hall to FINANCE 101 taught by professor Jeremy Siegel, an unabashedly free market economist, having trained under Milton Friedman himself. One evening the school put on a screening of The Wolf of Wall Street . That night, the finance bros beat their chests in deference to the mantra. The writing was on the wall by then though, it was the end of an era and they were the last of a dying breed.  

A decade on, we have clear marching orders: greed is bad. Saving the world is good. Anything under the moniker of “climate change” is good. Does your company have the word