That's only true to a certain extent. Don't forget companies are mainly run by profits. That's what really ends up deciding how the company is run.
Do you think a "good guy CEO" would stop Microsoft from extracting billions of dollars worth of royalties for bogus patents from Android and Linux vendors? Of course not. If there was such a CEO, he'd be quickly shut down by the board. And if the board were "sweetheart angels" that would ask for that, too, they would be replaced by investors.
So companies are really more like a machine, and the people are more like cogs in it. The machine's main goal is to produce profits. If one of the cogs says "no, that's not what we primarily want!", it will very likely get replaced. It takes a tremendous amount of will power to fight against the machine's desires, and it's usually only strong founders that can do it (Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk).
But those are the exception, not the rule. And even then, it's more about delaying profit gratification, rather than foregoing some profits altogether. It's about them knowing that if they do it their way, the company would be even more successful and profitable in the long term, while the machine's forces demand the profits right away.
Definitely a fair and salient point. Though I would argue turning a profit and acting ethically aren't always conflicting concerns.
In fact, ethical behavior is just another knob in the machine that people running a company can turn either way in their quest to maximize profit.
Erring on the side of too much ethical behavior can certainly impact profit in the form of lost efficiency and market opportunities, but we have to recognize that companies' customers are people too, and people generally have a distaste for unethical companies, and a fondness for ethical ones, that may influence their decision do business with them.
So turning the knob too far to either side can have direct and indirect implications for profit, and it's up to the people running the company to calibrate that knob in either direction.
Oftentimes the courses of actions a company can take on any given issue will not be a simple sorted array of choices with an obvious straightforward relationship in the form of less ethics -> more profit, but rather a complex decision matrix of causes and effects for which the outcome of any single option will be impossible to fully predict, and investors can generally see that too. So the people running the company will usually have some degree of freedom to experiment with which direction to turn the knob on ethics, and how far.
The only way unethical behavior affects profit is when it causes projecting the appearance of being an ethical company to become more expensive. To whatever extent that "people" avoid doing business with companies that they see as unethical, what they see is a company's image and branding, not their actual behavior. The balance is between unethical behavior and PR costs, not unethical behavior and ethical behavior; and that's even a gross simplification, because ethical behavior doesn't immunize you from bad PR.
I totally agree with your interpretation of the relationship between unethical/ethical behavior and bad PR, but you seem to be ignoring the opposite side of that coin. I hope this doesn't come off as combative, but I felt the easiest way to illustrate my point was by rewording your post:
> The only way ethical behavior affects profit is when it causes projecting the appearance of being an ethical company to become less expensive. To whatever extent that "people" prefer doing business with companies that they see as ethical, what they see is a company's image and branding, not their actual behavior. The balance is between ethical behavior and PR costs, not ethical behavior and unethical behavior; and that's even a gross simplification, because unethical behavior doesn't immunize you from good PR.
Maybe the effects of good PR can be less easily measured and felt than the obvious and immediate repercussions of bad PR, but the effects are certainly real and build up with time, so reasonable people can disagree as to what degree a company should pursue building up goodwill through ethical (likable) acts. Ethical decisions and behavior is the foundation upon which good PR is built. Even the most obviously opportunistic PR stunt must have some backing in an action the company has taken that can be construed by their audience as doing good.
That's only true to a certain extent. Don't forget companies are mainly run by profits. That's what really ends up deciding how the company is run.
Do you think a "good guy CEO" would stop Microsoft from extracting billions of dollars worth of royalties for bogus patents from Android and Linux vendors? Of course not. If there was such a CEO, he'd be quickly shut down by the board. And if the board were "sweetheart angels" that would ask for that, too, they would be replaced by investors.
So companies are really more like a machine, and the people are more like cogs in it. The machine's main goal is to produce profits. If one of the cogs says "no, that's not what we primarily want!", it will very likely get replaced. It takes a tremendous amount of will power to fight against the machine's desires, and it's usually only strong founders that can do it (Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk).
But those are the exception, not the rule. And even then, it's more about delaying profit gratification, rather than foregoing some profits altogether. It's about them knowing that if they do it their way, the company would be even more successful and profitable in the long term, while the machine's forces demand the profits right away.