Reward good behavior
From the Austin Business Journal:
Dell Inc., the State Educational Technology Directors Association and cable industry education foundation Cable in the Classroom are donating mobile computer labs to students from 15 hurricane-ravaged school districts in Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas.The article says the mobile workstations were designed with input from teachers, and can be put to use immediately even by schools significantly damaged by the storms.
[..]
Intel, Microsoft, Adobe, Datamation Systems, Time Warner Cable, Cox Communications and Cable One also contributed to the donations.
2 Comments:
It's great that they did this.
I assume you mean that all else being equal, or even a little bit unequal, you're recommending that reader should reward one of these companies rather than a competitor when making a purchase.
But I wonder if charitable actions like this ought to figure in who to reward with discretionary business like this. After all, it may be a gesture to help deflect attention from other actions, and at any rate, it shouldn't have been done with a reward in mind, so ignoring it for that purpose seems to the point, in a way.
Maybe company business practices ought to be the only basis for comparisons of this sort?
Just raising a discussion topic, really; I'm a little up in the air about it myself. I just recall thinking "I'll never hear the end of this" when Wal-Mart sent some trucks down to Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina. That was fine, too, but it got a ton of good publicity for a relatively small investment.
OTOH, I'm inconsistent in that I have sometimes evaluated companies by their political donations profiles -- to where I was pretty down on Dell, BTW. They seem halfway OK in other respects, though. I guess we'll all work with whatever information we please.
I tend to agree that it's hard to discern the motivations of corporations in this regard.
I've sat in board meetings where they discussed how much to allocate for what charity and what PR benefit might accrue. And don't get me started on United Way.
Everything boils down to cost/benefit with some of these guys. But not always. Some of them actually feel a civic duty, or even a moral obligation, as long as it doesn't conflict with their fiduciary responsibility to shareholders. Although this seems more likely the case for a private v. a publicly traded company.
But either way, when they do something right, whether for altruistic reasons or by accident or by cynical design, if the market/public rewards it they will soon start figuring out that doing the right thing can generally help the bottom line, thus benefitting shareholders, thus making them more inclined to behave in a similar fashion in the future.
Disclaimer: I use and like products from Dell, Microsoft, and Adobe in my business. Not because of their politics or philanthropy, but because of the quality of their products and support and the overall fit with our customer/supplier/business partner's chosen technology platform/direction. Stuff like this, as rare as it seems sometimes, just makes me feel better about our choices.
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