Corporate Compassion Is Way Past Due

Everyone in our country is talking about the present conditions of divisiveness being worse than ever. Name calling, prejudice, conflicts, animus, loud arguments and violence. The world and the people of the world are encountering greater challenges than ever before. From climate change to mass shootings; from international disputes to migrants and refugees; from huge income disparity to deep poverty, and so on.

During these very turbulent times, why aren’t empathy and compassion the most dominant forms of behavior in all of us? When we look at chimps and other primates, compassion comes to them so naturally that it prevails throughout each of the days of their lives. Is it our “superior intelligence” that takes away what is fundamentally innate within each and every one of us and leaves us confused? There was a very warm article in the Washington Post recently by Steven Petrow, who described the surging and positive feeling of sharing the “last scone remaining in the bakery” with a stranger. Lady Gaga led us to perform acts of kindness each day during the first twenty one days of September. Because of that, those of us who participated would conclude that September was our best month personally this year. 

Jeff Weiner, Deepak Chopra, Richard Branson, Ashton Kutcher, Arianna Huffington and I and others have been talking for more than a decade about the need for the most important focus in all of our lives to be compassion. For the last ten years Bill Gates has been living a life of exemplary compassion and philanthropy! Just recently, I had the opportunity to learn from Katy Perry that compassion and benevolence have become the core of her priorities.

Since our businesses and places of employment take up most of our waking hours, should not those businesses become the centers of compassion in our country and in our communities? No one sector is more capable of solving the most difficult of our society’s problems than is the corporate sector. If the resources, talent, demonstrated competence and expertise of that sector could be organized alongside of government and civil society, I truly believe that just about all of our intractable problems could be solved. 

The largest tech companies have market capitalization values approaching, or greater than, $1 trillion. Apple’s net earnings are estimated to be $60 billion and Amazon is projected to be at that level within three years! The 2018 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act reduced the tax rate on corporations from 35 percent to 21 percent! On earnings of $60 billion, that represents a savings in taxes of $8 billion this year alone! With all of the profits and cash that have been accumulated by major businesses, isn’t it time for these companies to also lead our country in compassion? Could and would corporations set aside a certain percentage of just their tax savings and apply them to addressing the most troubling challenges facing us as a society today? I know the results would be dramatically positive.

In the accompanying video, young Master Hilton Rawls III, seven years old, implores Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, to include the city of Newark, New Jersey in its decision for expanded corporate offices. I am also a native of Newark and truly believe that Amazon’s decision to have some type of presence in the city, could be the most compassionate act performed by a major tech company in history. In addition, it would make a great deal of business sense. Employee morale would skyrocket, Newark is 18 minutes from Midtown Manhattan by train, it shares the same talent pool with New York, its cost of living and cost of construction are significantly less, it has offered a very attractive economic package to Amazon, and Newark is reachable from Washington, DC in almost half of the time it would take to get to certain parts of New York. 

No longer should major decisions and plans be made by American business without having compassion as its principal guiding principle. I sincerely hope as each day goes by every one of us becomes more compassionate. I guarantee happiness will explode.