Companies value sustainability in their buying decisions? Really? Do they now? What else does a company value, pray tell? What does it long for when the night grows cold and the fluorescent lights flicker out? What does it dream of when the spreadsheets are finally closed? What are its aspirations when the going gets tough? Does it tremble in fear? Does it dare to hope? Does it perch itself on the porcelain throne to muse about a better, greener tomorrow?
You think these questions are absurd because a company is an inanimate object? Oh no — it’s far worse than that. Your bathroom mirror is an inanimate object. It at least has the decency to exist. A company doesn’t even rise to that level. It’s a legal hallucination. A convenient fiction we use to structure power, wealth, and responsibility — or more often, to evade the latter. We organize our collective behavior around this phantom like medieval villagers dancing around a maypole, pretending the pole has agency.A company is no more “real” than a country, or your Key Performance Indicators. All of them are useful figments of our imagination, scaffolding for human cooperation. But real? No. They’re ghosts wearing business suits. And yet, how many of us actually keep this in mind when we swallow marketing pablum about what “companies value”?