"If the primary duty and concern of a corporation is to make money, then conflict is inevitable when the corporation must also acknowledge a duty to serve society."
From your perspective, how accurate is the above statement? Support your position with reasons and/or examples from your own experience, observations, or reading.
From my perspective, the above statement is inaccurate.
The statement seems to imply that any industry that acknowledges a duty to serve the society will do so at the cost of getting detracted from its primary duty of making money.
The case of Muhammad Yunnus of Bangladesh, who won a nobel prize for his micro-finance business, illustrates how wrong this assumption is. His business lent small amount of money at a nominal interest rate to small-scale social entrepreneurs in villages. These were generally women who would employ other women in a village based small scale industry like making baskets, knitting etc. Not only the business was profitable, it created prosperity at the bottom of the social ladder. The desire to serve the society did not conflict with profitability.
What is true for social entreprenuers like Yunnus, is true for other industries as well. Anybody who has a doubts just needs to see that Bill Gates's Microsoft, Narayan Murthy's Infosys and Richard Branson's Virgin Group are involved in a lot a charitable activities. Acknowledging a duty to serve the society has not led to any conflict in case of these very successful companies. Hence, any claim to the contrary is not credible.
The desire to serve the society and the desire to make money are not necessarily at odds with each other. If it was not so, a lot of successful companies and social entrepreneurs would not have made any money what-so-ever. The very fact that these entities are profitable in spite of serving the society clearly exposes the inaccuracy of the statement.
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