When you are a God, as is Apple, just like any God, you can do nothing wrong. If you have Apple on your resume as an ex-employee, it’s the same as having gone to Harvard, MIT, or maybe possibly Tsinghua. And that’s where Apple is, or has been until recently. You might have read that Apple has been avoiding a lot of taxes not only to the US government but also too many other governments. Well, strictly speaking, it hasn’t avoided any, since it paid everything that it owed legally. But it’s clear that Apple has used its skills in innovation to finding highly innovative ways to avoid paying taxes.
So here’s the question for Apple and everyone else. Is it cool and socially fair to use every legal way possible to avoid paying taxes? How does that fit with the image we all have of Apple as being a God? Do Gods avoid paying taxes?
In the US there’s another hot buzzword. It’s called “corporate social responsibility”. They just say “CSR”. It means making sure your company does good things for people, not just for your shareholders. It means that you have to design your company’s activities so that they not only make profits for shareholders and pay employees well, but also help society and poor people, not to mention do good things like the environment. And they help fight things like disease, mental illness, crime and poverty. So CSR is much wider than innovation is. Innovation usually means just getting breakthrough products and services that lead to great profits for companies and shareholders. CSR means also doing good things for non-shareholders and governments generally.
Apple is probably paying its taxes legally but clearly it’s not into CSR. It’s still living in a pre-CSR era where shareholders keep their huge profits and don’t share them with the society that helped them to create these great amounts of money. Apple has always been a shining light for many people. Steve Jobs was one of the best-known people on the planet. Clearly he was the driving force behind Apple’s innovations. But being a genius doesn’t mean you are a nice guy. Steve wanted to help himself and his shareholders. He wasn’t into helping anyone else, least of all poor or sick people. As evidence, in the US people look at the working conditions at Hon Hai, the Chinese company that manufactured most of Apple’s products. The working conditions there, at least to US people, are not good and many people felt that Apple demeaned itself by using such a company with such poor attitudes towards its workers.
One way of looking at Apple is that it is just another company that hit its peak and will now go into a long and slow decline, just like Microsoft. Another way it to see it, again like many other companies, is as one that is fast losing its creative juices and thus its edge in innovation. Both of these would be accurate perceptions. But there’s another way to view Apple. That is to say that it is no longer in tenor with the times. There was a time when people cared only about companies being innovative and cool and making huge profits. But time has moved on. We still want our companies to be innovative and hip. But in addition we want to see them use their innovation skills to do some social good and have a social as well as a business impact. 
In this new view, the world has too many problems to allow companies just to make a lot of money. Their activities profit from the way the world is. So they have an obligation to help the world that helped them by putting some of their capital to work doing things that are socially impactful. In this view, Apple has completely missed the boat. From a social activist’s point of view, its products may be hip, but its views certainly aren’t. Its attitude to tax isn’t just a reflection of management technique. It’s a reflection of a worldview that isn’t doing any of us any good at solving the most urgent problems everyone in this world faces.
CSR is the new God of business. It’s not just an American or a European thing. It’s going to impact every company in every country. Its isn’t just about Apple. It’s about every corporate entity. Time to move on and beyond just innovation.
*Dr. E. Ted Prince, Founder and CEO, Perth Leadership Institute, China Times (Beijing) May 2013