What is Silicon Valley?

Court Skinner a former executive with National Semicondutor who hangs out at South Bay Solari meetings in Palo Alto (http://www.solari.com/) says that most corporate “organizations exist independently of the place where they are and they obligated only to the limited stakeholders of the company, which the bigger the company the more rarely includes the citizens of their place.”

He says that if we expanded the notion of profit “to mean that the place where the company (or any other organization) “lives” becomes better (financially, or by any other metric) then they might have a positive impact (a positive contribution to the ROI of the place) rather than the current negative contribution. The notion of “profit” would therefore be motivated by producing “benefits to the place rather than to the management of the company and the distant shareholders.


This would mean providing:
• Interesting jobs to local residents
• Providing education that leads to rewarding work
• Designing and constructing a well thought out built environment that is both ecologically sustainable and socially and culturally nourishing.

Skinner says that if “corporations are going to pretend to be people, then they must be a part of some community. If they behave as if they are “good citizens” of that place then they too have obligations to that community just as real people do. So in terms of asking what is Silicon Valley: we have to reconsider the idea of corporate culture, corporate communities that revolve around those cultures and how they interact with real communities. This relates to the work of innovative socially conscious business pioneer Frank Dixon who spoke at the Febuary Green Century Salon about his work and his company Innovest. Dixon is working on a methodology to develop more sophisticated and rigorous screening processes for socially conscious businesses. The goal is to:

• Demonstrate that a commitment to making businesses more sustainable is a key sign of well thought business plans based on an ethical decision-making process.
• Reform the underlying structures of society that reinforce dysfunctional behaviors and interactions in the society. Systemic change is important as it is case that today the system that firms work under compels them to be unsustainable.
• Promote a global perspective as compared with the narrow perspective that now dominates. Globalization is not sustainable without a global perspective that includes considering the long term ecological and social impacts of the corporate community on the world.