Energy, Old Companies And New Technologies
Last night I read the piece in the NYTimes Magazine about Sister Daly’s fight as an ExxonMobil shareholder to get the company to take more interest in clean energy technologies. It’s an inspiring piece, and Daly is doing important work. But asking ExxonMobil to develop new energy technologies is like expecting NBC to invent YouTube - it isn’t going to happen. ExxonMobil lacks the innovation, vision and most importantly the incentive to develop new technologies. A corporation is a social machine that exists to make money. Old, successful corporations are machines that are built to take maximum advantage of the current marketplace. To mess with that marketplace would be to tinker with the formula of their corporate success, and jeopardize their profitability.
Which is why you can petition ExxonMobil to get behind new energy initiatives, and they may make some concessions, but any real changes in the energy marketplace are going to come from outsiders looking to disrupt what ExxonMobil has created.
