Photo credit to John Tlumacki — Associated Press

Within the recent months, ISIS has captured the daily headlines with activities that the media often portrays as solely religious or political. But we often forget that like any organization, ISIS needs funds to operate. The heavily publicized ransoms are small one-time transactions that cannot be practical in the long-run. In this article, CBC explains how ISIS relies heavily upon captured oil fields to generate income.

Photo credit to Reuters

So why have we not heard more about this? The US government clearly knows about their strategic importance, since they have led air-strikes targeting said oil fields. I think the media refrains from putting too much emphasis on the airstrikes hitting the tangible operations because the effects are still unclear. On one hand, it is undeniable that the oil refineries, which “[generate] between $1 million and $3 million a day of revenue” (CBC) is an important asset to the group. Intuitively, we would think that destroying this major source of revenue would significantly weaken the group. However, ISIS’s other sources of revenue are still unclear, and human rights groups, such as Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, have said that the airstrikes have raised gasoline prices for civilians (CBC). The mixed results from the economic perspective is hardly marketable to the voting population in Western countries, and perhaps that is why we hear more about the political and religious side of the story.

Photo of Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield taken from Ottawa Citizen

In the short video we watched, R. Edward Freeman argues that for a business to succeed, the people managing the business must synthesize and not isolate all the stakeholders’ interests. I found it particularly interesting that Freeman considers “community” as a stakeholder. I thought that Freeman’s perspective is similar to Michael E. Porter and Mark R. Kramer‘s argument that the community’s, or general society’s, interests do not necessarily conflict with, say, the business’s shareholders, because their interests can align. An example of this perspective is Ben & Jerry’s: a profitable ice cream company that also has a reputation for being ethical. In this article, the founders Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield say that initially the company barely made any profits after they donated a large part of their revenue. However, Ben and Jerry managed to align community’s interests in quality ingredients and sustainable manufacturing with shareholder’s interests in profits after they adopted a new business plan of selling to distributors while also maintaining a clear set of values. In essence, Ben & Jerry’s involvements in campaigns “may have cost [the company] some customers […but] they also deepened Ben & Jerry’s connection to its base.” From this example, I interpret ethical business as a business that does not alienate or pit one shareholder’s interest against another’s, but rather a business that can serve all the shareholders.

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