I'm in the middle of reading John Brooks' Business Adventures. It is a great book and once I get done with it I'll have a more in-depth review of the entire book. Today though I felt I had to talk about one of the stories. Xerox has an entire chapter devoted to it and rightly so. It is fascinating story of discovering the printing method we all use each and every day. But more fascinating is that they were one of the first schools to give large sums of money to a university with no direct benefit back to them. They of course benefited from a more prestigious school offering better classes in their hometown to find better talent in their company. Yet the school did no research for them directly.
Xerox donated several millions of dollars to the University of Rochester which was the largest gift from a company to a college at that time. Many people in the business world and in charge of other companies said that Xerox was wrong and should not be giving money in such large sums to a school. Some shareholders also cried foul and stated that Xerox was taking away their profits from the company. The founders did not care a lick about the detractors statements. To them the most important thing was to do the right thing and they saw that as donating to the local university.
We should remember this because sometimes we too get distracted with short-term goals and do not see the bug picture. Xerox is still around today and thriving and it might just be because of this early investments and good management. I'm sure the small donations in the end had a fairly good ROI.
When companies today start talking about giving back and make it seem like a new idea just remember that there is nothing new under the sun and that Xerox was one of the first pioneers of giving back.
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