It is a curious thing that collectives, nations, organizations, governments, corporations, bureaucracies often act in a way that is in their perceived best interest, even though it may be totally opposed to the interests of the individuals that make up those collectives. Of course, "best interest" is a matter of definition and debate; it may be dead wrong, just as humans can be self-destructive too.

If you look at the histories of nations, regimes, dictatorships (both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia come to mind) these collectives engage in policies and activities that everyone working to bring them about know perfectly well are suicidal, but no one wants to rock the boat, everybody wants that paycheck, and everyone is afraid of the boss. And the boss has to answer to the stockholders. The only buck that ever stops is the commercial one, all other responsibility and morality and even common sense is shunted aside in its favor.

Corporations are no different. They develop a mind of their own. Like HAL 9000, they exceed their programming. Even though we have an example here of a great corporation that deliberately changed its own policy and embarked on questionable behavior, no doubt for the power and wealth it pursued. Like an addict or a drunkard, it engaged in what it knew perfectly well to be self-destructive behavior.

I've always been interested in corporate (or perhaps I should say collective) consciousness or behavior or personality. A collection of humans is definitely more than the sum of its parts, (look at mobs!)and adding a collective goal, such as conquest or profit, only makes it worse.

Someone should study this phenomenon.