But you are right, many executives tend to agree with your point of view. That’s probably the single largest problem in society today.
In my view, the end of a business is whatever serves the self interests of the participants. A customer may want something different than an employee or an owner. A supplier is not obligated to offer a price that benefits the owner. Instead they are free to negotiate a price on behalf of their own interest. Likewise an employee, which is a kind of supplier. To the extent that the public are affected by the behavior of a corporation, they can demand regulations based on the public interest.
The people who are actually legally or contractually obligated to serve as fiduciaries for the owners can usually be counted on the fingers of one hand.
"It is not to the benevolence of the butcher, brewer, or baker, that we appeal for our supper, but to their regard for their own self interest." -- Adam Smith
One answer to the first is that wealth can be used to change the world. Small scale wealth can change things for you alone, like buying a nicer house. Large scale wealth can change things for everyone around you, like supporting a political platform of your liking.
In the same vein, money as a means of transaction is supposed to capture the social good that is gained within every transaction and make it abstract so we don't have to specifically barter for what we want in the present.
If we accept for the sake of argument the above, then we can examine if corporations are really doing social good, because if they are not then the ought to be restructured. This line of thought is what lead to the anti-trust acts of previous eras, safety regulations, food and drug regulations, and general business regulation in the present day. We have previously acknowledged that businesses can gain wealth, and power, without adding social good and as corporations are an abstraction created by society, it's well within our rights to change them for societies betterment.
The thing that disheartens me is that most people today fail to realize that people have been organizing into large work entities since time immemorial to build products and offer services in the hope of making money as owners, workers, and investors. Many people in every culture have accumulated great wealth by enterprising means. Yet people act like working for someone else is some new construct that exists to oppress everyone and most of the common mans ills are because of capitalists. This to me is quite silly.
The only easy things in life are complaining, procrastinating, failing and dying. Most everything else that is worth having in life takes discipline, work, and self growth. Yes some people will get more of those good things, some for less effort, so what though? As long as they are not breaking laws to do so I am fine with it. If someone breaks the law then punish them.
What an amazing world where the single largest problem isn’t war, famine, or pestilence. We dun good.
Business basics such as "The customer is always right" are so banal and correct at the same time.
If a company doesn't deliver value to somebody somewhere, all this extra talk does not matter.
Both are gaming companies. Both serve similar segments.
Only the latter was a toxic work culture.
The customer should be listen emphatically, while trying to identify their needs and see if your product fits or not, should have maybe a voice in saying what kind a direction a product should go, should have access to information regarding their own data and how we handle it, but I would not put such responsibility of figuring the "right" to the customer.
The customer is sometimes wrong. The customer is sometimes influenced by bad press, publicity or lack of knowledge, or even lack of interest to put the effort to understand or articulate their own needs. Sometimes the customer asks for a feature that they will not use.
So we should see the customer emotions, expressions, complaints, praises as an effect which needs to be acknowledged and listen to and try to understand the cause.
Here is a simple example: televisions which are promoting useless debates, false claims or subjects which are blown out of proportion, you know what they say: It is what the public wants.
Absolute words such as "always" are used for dramatic effect in most human-centric contexts. That's why the phrase is also generally accepted as banal: it does not convey much meaning without deeper analysis.
Customers are not "right" about everything and they will not determine the product direction in every sense. That's the job of the company leadership.
"The customer is always right" can also mean that "the market is always right". Ultimately, people will vote with their wallets. They will either buy your product, or they won't.
a) Charlie Warzel has never run an organization or group of any size.
2) He comes to this tempest-in-a-teapot with a strong POV.
Is he right? wrong? neither? You might as well listen to the guy on the next barstool over. That's the nature of the modern op-ed.
This is not a defense of punditry — I feel pretty icky anytime I see a climate denialist like Bret Stephens opining on climate change in The Paper of Record, for example — but I also don’t think we should necessarily conclude that a person’s relationship to power connotes an inherent level of expertise.
They have decided to reset their culture - it might work out, it might not. But by doing it with a massive voluntary payout with no obligations, they have said huge amounts about their own personal integrity, which will trickle down. I have no doubt they are inundated with high quality applicants right now. No such thing as bad publicity and all that...
Execs' words carry a lot of weights. What they choose to celebrate vs. what they don't will define the culture.
Any sort of leaders know this.
And the company has advertised for free, thanks to mass media, that it will readily pay top dollar for people who seek to spend their workhours... you know, actually working.
Note that I'm not invoking a slippery-slope argument here - we know that privacy was being violated here, we're not merely predicting that this could happen in the future.
The employees were the ones to change that negative aspect of the culture after the CEO had failed to do so for years. What about that gives you confidence that the CEO values privacy?
It is unclear currently if the employees leaving are the same ones who supported the old culture or those who lobbied for the new, or if both groups are the same. I've seen one report that a person called Basecamp culture akin to 'genocide' when that person had been an active supporter in the 'genocidal' culture themselves. It may have been a genuine change of heart, but their hyperbolic language couldn't have lead to good discussion making nor made it clear what kind of punishment that person should get for their past admitted misdeeds.
I agree with this blog article insofar as you cannot define what a culture will be, the way you define OKRs or go to market strategies. A couple anecdotes:
At a former company, roughly the size of Basecamp, a VP of business development said this to me, essentially word for word: "The culture of ${companyName} is getting to $30 million ARR within the next 6 months." This was in the context of me telling him that developers were not happy with the direction of the company culture. His framing told me that he was talking about something definitionally different than I was when I talked about culture. Incidentally, that company imploded, though it does continue to limp on.
At another company, the CEO repeated at every all-hands meeting that our company had a "culture of performance". I always wondered how the hell he would know that, since the only time he interacted with anyone at the company outside the VP level was when lecturing at the all-hands meetings. He was no doubt qualified to discuss the culture of vice presidents and the c-suite, but how could he possibly describe what the other 99% of the company was like?
My point is that executives think they can define what a culture is, but they can't. Nobody can. You can only describe what a culture turns out to be. You can try to change it, but it's not ever going to be entirely in your control, ex officio, like it's a dress code or something.
You don’t have to be disgruntled at all to take a 6 mo or 3 mo salary buyout. (I read 6 mo for people at the company over three years, 3 mo otherwise.) Anything short of highly motivated to stay would have to think seriously about taking that.
As such, employers define their own culture.
https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=724a91e1-94f1...
