Item — HN Reader

For a lot of toxic people, the business views them as "high performers" and their harassment of others as a personal flaw. "Separate the art from the artist". Sometimes, being a good person is seen as bad for business, since there's a meme that business is about being ruthless in success.

I blame it on movies and TV.

1 comments

Ruthless toxic business culture predates movies and tv. Look at Standard Oil, Carnegie Steel, railroad conglomerates, the existence of legal slavery etc.

It is a flaw in the system, given the prevalence unchecked.

Ruthlessness is for your competitors, not your employees. Locking people into low-wage jobs doesn't benefit the company, because as soon as you get a competitor, you're screwed!

If we're using legal slavery as an example, countries that abolished slavery early ended up being more productive because employees actually want to work/innovate/create quality goods. By hiring slaves or treating your employees like crap, you're voluntarily specializing in the low-end of whatever market you're in, because your employees don't care about the product.

That's rarely the most profitable move unless you have a monopoly or a commodity good, like the examples you've provided.

We're doing this experiment right now in Canada by importing millions of temporary foreign workers/international students to work in slave-like conditions. If ruthless toxic slavery worked, we should be making more money. In reality, our GDP/capita has dropped continuously since 2019 indicating we're actually less profitable per person.

To be clear, I’m not equating these things to success in any forms, only that there has been a prevalence of negative patterns stemming from business culture for a long time