I know the board has some fiduciary duty, but can a company put some guardrails on it when they go public, like saying the environment will always come first, or employees or customers or something?
I know the board has some fiduciary duty, but can a company put some guardrails on it when they go public, like saying the environment will always come first, or employees or customers or something?
Timeline is a critical factor, but quarterly reports culture makes most companies suck at long term stability and profitability without privateering (legal piracy) and exploitation. Like, profitable when. I may need to spend a ton of money, retool, and take a hit for the next 2 years, but then I can cut my costs in half. That wouldn’t be impossible to pull off, but what if I can confidently predict 10 or 20 years in the future.
I think the trouble with employee protections and the environment is that humans are only semi-sentient entities. We are not capable of managing both big and small scales at the same time.
I struggled with this when I went from managing inventory for a single bicycle shop to a chain of 3. Each store had its own little niche and I needed to know each of the key sales staff too. Then I had to try and spend a couple million dollars based on what I was willing to gamble on selling next year when I made preseason order commitments. Every single year and large order was putting the entire company on the line. The bigger this gets and the more money is on the line, the harder it is to consider the fractal interests that are near the bottom of the chain.
Like with the bike shops, I had nothing to do with people management or the sales teams. I worked completely in the background like one of the owners. This is a necessary disconnect, but it is this big-decision maker culture that has gone awry with no profit sharing. Like it is amazing what people can infer and use to make strategic guesses that keep a company afloat, and this is why they are getting paid so much for their results. It is easy to think of a business as some kind of stable thing that will always be and is just channeling money around in ‘ways’, but when you’re sitting in the back office, it feels like you’re going to Vegas, know the odds are stacked against you, and your existence relies on betting big on something you are likely to lose at.
The real problem is cultural. When that bet pays off, the gambler must feel indebted to the real people that were part of making it possible.