Everything you know about the corporate world is an illusion

In a very meaningful sense, the entire corporate world is nothing more than a product for investors.

Yes, actual products and services are conceived of, created, marketed, sold, and serviced. Yes, people spend their careers in the corporate world — pursuing work that matters, learning and developing, trying to better support themselves and their families…

There’s a lot of activity. And yet, it’s all a sideshow.

The most apt comparison that comes to mind for me is social media. There, the saying goes that if you’re not paying for something, you are the product.

As an example, Facebook is free to you. And people spend a lot of time doing all sorts of things on Facebook. But it’s all a sideshow to Facebook. You are not their customer. You — more specifically, your attention — are the product they sell to advertisers.

That has consequences.

Social media companies will always put their needs to sell advertising (the main event) over your needs (the sideshow). [With the possible exception of when pursuing revenue is illegal or so horrible that it leads to significant social pressure. Even then…]

Similarly, this dynamic has consequences for the entire corporate world.

Corporations will always put their need to attract investors (the main event) over the needs of customers, employees, communities, and the planet (the sideshow).

Social media is, in many ways, ruining human interaction. Anytime you add another entity to the mix with their own agenda that has nothing to do with the needs of the people involved, you’re distorting the interaction — almost never for the better.

Imagine you were hanging out with some friends having a friendly chat. But, there was an additional person in the group that nobody knew and whose sole objective was to sell you things. Is it not obvious that your interaction would be much less enjoyable than without that person?

Similarly, this dynamic has ruined work. It distorts the incentives that exist between the people that make products and services and the people who want them.

• It makes companies focus on the short-term instead of doing what is right for their long-term survival.
• It hampers innovation.
• It ruins the employee experience (and often callously destroys people financially).
• It ruins the customer experience (for one bit of evidence, try calling customer service — for nearly any product from nearly any company).
• It often ruins communities (sometimes just by being there and sometimes when, for investor reasons, companies pull out of towns or regions).
• It often ruins the planet.
• It pushes a culture of consumerism, thereby degrading humanity.

Let me be clear: I am a capitalist. Full stop.

But that doesn’t mean the way we “do” capitalism is right. It seems to me that we’re letting the tail wag the dog.

Business should be about making people’s lives better by delivering products and services that they want or need. And, as a human institution, it must adhere to the norms and expectations we place on any human institution — not just following the law, but ideally making humanity better or, at least, not making us worse off.

Yes, business needs investment. But that should be the sideshow; the main event should be the thing that’s worth doing that requires investment!

Insofar as the corporate world is concerned, we have spent a lot of time and money making everything bass-ackwards!

Businesses need all sorts of things. They need water and electricity, internet service, licenses…but those are all sideshows. Other than certain companies like, say, breweries, businesses don’t design all of their activity around making sure they have water.

They understand the difference between means and ends.

Except where it comes to investors. There, we deliberately lose sight of which is the end and which is the means. It’s genuinely stupid and truly bizarre.

We really need to get our heads out of our asses and restore the purpose of work — creating goods and services that make people’s lives better in some way. And that reevaluation must put investors in their rightful place — as important means, in service of more important ends. Not the other way around.