Dear Friends,
It seems to me, there is an old saying that is prescient today, “don’t “excrete” where you eat.” Today’s corporations could learn a thing or two from that wise old saying. You have to wonder what they are teaching in business colleges today. Firms are run like they don’t even want to survive. Alienating customers at every turn and daring us to go somewhere else. Today corporations have three enemies, or you would imagine so given the way corporate executives run them, those enemies are… the customers, the employees and the shareholders. Executives seem to believe that if only they could get rid of those three groups of people their companies could be run like tops. Of the three, damaging the interests of the customer is by far the most egregious, because it is the customer that sustains the firm. After that, wounding the shareholders interests, creating a principle agent dilemma, and finally, ignoring the interests of the employees. Corporate executives today, judging by the public and private actions of the firms they control, are far more loyal to the new class, than even their own place of business.
Don’t “defecate” where you eat is a metaphor, it takes the analogy of excreting in a food preparation area, which everyone instinctively knows (or should know) is a path to severe disease… to illustrate why a person or company should not damage in any way something they rely on. It is mere common sense but sadly, in the new class’ world, common sense is a very rare thing. Evolving from a way of warning people away from having romantic relationships in the office, to a warning to take great care of that which you need. For an employee it is their place of work and for a business it is their customers. Food analogies are appropriate in the world of business, the customers, to put it another way, are the side of the bread the butter is on, and no one wants that side to hit the ground, for a number of reasons too obvious to go into.
Twitter, Target and the NFL, are all using their dishes as bedpans, while emptying them in their kitchen sink. With the revelations that Twitter hides tweets of conservatives while not censoring those of progressives, socialists and Marxists shows how deeply executives at Twitter hold their customers in disgust. How poorly those executives must think of the people that pay their salaries. The NFL will not allow a player to dance in the N zone but spitting in the eye of their most ardent fans is perfectly acceptable. No wonder attendance and viewership is way down. In any organization 10% of the people do 50% of the work, and in an imploding organization those good people will leave first, because they have options, and the bottom 90% must pick up the drastically increased workload. Which always leads to failure. Once the process begins, it becomes exponentially more difficult to stop as time goes on.
What I find the most laughable, is the typical reaction of corporate executives once they have so polluted the well from which they drink, is to raise the price and lower the quality. Blockbuster was the perfect example of this in action. When streaming video started cutting into their bottom line, a product of greater convenience and lower cost, Blockbuster raised their prices, exacerbating the cost differential, and lowered the convenience of their product, (they started imposing late fees, a violation of their original business model). The results spoke for themselves, Blockbuster is no longer a corporation, the customers are denied an option, the employees are out of jobs and the shareholders have lost their savings, but you can bet the executives landed well, lofted by golden parachutes.
These executives are cut from the very cloth, the new class, that is the source of our bureaucrats, journalists, lawyers, judges, politicians, doctors, scientists, etc… you know, the people smarter than the rest of us, and who believe themselves so smart they should run our lives through the bureaucracy. They destroy our corporations, and thereby the savings of people who have invested in them, alienating customers by imposing political correctness, poking their grubby fingers in the eyes of their patrons, by taking a knee, even outright stealing directly out of customers accounts, ala Wells Fargo… and have got away with it every time, with no one making the decisions suffering any negative consequences. Consequences are for the customers, shareholders… and employees. But I wonder, if new class executives are so smart, why do they continue to defecate where they eat?
Sincerely,
John Pepin
