@kibasnowpaw :-
What's today's business "motto"? Something along the lines of "Expand or die", I believe?
Pretty much sums it up, IMHO. As companies grow bigger & bigger, they have more and more internal problems just keeping all their departments and subsidiaries singing from the same hymn-sheet, as it were. A corollary of that is that they slowly become more and more disconnected from their roots.....and eventually, the 'little people' who supported them & believed in them in the beginning kinda get forgotten about.
It's sad, but true. It's just the way modern business is....and the worst part of the whole shebang, to my mind, is the way many big organizations now seem to be run primarily FOR the benefit of their shareholders. 'Shareholder value', apparently, now takes precedence over everything else...
Says it all, doesn't it?
(
shrug...)
Mike.
I largely agree with what you’re saying, but I think the root cause is a bit more structural than moral.
Once a company reaches a certain size, it can no longer operate as a collection of people who all talk to each other directly. There has to be a hierarchy, and there has to be a “head.” That alone isn’t the problem the problem is that every additional layer introduces distance. If five people work together, communication is constant and problems surface quickly. If those five each manage five more, and those five manage five more again, you now have multiple layers where information can stall, soften, or disappear entirely.
On paper, delegation solves this. In reality, human behavior works against it. Some people are conflict-avoidant and don’t speak up. Some are ambitious and protect their image. Some are power-hungry, narcissistic, or simply dishonest on their way into leadership roles. Over time, reporting problems becomes risky, because managers are rarely incentivized to pass along anything that makes their department look bad. So issues stop at the first “safe” level and leadership ends up disconnected not by intent, but by system design.
That’s where I think the real failure happens. It’s not just that companies forget their roots; it’s that the structure actively filters out uncomfortable truths as the organization grows. The longer the chain, the worse that effect becomes.
One practical way to reduce this not eliminate it, but reduce it is independent reporting paths. People trained specifically to handle issues, with anonymity, and no ties to departmental leadership. Their sole job would be to ensure information moves upward unfiltered. That won’t fix everything, but it changes incentives enough that problems are less likely to die quietly at one layer.
The shareholder issue you mention amplifies all of this. As companies grow, so do investment stakes. At a certain point, decision-making shifts away from people who understand the product or community and toward those who control capital. Once that happens, the company isn’t really run by expertise anymore, but by financial pressure. If leadership ignores investors, the money leaves and that threat becomes a form of leverage. In practice, it can feel a lot like soft blackmail.
So I don’t think you’re wrong at all. I just see it less as “modern businesses losing their soul” and more as large systems behaving exactly as they’re structured to behave with scale, incentives, and power concentrating in ways that quietly work against transparency and accountability.
