Ever read
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Mazes ? I think I may have originally heard of it on HN. I'm curious if it relates to your experiences.
If you owned most or all of the company, maybe you would make more of an effort to prevent bad stuff, like dumping toxic waste in rivers.
On the other hand, if you owned the whole company, you could maybe make a lot of money by creating externalities like dumping toxic waste in rivers.
I always thought from observing others (since a year or two into my first corporate job) that the job of managers, up to and including the CEO, is to manage conflicts of interest. Fashionably, "stakeholders".
All of the things people say about managing sound to me like misdirection from the actual meat and potatoes.
As a non-manager, I've tried to train myself to never take it personally if a manager does something inhumane out of (apparently) loyalty to an organization. Maybe they feel it, or maybe they feel like they are trapped into it to keep their job.
If I want something, I appeal in some manner to the underlying human feelings that I assume everyone has. Blaming people (even implicitly) for failing to be loyal to whatever they ought to be only creates bad feelings.
But, people, managers and non-managers, who are good at manipulating situations by such techniques as appealing to friendship or human decency, can end up subverting a whole organization. The integrity of an organization paradoxically depends on people who follow rules for their own sake even when they lead to wrong outcomes, for a greater good. I'm thinking of the legal system and government as much as corporations.
“William Roper: “So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!”
Sir Thomas More: “Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to
get after the Devil?”
William Roper: “Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!”
Sir Thomas More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned
'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This
country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not
God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you
really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes,
I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!”
I have no solution to the conflicts of interest I see everywhere, which is why I've never put real effort into becoming a manager even at the lowest level.