Over the past year, needing help with various aspects of home maintenance (electrical, plumbing, gardening), i've noticed a trend that feels quite real. It’s one of those shifts you don’t fully grasp until you’re right in the middle of it, trying to solve what should be a simple problem. But the solution is no longer simple.

Lately, I’ve noticed a surge in newsletters hitting my inbox. The funny part? I never signed up for most of them. Oddly enough, they all seem to come from the same platform, Beehiiv. Now, I’m not saying it’s Beehiiv’s fault. It’s just the delivery mechanism. But what’s starting to bother me is how I ended up on these lists in the first place.

In a tech marketplace where the barriers to entry have never been lower in the history of capitalism, a marketplace where innovation often outpaces regulation, some (probably way more than we’d like to admit) companies resort to practices that prioritize profit over transparency. That prioritize profit over respect for customers. That prioritize profit over ethics.

In many online articles, debates, and thought pieces, we see a sophisticated manipulation aimed at supporting unquenchable greed. The orchestrated backlash against remote work is less about genuine concerns and more about maximizing profits. It’s a stark reminder of the lengths to which companies will go to protect their financial interests, often at the expense of their employees' well-being.

It’s important to recognize that these decisions, often masked as "business decisions," are made by people. When we say it’s a "business decision," we give individuals an excuse to not have to personally own their actions. With this specific client example, it's the people there, some of whom are good people, but they fall victim to bad culture that stems from poor leadership at the very top of the company.

Let’s say a given task may take a beginner 6 hours to complete, a 10-year expert may be able to complete that same task in 1 hour at an even higher level of quality.

Which one is more valuable?

While partnerships between vendors and agencies are often talked about as being beneficial collaborations designed to create better client experiences, the reality is that many of these partnerships are toxic, driven by hidden financial motives that ultimately prove detrimental to the clients they are supposed to be serving.

As we exited the grips of the COVID-19 pandemic, many brands were more than ready to return to pre-pandemic levels of in-store purchases. However, this desire for “the way things used to be” potentially overlooks a critical reality — and that is that the pandemic served as a sort of accelerator of a trend that existed before we ever heard of this COVID-19 thing.

The health of a business's culture and the well-being of its employees depend on the values and actions of its leaders and team members. A company that creates a toxic culture or makes decisions that harm its employees, is doing so because the individuals in power allow it to happen.