Profit taking is lazy
Once an organization reaches scale, particularly if it feels like a monopoly, it’s tempting to “take profits.”
This means less investment, fewer staff and a lot less care. Those things are expensive. Easier to simply keep the money.
And those things involve emotional effort. Easier to simply point to the bottom line, as if that’s the point.
Lazy managers dump the emotional labor on overworked frontline staff instead of creating systems that create value for everyone.
And lazy shareholders reward quarterly earnings instead of understanding the long-term ramifications of failing to serve customers.
“We don’t care, we don’t have to,” is often the last slogan once-great institutions have emblazoned on their door.