The company you keep - Profit is a reflection of customer and employee satisfaction

http://www.constructionweekonline.com/article-18866-the-company-you-keep/

It was amusing to witness the recent fiasco involving Apple whereby screen shots from the new iPhone maps application were missing some major cities, or misplaced them entirely. Apple has always been known for its quality control down to the tiniest detail. This makes it all the more surprising as to how it was possible a mishap on this scale could strike this company.

It tends to be the same story whenever painfully obvious or embarrassing mistakes are uncovered in the larger type of corporations. Those in senior positions that presumably have the job to know what is going on were staggeringly unaware or cannot remember anything.

I believe that incentives are the main culprit that almost always explains such inane missteps. More precisely, the seed of most systemic failure is when the self-interest of individuals is misaligned with that of the organisation as a whole.

When organisations grow too large, individuals can easily become exceedingly concerned about hitting narrowly defined KPIs that prioritise cost-savings at the expense of the overall quality of the product or service. Outperforming fellow managers of other divisions becomes more important than wanting to see the company outperform its competitors on the market.
In such work environments, no one becomes willing to take on responsibility for a problem or dedicate the needed resources from their budgets in order to have it resolved. Sometimes, even associating yourself with a specific problem by pointing it out and making suggestions can potentially cost you your job.

Making a career today is in no small part about having the skill to disassociate oneself from any direct contribution to the creative process so as to be able to skirt accountability, if any is needed, following any shortcomings making their appearance.
I experienced an extreme example of this mindset a few weeks back when I called a company that had apparently institutionalised this approach in its business model. That is, creating a seeming divide between individual employees as for to their responsibility and authority, and the accountability of the company.

Being unable to redeem an internet voucher for a meal at a restaurant as it had been shut down, I was informed that a refund was impossible as the computer system did not permit one to be issued.
After two days of threatening to come to their offices in person and taking all kinds of action against both the company and its employees individually over its fraudulent business practices, they reluctantly credited me with the amount in question. I feel that we have a collective responsibility to not allow corporations to be faceless or unaccountable, or to make themselves unreachable when it comes to immoral business practices like having armies of abused workers in factories and call centres under the guise of outsourcing to convenient offshore locations.

To any student of European history it is an early warning when individuals justify illegal or immoral actions with the argument of “I am just following orders”. The same goes when you hear that companies exist for the purpose of creating profits for their shareholders. Companies are rewarded with profits for offering value to their customers and employees. It is not designed to be the opposite way around, with companies rewarded for exploiting clients and employees!

Business by means of deception, as in misrepresenting quality and delivery, is not how capitalism works to create wealth and better societies. When capitalism functions as it is supposed to, it is a safety valve that ensures that only the companies that deliver an acceptable value proposition to both customers and employees will survive. The rest get cleaned out.

This is what we are seeing yet again around the world as companies will ultimately have precisely the employees and, with it, the share price that they deserve.