Working for a Fortune 500 and hearing executives talk is surreal. They straight up say things like “if you’re not growing, you’re failing”. No thought at all as to how that’s supposed to work in the long run. The post-pandemic surge in profits doesn’t help; companies that usually don’t get 15-20% profit margins suddenly saw that, and the expectation of shareholders is that they can keep doing that forever. That’s insane.
Conversely, I’m also active in my local makerspace. We’ve grown massively in less than 10 years, and deliberately stopped taking new members for a few months because our volunteers were getting burned out. When we reopened, we kept the new member signups intentionally limited so certain areas (woodshop, mainly) would be able to absorb turnover without driving the trainers too hard. We still have net growth, but way slower than we were before. We’re far from failing, and the MBAs running Fortune 500s can go fuck themselves.
Working for a Fortune 500 and hearing executives talk is surreal. They straight up say things like “if you’re not growing, you’re failing”. No thought at all as to how that’s supposed to work in the long run. The post-pandemic surge in profits doesn’t help; companies that usually don’t get 15-20% profit margins suddenly saw that, and the expectation of shareholders is that they can keep doing that forever. That’s insane.
Conversely, I’m also active in my local makerspace. We’ve grown massively in less than 10 years, and deliberately stopped taking new members for a few months because our volunteers were getting burned out. When we reopened, we kept the new member signups intentionally limited so certain areas (woodshop, mainly) would be able to absorb turnover without driving the trainers too hard. We still have net growth, but way slower than we were before. We’re far from failing, and the MBAs running Fortune 500s can go fuck themselves.