It's the inevitable result of prioritizing profit rather than prioritizing the creation of quality products that the people working at a company can be proud of.
That's why you see companies fall apart when the founders leave. They're replaced by people who prioritize profit for the company and wealth for themselves rather than product quality so the company ends up rudderless.
Which ironically fucks over profit anyways, just about every time. I think it's more of a personal greed thing combined with incompetence, on top of perverse incentives that come with being a publicly traded company.
The quarterly profit model all but ensures a societal-scale myopia in the end.
One of my former employers was like this - the founder was a brilliant engineer, who installed good financial controls, and was himself decent at the business end.
But, he was a micromanger, and he never sought to create replacements for himself inside the company, he tended to penalize people who stepped out of line too. So once he was out of the picture (he sold out), we didnt really have the right person to run the company, or the right culture to just install a generic manager with industry expertise, it instead was a company that had been formed for the founders personal needs.
That company was purchased by a multinational, and is now being systemically dismantled.
Intel felt quite a bit like IBM during my time there circa 2010.
I wasn't familiar with this quote, but wow was that my experience at large tech orgs. I wish I would have known this about 15 years ago, as perhaps I would have done a better job picking orgs to work at early in my career instead of being so frustrated.
I don’t know how an organization avoids this fate, but it does seem to eventually come for all enterprises.
IBM, Bell Labs, GE; who else should be on that list?