Before investing to employees I think it should revisit management practices and strategies, which starts in MBA and university.
Instead of teaching how to increase shareholder value in the short term, it should also teach how to increase value to the society in the long term as well (and focus on it highly) - not just say: if you win society wins kind of generic fluff.
Without changing management strategies everything becomes short term after a while
Problem is this is quite often a requirement for a public company, to maximize company value/profits above all else.
Also execs who are more right-wing are typically not interested in helping the larger society in general.
And there are very few large public companies with active enough investors to oust a CEO over this, and even fewer that have both active and activist investors that would be interested in such a thing.
> the CEO can't take actions that intentionally hurt the company
And who gets to define what "hurt" means?
You'd have to prove that the CEO knew that it would hurt the company and still did it or that it's so ridiculously negligent that any sane person should have known.
If you were to explain the costs of knowledge lost, of training, of taking a risk on a new unknown person, of relationships, there's no answer because it doesn't show up in any operating expense worksheet.
What you're supposed to do is find another job, and explain that you love this job so much, but the other offer is really good, can they come up close to it and you'll stay. Repeat this every few years or find a new job and move to it.
With a myopic definition of "optimize". But as long as they are being rewarded for it, the incentives are broken.
Absolutely agree with this. Most MBAs are taught to optimize and reduce the slack.
It works fine with machinery and materials, but not with humans.
When machinery is optimized and run thin, when one of them breaks, you can get exact same in couple days (you usually prepare for it earlier), but with humans, they train their brain and next person is different from the first person.
Humans also break in different ways:
* They stop caring - you wouldn't notice it immediately, they will close tickets, but give bare minimum thought
* Communal brain will not be trained when there is not enough room for experiments and learning - which reduces the innovation eventually
This is exactly the reason it is difficult for US companies to compete with Chinese companies in manufacturing, because their communal brain have already trained and produced very good talent.
Next is the knowledge, more you outsource, more you lose it