Why companies that trade ethics for efficiency always end up paying more.
Hey builders of empires—
Profit and value are often used as if they were twins. But they aren’t. Profit is what you count. Value is what counts. One fills a spreadsheet; the other fills the meaning of the work. The first can make you rich.
The second can make you last.
My father ran a company that built swimming pools and water treatment systems. For twenty years, he worked with a major client: the U.S. Army in Naples.
His job was to keep the Olympic pools running year-round. It was a complex, high-responsibility operation—so much so that on Christmas Eve, while others were home, he was at the pool, fixing systems so generals could spend the holiday in warm water.
For two decades, he was indispensable.
A man of enormous value. And then, one day, without warning, the contract wasn’t renewed. The reason? Budget cuts. They gave him a glass plaque with his name engraved on it and a round of applause. Then they hired a cheaper company.
That was the day my father learned that being valuable doesn’t always mean being profitable—at least not in someone else’s ledger. And that was also the day I understood that lesson through him.
The client eventually realized what they had lost, but by then, it was too late. You can’t replace trust once it’s broken. And you can’t rebuild value from the ruins of convenience.
What breaks inside a company
Years later, I kept asking myself: what really represents value? And why is it so easily traded for a few saved dollars? Is it a lack of ethics? Maybe. A lack of long-term vision? Probably. But there’s more.
- The dictatorship of KPIs – Managers hide behind numbers to avoid moral decisions.
- The culture of replaceability – The illusion that everyone and everything can be substituted cheaply.
- Short-term myopia – Quarterly thinking kills generational strategy.
- Institutional amnesia – New leadership forgets what was built before them.
- The distance between decision and reality – Those who decide aren’t those who know.
This is how companies commit the most banal form of self-sabotage:
they optimize themselves to death.
There’s something painfully ordinary about this type of error. It’s so common it barely feels like a mistake anymore.
Like Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil, this is the banality of cost-cutting. No one feels responsible, but everyone contributes. The CFO signs the new deal, the CEO approves it, the HR director nods, and someone who carried the company for twenty years walks out the door with a plaque that costs less than lunch.
Some companies refused to treat value as a side effect. They saw it as the engine itself.
Take Nucor, for instance. While other steelmakers relied on hierarchy and control, Nucor bet everything on trust. Every worker was a decision-maker, every plant a living organism. When the industry collapsed, Nucor didn’t just survive—it expanded. Because when people feel ownership, they don’t wait for orders; they create momentum.
Then there’s LEGO. In 2003, it was drowning in debt and creative exhaustion. Consultants advised more licensing deals, more profit per unit. Instead, LEGO did something almost naive—it went back to play. To the magic of small hands and big imaginations. The brand stopped chasing efficiency and started protecting meaning. The turnaround wasn’t a financial miracle—it was an act of remembering what mattered.
And Costco—a quiet rebellion in a world addicted to margins. The company pays more, charges less, and still wins. Because trust scales better than greed. Every decision echoes the same logic: when you treat people well, they treat your business like it’s theirs.
These are not stories of altruism. They’re stories of intelligent selfishness—the kind that understands that value, once cultivated, multiplies silently over time.
Efficiency gives you speed. Value gives you endurance.
How people feel today
The numbers are staggering, but the stories behind them are even louder.
In Gallup’s 2024 survey, over 70% of employees said they feel like replaceable costs rather than contributors. Deloitte’s research shows that organizations with a sense of purpose don’t just retain people longer—they keep their spirit intact, with 40% lower turnover and 23% higher profitability. McKinsey’s 2023 study found that companies with high trust indexes outperform peers by up to 400% in market value over a decade.
But statistics don’t capture the real fracture—the quiet resignation of those who feel unseen, the creativity that dies in silence, the invisible tax of disengagement. People don’t leave jobs; they leave places that stopped recognizing their worth. And when a culture stops seeing its people as value, the decay doesn’t start in the numbers—it starts in the heart.
When people feel they are the value—not just producing it—profit becomes a byproduct of pride. When they don’t, no incentive is rich enough to buy back meaning.
What Value Leaves Behind
The market always beats performance, eventually. Every record falls, every margin shrinks, every advantage erodes. But value—real value—doesn’t decay. It compounds.
The companies that mistake cost for value lose both. The ones that understand the difference build something indestructible.
Profit tells you how much you won. Value tells you whether it was worth it.
Until next time, stay valuable.
Alex
