the obstacle are concerns and issues that are ignored, selectively or electively, for the sake of financial mechanisms, extraordinary agreements, to keep the balance sheets clean or late Soviet style management aka "don't let the leader know", or the shareholders.

at that point, you can't flatter no more and it's hard or impossible to remain constructive.

luckily that's a problem for less than 5 % of any workforce and thus, statistically irrelevant.

real issues and concerns thus turn into a 95 out of 100 kind of problem. and this has been going on for so long that the entire chains of command and hierarchies are easily corrupted.

in the Netflix adaptation of Cyberpunk 2077, the hierarchies in corporations only exist for the sake of flattery, so that there is someone below, without any real function except maybe to store some secrets in their brain and or make them accomplices that can take the fall whenever necessary.

I hope we'll never get there but our chains of command have been made for, by and of flatterers.

it's otherwise hard to impossible to imagine how all these small wars are going on or how media decides to portrait them, and how things like the right to repair, tiktock, cookies, web surveillance and fingerprinting for the sake of marketing could have happened.

In my experience, control will outweigh other important factors (like profit) - providing those other factors aren't applying immediate pressure.

In corporations: We see this when copyright maximalists want more copyright control, even when it chokes off likely avenues of profit (eg: shutting down fan-created efforts).

On a much larger scale, there is a force that ruins everything eventually.

    No one anywhere wants to clean their own house.

From what I see, it is enabled by (and thrives under) the compulsion for control. eg: Beneficial labor unions of the 1930s were corrupt by the 1950s because union members preferred the safety of power over the uncertainty of excising corruption.

Closer to home: Hiring portals auto-trash classes of viable applicants. eg: 1st time job seekers, breaks in job history, irrelevant+minimal criminal records, unwanted zip codes, etc.

cont: I have learned that many chronic complainers are also natural-born troubleshooters. It's practically hidden knowledge because they are universally dismissed w/o consideration.

Taking a risk is trading control for the unknown. Our desire for control is so strong, we'll skew the equation by downplaying the gains.

Article says that leaders react negatively to people who challenge the status quo because they are perceived as threats. Article says the exception to this is when the challengers also demonstrate a high level of trying to make things better.

This seems like pretty human behavior. Business leaders and managers will naturally tend to align their egos with the business status quo (in some form).