@Captain Ron
I appreciate your post and what it immediately brought to my mind were all the various companies I worked for throughout my career.
I've always expressed that I'm a client advocate. I genuinely care about the people I've worked with at at various companies.
To greatly varying degrees, some horrifyingly bad, some just stupidly bad, all of them failed to make the clients, you know the ones who ultimately pay the bills, the first priority. To be clear, I'm not a customer is always right sort of person, I'm not and they aren't. Moreover, there are bad clients you should fire. That said, always making profitability the first priority has a horrible effect on the client experience. Yet, from Fortune 100 to VC Funded SMBs, the stake holders are never the clients, and instead it's the investors or shareholders. Idiotic decisions are made to move the stock in the right direction, even worse ones are made to appease VC shit heads. VC cares about Ebita and 90 day profitability, crossed with 30 day growth and they hire "winners" rather than leaders to do drive that goal. Client advocates with long term clients relationships for on going sustainable business is actually a negative to VC management.
I don't want to derail the thread completely but winning at the cost of anything is the problem in a broad spectrum globally right now.
Facebook, among other corporations and silicone Valley drove the exponential growth of this aspect. Sure, it absolutely existed before but the tech craze insanely sharpened the knife that is among the largest issues in the world today. Without going full economics nerd, technology, the king driver of this behavior has been among this largest contributions to the economic divide between haves and have nots. This all said by a life long tech guy.. (edit - and a Yay! I LOVE capitalism guy, for the record. No not sarcasm. Which I believe, should make my condemnations seem that much worse.)