Language is the house of being. In its home human beings dwell. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home.
| Martin Heidegger, Letter on Humanism (1946)
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Welcome to my home. Thanks to everyone who follows, reads, and subscribes to this project, now years in the making.
A Business Is Not a Family
Meaning, loyalty is dead.
Emily Grede, the cofounder of the Skims fashion business, is the latest advocate of cut-throat, heap-up-the-dead business practices, but she blurs the image by interspersing ‘empathy’ between pronouncements about ‘business needs’.
Amanda Goh did the work of listening to a podcast interviewing Grede, and writes1:
As founder and CEO, she said her first responsibility is to make decisions that serve the business, even when that means acknowledging that some employees may no longer be the right fit as it grows.
“As the leader, you have to make difficult decisions,” she said. “It is not my job to be your friend. It is not my job to treat everybody as though this were a family. But that doesn’t mean that you miss empathy or that you treat people badly.”
This translates into feeling little or nothing about firing people, it seems.
As the cofounder of several consumer brands, including denimwear brand Good American and sports fashion brand Off Season, Grede said she works in an environment where “radical honesty” is required.
That means employees are rarely caught off guard by feedback about their performance, Grede said — and because those conversations happen regularly, “nobody’s surprised.”
“It is not the job of me or any other woman in a position of leadership to have to kind of cottonball everybody along the way,” she said.
“We run a business just like anybody else, and that is with an enterprise mentality to do the best things that are right for the company,” Grede added.
And the implicit contrast is that company leaders shouldn’t have to operate their organizations to seek to do what is best for the employees. Or really to consider their employees at all.
Beyond her approach to leadership, Grede has also been candid about the demanding work ethic and level of commitment she believes are necessary to build a successful career and business.
In May 2025, Grede said she sees it as a red flag when job candidates talk about work-life balance. “Work-life balance is your problem. It isn’t your employer’s responsibility,” she said.
Anyone who wants to set meaningful work boundaries is, presumably, simply not hired. And if they start talking about it, there’s the door.
I wonder if Colin Newlyn was motivated to write Success Is What You Make It after hearing the newest CEO explaining that loyalty is dead:
Why are employers not delivering what their employees want them to but actively moving in the opposite direction?
“Well”, they might say, “we are not charities, we are not run for the benefit of our employees. We are here to make a profit and deliver a return for our shareholders, and we are in a competitive world.”
In fact, this is exactly what they say.
However, they never explain why the two things are incompatible.
Some companies manage to marry the two. I would argue that they are, in fact, entirely compatible. What’s more, organisations that give their employees what they aspire to are more stable, adaptable, resilient and, shock horror, profitable, than their competitors. More suited to thrive in the world we find ourselves in.
But that doesn’t fit the neoliberal dogma, does it? Or allow the massive accumulation of wealth and power by the few.
(By the way, you might want to subscribe to Colin’s newsletter.)
Factoids
The Meaning of Work in the AI Age
Imagining the Digital Future Center has released a report — The Meaning of Work in the AI Age — and the top-line results are bracing:
Work is a foundation of personal life. Among workers, 81% say paid work is extremely or very important to their role in their family, 70% to their sense of meaning and purpose and 64% to their personal identity. And (58%) call it extremely important to their sense of responsibility to their community.
AI experience does not erase anxiety. Among adults who had used a large language model (LLM) like ChatGPT or Gemini in the previous week, 80% expect net job loss, 65% foresee inadequate pay and 61% say less meaningful work would erode purpose and dignity.
Confidence in learning exceeds confidence in control. Half of workers (50%) say they are extremely or very confident they can adapt skills for their current job; 40% are similarly confident they will control their career path. Yet, overall, these workers predict that most workers will have little control over their futures.
Hope for a new social contract around work: Americans combine expectations of self-reliance with a desire for shared gains. Fully 60% of all U.S. adults agree that workers must adapt themselves rather than expect outside help and 59% agree that wealth generated by AI should be widely shared.
The support system inspires little confidence. Only 11% of workers are highly confident government agencies will be helpful if AI significantly affects their jobs; 58% have little or no confidence. Every local institution tested is rated as being more unprepared than prepared for job market change.
Lee Rainie, an old friend and the director of the Center, writes [emphasis mine]:
“Americans’ concern is that – as AI inevitably spreads in years to come – the changes that lie ahead may not preserve enough work or other life roles that provide economic security, social value, self-identity, dignity and personal meaning and genuine human agency,” said Lee Rainie, director of the Imagining the Digital Future Center. “These findings pose an enormous policy challenge. People see trouble ahead and seek a transition in an AI economy that makes human satisfaction, agency and purpose feel consequential. The immediate challenge for employers, institutions and others who serve the public is to develop and support an AI Age infrastructure to support human resilience – the vital factor enabling people to flourish.”
I won’t hold my breath.
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Hamilton Nolan on What To Do With Billionaires
Hamilton Nolan spells it out:
The most important political task in America is clawing back the vast fortunes (and the vast power they create) of the ultra-rich.
Just one excerpt from his recent post, The War Against Accumulated Capital, where he stops short of calling for jailing billionaires [emphasis mine]:
The level of billionaire wealth should be seen straightforwardly as a problem to be attacked. It is dangerous. It upsets, to a fatal degree, the balance of power that is necessary for any democratic society to exist. At a time when the 15 richest Americans are worth a combined $3.6 trillion—twice the gross domestic product of Australia, equivalent to the GDP of the entire Arab world—we are already in emergency territory. These people may be very nice but they have too much money. We need to take a lot of it away from them, soon, or no more democracy. It’s pretty simple.
In the long term, it is possible to strengthen the power of organized labor to allow working people to capture a bigger share of national income and thereby tilt the playing field back towards sanity. That will take decades, if indeed we ever accomplish it. We can’t afford to wait that long. (More to the point, billionaires will continue to use their own power to ensure that we never get far down that path anyhow.) In the near term, taxes and regulations are a faster and more direct way to rein in extreme fortunes. “Take away money from billionaires” is a necessary and appropriate policy goal and there is no need to couch it in fuzzy platitudes about fairness and free enterprise. It is just plain fatally destabilizing to American democracy for so few people to have so much money. Though I do not support the mass imprisonment of billionaires due to my belief in universal human rights, there is no doubt that imprisoning our nation’s billionaires and confiscating and redistributing their wealth would be a net positive for humanity by utilitarian standards.
Nolan believes there is no more important vote than the one-time 5% wealth tax on the ballot in California, called Prop 40. He acknowledges it may not pass, and he castigate the unions that have opted to not support it.
As he says,
Either we take a lot of money away from the rich or we all learn to love life under digital feudalism. Those are the stakes. Time to stop fucking around.
