Whose interests are you serving? The business decisions that shaped our crisis

This article is the second part of a three-piece series. Here is part 1.

I was in my early 40s when one of our salespeople came back from a Ford supplier convention.

He was thrilled. Genuinely excited. He'd gotten the new marching orders directly from their procurement team, and he couldn't wait to share them with us.

We needed to set up manufacturing operations in third-world countries, he explained. Labour was cheap. Insurance requirements were nearly zero. Environmental regulations were minimal or unenforced. Everyone would make lots of profit — Ford, us, the whole supply chain.

He laid out the presentation materials Ford had provided. Charts showing cost savings. Projections of margin improvements. Case studies from suppliers who'd already made the move. It was all very professional. Very compelling. Very normal.

I sat there, listening to his enthusiasm, and something inside me broke.

Not because the strategy was unusual. It wasn't. Not because Ford was uniquely evil. They weren't. What hit me was the cheerfulness. The complete absence of any consideration for what this meant for the people whose labour we'd be exploiting. The blatant disregard for humans. The arrogance of assuming we could just set up operations anywhere, extract what we needed, and move on.

And more than that. The logistics. The infrastructure. The investment required. All to avoid paying fair wages and meeting basic safety standards in our own country.

We were expected to act on these orders if we wanted to remain Ford's preferred supplier. That was clear.

We got lucky. We couldn't make a business case for it. The capital requirements were too high, and the operational complexity too great for our company's structure. And we were doubly lucky: we were the only game in town for our country. But that moment has stayed with me for decades. Because it crystallized something I'd been seeing but hadn't wanted to name. The business decisions that optimized profit also optimized harm. And everyone knew it. And it was presented as a smart strategy.

The decisions that never make the annual report

In Part 1, I showed you the consumer-facing lies. The campaigns that convinced us bacon and eggs were traditional, litter was our fault, and milk built strong bones. Those were sophisticated deceptions, yes. But they were just the marketing layer.

The deeper machinery operates in the business decisions that never get advertised. The trade-offs that get made in conference rooms. The costs that get externalized. The harm that is systematically hidden in operations.

Here's what those decisions actually looked like from inside the machine.

Supply chain decisions: the race to the bottom

When 'global sourcing' meant abandoning communities

That Ford supplier convention wasn't an isolated incident. It was the standard playbook. Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, every industry was getting the same message: go global, cut costs, maximize margins.

The pitch was always framed as a competitive necessity. "If we don't do this, someone else will." "Our shareholders demand it." "This is just how global business works now."

Here’s what they didn't say in the presentations. We're systematically seeking out places with the weakest labour protections, the lowest environmental standards, and the least worker power. We're not just finding cheaper labour. We're specifically targeting regulatory arbitrage. We're betting that workers in these countries are desperate enough to accept conditions we couldn't legally impose at home.

And when accidents happened — factory collapses, chemical spills, worker deaths — we'd express concern, maybe make a small settlement, and keep the supply chain running exactly as before. The costs of those tragedies? Externalized onto the communities. The profits? Internalized to shareholders.

The 'refurbished' container scam

I sat in another operational meeting years later, this one about freight containers and logistics equipment.

The recommendation was clear: it was preferable to purchase a product from China and sell it as "refurbished" than to buy a new one from local manufacturers. China was always cheaper. Even with shipping. 

Someone raised the environmental impact. The response was immediate: "That's not in our cost structure. That's not our problem to solve."

And that phrase — "not in our cost structure" — I heard it constantly. Pollution? Not in our cost structure. Worker safety? Not in our cost structure. Community impact when we closed plants? Not in our cost structure.

What they really meant was that we've successfully shifted those costs to someone else. The public. The environment. The workers. Future generations. Anyone but us. That's not efficient business. That's systematic theft.

Product decisions: when marketing is the product

The brewery lesson, revisited

Remember my brewery audit from Part 1? That early realization that the beers were all essentially the same, differentiated only by advertising?

That pattern repeated across industries. Throughout my career, I kept finding it. Not just in beverages. In cleaning products. In automotive supplies. In refurbished and recycled metal. In specialty gourmet products, in countless categories where actual product differences were minimal, but marketing differentiation was massive.

The business model was simple: spend minimally on product development, maximally on marketing. Create the perception of value rather than actual value. And whatever you do, never talk about what happens after the product is used.

The things we never mentioned

Take cleaning products. In multiple companies I worked with, the formulations were pretty much the same across brands. Maybe slight variations in fragrance. Maybe different dye colours. But the active ingredients? Largely identical.

The marketing spin sold the product. The differentiation was almost entirely perception.

But here's what we never, ever talked about in those marketing meetings. Where did all those chemicals go after use? Down the drain. Into the sewers. Into waterways. The environmental cost of those products — the cumulative impact of hundreds of thousands of institutions using them daily — never came up in product development discussions.

Someone once raised it. I remember the response: "If it's not regulated, it's not our concern. Our job is to make products at prices they'll pay within the existing laws. Nothing else matters.”

Translation: we know we're dumping chemicals into waterways. We know there's probably cumulative harm. But until someone compels us to care through regulation, we will continue to do precisely what maximizes our profits. The harm? Not in our cost structure.

Financial engineering: where the real lies live

The soil remediation shell game

I participated in approximately 70 acquisitions over my career. In every single one, we asked two questions first: What are the profit numbers? What are the environmental liabilities?

In that order. Always.

And I learned something, both numbers were moving targets. But the environmental liabilities moved a lot more than the profits.

One acquisition sticks with me. The target company was valued at around $400 million. During initial due diligence, they disclosed soil remediation liability estimated at $25 million. Significant, but manageable in the context of the deal.

Then we brought in experts to assess the contamination. The estimate grew to $50 million. Then kept growing. By the time we had a professional analysis with defensible numbers, the liability was capped at $80 million with the proviso that it could potentially exceed that amount.

Those numbers became toxic. The deal died.

But here's what haunts me. How many deals went through where we didn't dig deep enough? Where the seller's estimate was accepted? Where the liability was understated just enough to make the numbers work?

And here's the darker question. In deals that did close, what happened when the real remediation costs emerged years later? Who paid? Not usually the sellers. They'd structured indemnities with caps and time limits. Not the buyers. They'd often pass costs to ratepayers or communities or declare bankruptcy of that subsidiary.

The pattern was clear. Environmental liabilities were treated as negotiating variables, not as real costs that someone, somewhere, would eventually have to pay. Until they became too big to hide. Then the deals collapsed, the companies restructured, or the public ultimately bore the costs.

The synergies that never came

Every acquisition pitch deck I ever saw was filled with the same promises. Consolidation synergies. Marketplace expansion. Revenue growth. Cost savings. The numbers were always impressive. The PowerPoints were always polished.

Here's what actually happened. In all the acquisitions I was involved in, we captured maybe 30% to 50% of the expected profit synergies. We never got more than 75% of the promised revenue synergies.

Never.

There were so many reasons why. Integration was always harder than projected. Key employees left. Customers didn't respond as predicted. Systems didn't mesh cleanly. Cultural differences created friction. Market conditions changed.

Or, as one CFO put it candidly after a few drinks: "Our eyes are always bigger than our stomachs."

But here's the thing: everyone knew. The investment bankers knew. The executives knew. The board members knew. These weren't honest mistakes or optimistic projections. These were numbers carefully constructed to justify deals that people wanted to do for other reasons. Reasons like ego, empire-building, and bonuses tied to deal completion or competitive pressures.

The pitch decks were fiction dressed up as financial analysis. And we all participated in maintaining that fiction because our incentives rewarded completing deals rather than delivering promised results.

What happened when the synergies didn't materialize? Mass layoffs to "capture cost savings." Facility closures to "streamline operations." Benefit cuts to "improve margins." We extracted the value we'd promised investors by taking it from workers and communities.

The pattern behind every decision

Sitting in all those meetings, I began to see the pattern clearly:

• Optimize for profit extraction, not value creation
• Externalize every possible cost — environmental, social, human
• Treat regulations as constraints to work around, not principles to uphold
• Promise synergies and transformations that will never fully materialize
• When promises fail, extract value from workers and communities
• Celebrate these decisions as 'smart business' and 'competitive necessity'

This wasn't a few bad actors. This was the system working exactly as designed. Every quarterly earnings call rewarded this behaviour. Every compensation structure incentivized it. Every business school case study taught it.

That Ford supplier convention? That wasn't Ford being evil. That was Ford being efficient within a system that makes exploitation profitable and responsibility expensive.

Why this matters for sustainability

The sustainability movement often treats these business decisions as mistakes that could be fixed by better information or smarter leadership. What I learned is this. They are not mistakes. They ARE the strategy.

When a company announces a net-zero pledge while continuing to expand fossil fuel operations, that's not hypocrisy. That's the same playbook I saw with acquisition synergies. Promise transformation, deliver extraction.

When corporations fund recycling programs while lobbying against bottle deposits, that's Keep America Beautiful 2.0. It shifts responsibility to consumers while protecting the business model that creates the problem.

When environmental costs are called "externalities" in business school, that's just giving the practice of theft a technical name.

Until we name this playbook clearly, until we stop treating systematic harm as an accidental byproduct, we'll keep getting sustainability theatre instead of actual change.

Whose interests are being served?

When my salesperson came back from that Ford convention, thrilled about the opportunity to exploit workers in countries with minimal protections, he genuinely believed he was serving the company's interests. And in the narrow logic of quarterly returns and shareholder value maximization, he was right.

But whose interests were actually being served?

Not the workers who'd lose their jobs when we moved operations offshore. Not the workers in third-world countries who'd be exploited in the new facilities. Not the communities that would deal with the pollution we externalized. Not even, ultimately, the long-term health of our own company, because strategies built on exploitation are inherently unstable.

The only interests truly served were short-term extraction and the financial engineering that made it appear to be value creation.

Every time we chose China, Cambodia or Vietnam over local manufacturing, every time we understated environmental liabilities, every time we promised synergies we knew wouldn't materialize, we were serving the same interests. Extract maximum value, externalize maximum cost, and move on before the bill comes due.

The deepest lie

In Part 1, I showed you the consumer-facing mythology - bacon and eggs, crying Indians, "Got Milk?" The lies we were told.

In this article, I've shown you the operational machinery - the business decisions that systematically externalize harm while internalizing profit. The lies we told ourselves in boardrooms.

But there's one more layer. The biggest lie of all. The one that makes all the other lies possible.

In Part 3, I'll show you the machinery. Because until you understand how financial extraction actually works, you'll keep wondering why corporations can't seem to prioritize sustainability even when they say they want to. The answer isn't that they lack will. It's that financial engineering won't allow it.