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Ruthless Corporations ALWAYS Blame Individuals - Brutal Business Strategies Case Study - FutureIQ

5,807 views Wait, is this logic right? • Aug 02, 2024
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Slog Reference: How Companies Shift Blame to Individuals

Description

Some evil business tactics and strategies employed by corporations can help us get a perspective on how things happen in the corporate world and why it is individuals who mostly that get the worst out of it. Let's understand some such tactics from history when companies shifted blame to individuals, try to understand why they do that, and what can be done about it in this FutureIQ episode.

More videos for you:
Democracy's Biggest Lie: https://youtu.be/ns57h46YjZ8
How tobacco manipulated the world: https://youtu.be/N8ewD023cNg
The dirty secrets of advertising: https://youtu.be/ckon1Yi0B8A

Hope you enjoyed FutureIQ by Navin Kabra and Shrikant Joshi. Do hit us up on Twitter:
@ngkabra http://twitter.com/ngkabra
@shrikant https://twitter.com/shrikant

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Watch other episodes of The FutureIQ podcast: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAppTB0r5_TaYueZ0adD42Wiw5X-wTE4v

Chapters:
00:00 Carbon footprint
01:20 Medical case study
03:50 Paper straws case study
05:37 Work stress case study
06:40 Tobacco industry case study
07:55 Cars & accidents case study
09:30 Steel industry case study
11:00 How it got fixed?
13:37 The problem
15:05 The takeaway message

#futureiq #casestudy #business

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Transcript

Shri Kant huh do you know what your carbon footprint is uh well don't have to know it but you know the concept of a carbon footprint that everyone can calculate their own carbon footprint and try to change their behavior to reduce it so that you help the environment yes I do know what car you know that carbon footprint personal carbon footprint got really popular because BP the oil company British Petroleum yes the fossil fuel company was so worried about the negative image they were getting in the press that they hired ail and Ma the advertising company to figure out how to shift the spotlight away from them and ail and Ma came up with the idea of
popularizing carbon footprint so that people start worrying about their own carbon footprint rather than the behavior of BP right that is so diabolical it almost reads like a Hollywood script companies doing evil things and then passing the blame to customers well we will take a look at a bunch of such companies doing this this is a regular thing you're trying to I thought this the time no no no W okay to drive home the difference between responsibility of a person versus responsibility of a company okay let's take this example from the medical field okay okay so uh there is this concept called an infusion pump right remember I mean if you are like uh you know sitting
in bed with the IV needle in your arm and there is that saline thing dripping into it yeah and then they choose the speed of the saline with that little uh no so you get sophisticated devices which you can plug in there which have like a little keyboard there where you can type in the uh speed okay and then that precisely controls the speed but that's not the real problem the real problem is that the keyboard they had one particular company the keyboard had a little bug in it so that sometimes when you pressed key it would get pressed twice okay so a nurse putting in 4.8 would accidentally put in 44.8 so the dose that the patient
gets is 10 times what the expected dos is could almost be lethal in those multiples so now tell me what do you think the solution to this problem is when they realize Rec recall the pump well what they did was train the nurses on what is the correct stance how to stand when you press the number so that you don't double press it okay how to listen to the beep so if you hear a double beep then you know there is a problem how to look at the flow of the IV and know that oh my God this is going very fast you have a million nurses and there's a 01 chance of somebody failing
that's still people dying yeah that's a non zero whereas has on the other side you have one company that needs to fix something which is easier which is cheaper that actually depend on the cost of recall versus the cost of training and training company isn't doing company just sends out a brochure to the hosal then that is cheaper for the company right so then what will happen so that is what they did this explains both the how and the why of why companies shift the blame to individuals right once you start if every once everybody agrees that this training is important right once you start training you pretty much are giving up right you're basically
letting the company off the hook and you're saying well if somebody dies it's the nurse's fault wow I actually now beginning to realize how many of the things that we are blamed for we as in people are blamed for are actually the fault of larger company one popular example is of course use plastic straws paper straws yes that's a great don't use plastic stws paper that's a great one the point is that it's very easy to just tell the whole world oh don't use plastic straws you should use paper straws and now everyone feels guilty because paper straws are unusable do you know how this started in 2011 a 9-year-old kid did a school project just
came up with a number oh there are 500 million plastic straws right that that number didn't exist he just called up a bunch of Manufacturers came up with a number and that just got so famous and companies jumped on the bandwagon see it's easy for the companies right as in now they can give you the paper straw and it's your problem right you can't blame Starbucks for giving you a paper straw let me ask you this suppose we manage to get rid of all the plastic straws in the entire world right how much will you reduce plastic in the oceans plastic in the nose of the turtle and all of that how much will you reduce
how many percent 0.03 percent you know what is half the plastic in the ocean you know the whole big gar Gage is Pacific Garbage Patch the plastic there half of it is from fishing industry right are you going around saying oh you should fish using paper because the company can easily bribe the lawmaker or even if they don't bribe convince the lawmakers lobbying it's called lobbying yes yes yes no so yeah no and in fact it makes sense it's saying you know what if you do this the efficiency of this industry will reduce and you'll have less fish to eat and whatever right so let's take more examples right imagine modern workplace stress right everybody
is stressed at work and do you know of course the solutions are there right HR has um resilience training uh they will do like yoga and meditation workshops self-care practices yeah and so on right listen the simplest way to increase employee motivation is to raise their parag increase their pay salaries so see and the salary isn't really the cause of workplace stress the real cause long working hours right unrealistic expectations of the boss yes right leading to poor work life balance yes so the correct way to fix it is to fix those things right tell the bosses to really insist on not having long working hours to insist on not having unrealistic expectations right Nobody Does that instead of you know
thinking of the system and the company culture and fixing that you shift the blame to the individual oh you didn't do enough meditation that's why you are stressed tobacco industry right 50s 60s pretty much the thinking people and scientists knew that tobacco causes cancer and a whole bunch of other health effects right what did the tobacco industry do they said oh we will put a warning on the pack now you get to choose whether to have this cancer stick or not right and um the real problem is the fact that it's an addictive thing yeah which is being advertised as a glamorous thing yes to Children using cartoon characters wow how glamorous it us to be and when that was fixed when
the advertising was removed it went down right in the Western World smoking is going down like crazy uh and that's the difference I mean you put put it on individual choice and the reality is none of you want to make the hard choices right well 10% of you do but the rest of the world cannot yeah look with addiction it's actually a very hard choice but that's but that's the point that uh they knew it was causing addiction but they still chose to shift that responsibility to you saying you don't get addicted we are sending you addiction by the truckload but you don't do it and sometimes it doesn't even have to be about addiction and things like
that right let's take a much simpler case okay okay now cars oh on the streets and accidents right whose fault is it it's like oh well I mean there was a time early uh when cars were new and there were too many people dying because cars are fast and they hit the people and there were now wondering car industry was worried that what's going to happen right and the brilliant idea they came up with along the shift blame to individuals is to invent a new crime called JW walking right I knew was if you are crossing the street on foot that's a crime and it's your fault in the US you have you seen cars are
getting taller and taller and bigger and so on oh yeah there's a very popular graphic of the F-150 Dodge Ram growing yeah like now obes a driver sitting there how much can he see I mean how tall does a person have to be standing right in front of the car before the driver can see the top of their head right a kid this is called a front over fatality front over asn't because somebody dies because the driver couldn't see them down there 2800% increase ah yes yes and you know I mean the the car industry is quite capable of coming up with a solution saying you know what all people should walk on stilts there is one very
important thing that everybody should know right this would all be fine if it actually worked but it doesn't work focusing on individuals never works okay and I have a very lovely example for this okay okay in 1907 in the steel industry in the US there used to be 220 accidents per lakh workers okay okay steel industry dangerous working with steel in any form yeah today there are 26 right so 90% have is gone but let's try to see the history of how they tried to fix it right first they tried asking the individuals okay come up with safety rules understand how to work with steel which is extremely hot wear your gloves wear your helmets wear your hats and
corre wear protective you the problems are one is that most of the times the workers themselves don't care about the safety rules they don't follow them we tried instituting helmet uh compulsion in Pune and that still hasn't taken rout I mean if well if we try to actually enforce it there will be riots in the streets accidents like this are rare enough that nobody cares about them until it happens to them and once it happens it's too late yeah right in fact at that time somebody did a study there were thousands of strikes for better pay only 11 strikes to improve safety there were six uh strikes against the safety rules that were being pushed because
we've always done it this way yeah IND themselves resist the safety rules yeah right but the problem was fixed we know that right you know how it was fixed okay earlier it used to be like you know a worker gets injured who's going to does the worker get compensated right the worker had to file a case against the company and if the company is able to show any negligence even a little bit of something then company doesn't have to pay right so company's full Focus used to be okay let's just prove the worker is negligent the worker is negligent then they changed the rules okay saying we don't care whose fault it is if a worker gets injured they get
compensated correct unless the worker went out of their way uh to willfully endanger themselves endanger themselves then that's a difference matter but as long as that was not the case negligence is not uh enough to not compensate them right by default you have to compensate them right now what happens is every time there is an accident first the company has to pay up worker doesn't even have to file a suit right and they can't prove that the worker willfully did this right as a result what happens is that suddenly now the companies have Financial incentive to in the problem right suddenly from the focus has changed from fighting the liability to preventing the injury right
see think of the difference yeah yeah for any individual worker an accident is rare enough that they don't really care about it but for the company which is just one a 10% possibility of injury is still a lot of injury for the company it's a regular occurrence so the company has an incentive to fix it second now what happens is that the company actually put smart people in trying to figure out what are the root causes they put guards and enclosures around the machines they put locks and auto shut offs on the machine so if somebody's hand gets stuck in there the machine stops instead of just pulling them inside they created training programs and were serious about the training
program made sure that the workers actually pay attention to the training blaming the individual doesn't work right similarly there's one big component there which is human error uh right that 60 to 80% of all accidents were blamed on human error you can blame something on human error because humans are not 100% perfect the problem with this is that the blame is based on hindsight right uh it is always possible to find somebody to blame uh right humans think in terms of other humans uh Behavior causing things right second thing is as soon as you find somebody to blame then corrective action can be focused on the person the that person right or that specific action which
again as we saw from the previous example if you focus on IND idual Behavior changes it doesn't work it has to be made the company uh the basically it has to be made the responsibility of a company but it's not easy for us to do right because as humans we always tend to think right that if you know he got into trouble somehow he must be respons he must be responsible for it right it's a fundamental attribution error when you do something wrong you know all the internal reasons why it isn't your fault but when somebody else does it wrong then you just imagine that they must have made a mistake there are situations though where it is a individual's
problem as in individ individuals can't be never to blame sure sure the point is one the number of times we blame individuals is far larger than the number of times when they're really to blame one and second is that blaming the individuals doesn't fix anything right whereas we have seen examples that if you blame the company things get fixed they put smart people on it they put money in it they find Creative Solutions so I think the takeaway message for this episode should be yes I'm not saying that individuals are never at you know you should take person responsibility right take responsibility but make sure you understand the system and make sure you support efforts which are there to
change the system yeah only focusing on um effort which are trying to change the individuals is not a good use of your time right you can support that but much effort has to go in especially this is important in areas where you can actually make that systematic change right like I mean you can't change the prime minister of the country you can't change the laws of the country but there are things you can affect right like your if your if it's a small company then yes you can your uh efforts count in your apartment complex uh you can make rules which are more focused on systematic change rather than individual behavior and so on right
in general remember that there is a difference between the first cause for some problem that comes to your mind and then if you ask why a couple of times more then you get to the systematic issue correct that caused the human error so it's not just one why you have to ask why a couple of times to get deeper into the root of things we'll do an episode on the multiple yse and more generally the idea of you know proximal cause versus Ultimate cause right those are important things but basically keep that in mind and uh I think that's what is important all right there we go uh very important to uh focus on who
exactly is to blame and most of the time you'll find that it's not the individual but the company making the individual do certain specific things and actions to absolve themselves of liability and ask yourself if you already have an opinion about something uh which boils down to okay people should do XY Z ask yourself where that opinion came from it is quite likely that it came from advertising MH okay so if you ask two three wise some material there for you to think and develop your future IQ Shri Kant naen this is Future you