Measuring Companies by What They Give, Not What They Take
You spend your week in the grinder, punching out your little piece of the machine. At the end of the day, you know the score. The system—the one that pays the rent—is rigged with cold, financial precision.
The whole thing runs on one slick and slippery dogma: Shareholder Value.
You’ve heard the lie: getting rich for a few somehow makes the world better for everyone. It doesn’t. It just funnels the good stuff—the cash, the stability, the future—to the top.
The truth is simple: Shareholder Value is the sickness; Human Value is the cure.
The Cure
You dream of a different world. Not some hippie commune, but a smarter, more resilient marketplace. A world where the bosses and the boards are finally judged on something real.
Their quarterly report isn’t about profit extracted; it’s about Impact Delivered. We call this the Human Value Economy.
And you don’t win until the community wins.
The Scoreboard
What does that world look like? Start with a different scoreboard. Toss out the spreadsheets of pure extraction and look at metrics that speak to a life well-lived:
The Human Factor: Are your employees making enough to afford a decent home and raise a family without going broke or needing a side hustle? If your people are living in perpetual anxiety, your business is a failure no matter the stock price. The people who make the product should be able to afford the life the product promises.
The Durability Factor: Are you selling genuine value or just cheap junk designed to break next year? Measure a company by how long its product lasts and how much better it makes the customer’s life, not by how quickly it forces them to buy another one.
The Sustainability Factor: It’s not enough to be “less bad” for the planet. True success is measured by what you put back into the system—the environment you clean up, the community infrastructure you support. If you treat the world as a free dumping ground, you’re nothing but a financial vandal.
The Success Story
It’s not some hazy utopia. Check out the places that nail it. They get that money’s just fuel. What matters is where you burn it.
Do you stash it away—like that fallen CEO stockpiling cash for his boats while his people barely scrape by? Or do you pump it right back in: better wages, quality materials, real innovation?
When you invest in your crew, when your product has staying power, when you respect the earth beneath you, you’ve got something solid. You’ve got loyalty. You’ve got stability. You’ve got a business that can ride out the worst of it.
The enemy isn’t capitalism; it’s the gospel of greed. It’s time for a reformation. Yank those golden idols of profit from the boardroom and put up this simple truth:
The point of work is to lift human life, not fatten an algorithm.
The revolution begins with your wallet, your labor, your voice. Bankroll the cure, not the disease.
Life is lived,
Willy