Mohammed Al MadhiWe are living in a time where the meanings of words have quietly changed, and with that shift, something far more dangerous has happened: morality followed.
What was once shameful is now admired.
What was once unethical is now applauded.
Today, greed is sold as intelligence.
Cheating is marketed as strategy.
Lying is packaged as creativity.
And cutting salaries? That’s become the gold standard of “efficiency.”
Somewhere along the way, we stopped asking the most basic question:
If a company is already profitable, why is the first instinct to take from the people who have the least?
Instead of building new products, investing in innovation, or creating long-term value, many organizations discovered an easier formula:
Reduce costs → Reduce salaries → Present it as growth.
You will see companies making tens of millions in annual profit proudly announcing salary reductions — and somehow the world accepts this as smart leadership.
Meanwhile, the same company has a CEO collecting a six- or seven-figure salary.
Not because they created a breakthrough or transformed society, but because they mastered the art of shrinking everyone else.
In the same building, one person earns more in a month than another earns in a year — and we pretend that this is normal.
This is not leadership.
This is greed wearing a suit.
When Profit Becomes Urgent, Economies Break
There is a truth we rarely address:
Most economic crises are not born from weak economies.
They are born from impatient people.
If companies — or the individuals running them — were willing to pursue profit across generations instead of quarters, the global economy would be more stable, more humane, and more sustainable.
But we live in an age of immediate returns.
Profits cannot simply grow; they must grow now.
This year. This quarter. This CEO’s tenure.
And when exponential profit cannot come from innovation, it is extracted from people:
- Cutting salaries
- Reducing benefits
- Shrinking departments
- Increasing prices
- Draining the current economic cycle to its final breath
Eventually, the system hits a dead end — a point where the only way forward is collapse.
Then comes the irony:
A recession becomes an opportunity.
Assets become cheaper.
Labor becomes cheaper.
The system resets — not because it healed, but because it broke.
This is not economics.
This is engineered instability.
A normal person has a natural purchasing cycle across their lifetime.
When they pass away, another person enters the system with the same economic potential.
If companies simply respected this natural rhythm, they would still make the same profits — just spread across time, not extracted in a single breath.
But the modern corporate mindset refuses to wait.
It drains the present without allowing the future to replenish.
That is why crises repeat.
Not because economies fail —
but because greed refuses to wait.
Maybe the Private Sector Should Start Thinking Like Governments
We often hear:
“Governments should think more like the private sector.”
But perhaps the opposite is true.
Maybe the private sector needs to think more like responsible governments — especially in how they care for people.
What is wrong with a company offering interest-free housing loans for employees buying their first home?
What is wrong with businesses giving their workers a share of the stability they help create?
Because imagine the result:
- Employees become loyal
- Families become secure
- Home ownership increases
- Consumer confidence rises
- Spending grows
- The economy strengthens
This is not charity.
This is economic intelligence.
You strengthen the ecosystem that provides your profit.
You protect the very people who protect your business.
And you build a long-term, crisis-resistant economic cycle.
This is how you create a solid economy.
This is how you maintain profit without destruction.
This is how you escape the endless loop of recession and recovery.
Profit and humanity are not opposites.
Greed and sustainability are.
A World That Needs Its Definitions Back
The greatest danger of our time is not that companies want profit — profit is essential.
The danger is that we allowed profit to replace purpose.
We allowed efficiency to replace empathy.
We allowed speed to replace sustainability.
And in this transformation, words themselves betrayed us:
- Honesty became optional
- Creativity became manipulation
- Leadership became cost-cutting
- Success became how much you can take, not how much you can build
But there is still time to recalibrate.
There is still time to restore meaning.
Conclusion: The Future Depends on What We Choose to Reward
A society becomes what it celebrates.
A company becomes what it rewards.
If we reward the extraction of value, we will create leaders who extract.
If we reward building, we will create leaders who build.
The future — economic, social, and human — depends on a very simple choice:
Do we want a world driven by impatient greed?
Or a world built on patient, sustainable intelligence?
Real success is not complicated:
Make profit.
Keep your people human.
Everything else is just greed wearing a suit.
