The Systemic Inhumanity Of Business

Dr. Martina Olbert
3 min readMay 11, 2021

Should we finally address the systemic inhumanity of business or will we continue to pretend it doesn’t exist?

The one that reduces the man to an object.

The one that reduces the man to a resource.

The one that reduces the man to a candidate.

The one that treats the man as a cog supposed to fit in a machine.

The one that doesn’t realize that without the man there is no machine.

When will we finally learn the truth and be brave enough to change and implement it?

To see that there are no candidates, no resources to manage, no criteria to fulfil, no cultures to fit, no expectations to meet?

We are the people.

If a business fails to generate value for us, how does it stay in business?

That’s right, it doesn’t.

In The Past, Business Was Driven By Humanity

Once upon a time, before corporations took over, business WAS human.

Naturally, as people created value.

Not a fragment of a value which has compartmentalized businesses into silos, fragmented value and relegated people into objects…

The real problem isn’t that we are people and not numbers.

The real problem is that there is no humanity in business.

Which is why there is no value.

Which is why there is no meaning to anything that we do in business.

Humanity At The Core Of Business Creates Meaning

It’s time that we put not only the customer at the core.

It’s time that we realize how inhumane of a system we’ve created to run our lives. And put humanity back at the core of business to create real value.

If we don’t find life balance and understand that work is only a means to live a good life, one that’s worth living, we won’t advance.

There is no work-life balance. There is only Human Balance.

Dr. Martina Olbert

Humanist, Futurist, Thinker, Speaker, Strategist, and Social scientist. Laying the foundations for Humanistic Capitalism using business to drive social change.

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