Corporations Should Die
On empire building, rent-seeking, and the case for trust-based businesses
A former Amazon VP just did a three-hour podcast about everything he saw in corporate politics. Empire building. Scope stealing. Reorgs designed to check boxes instead of serve customers. Managers shuffling humans around like chess pieces to hit headcount thresholds for their own promotions.
The whole thing is a masterclass in what corporations actually are.
Not what they say they are. What they are.
The Two Forces
Every corporation is a combination of two forces: rent-seeking and friction.
Rent-seeking is the internal competition for resources that have nothing to do with the customer. Ethan Evans describes it perfectly. At Amazon, there were whisper numbers. To become a director, you needed 80 to 90 people under you. Not 80 to 90 people’s worth of impact. 80 to 90 bodies. The leadership principle literally says “there’s no bonus for additional headcount.” The promotion threshold says otherwise.
So what do ambitious people do? They empire build. They claim they need people. They take over other groups. They rationalize it to themselves. They play the game because the game rewards playing.
Friction is everything else. The meetings about meetings. The alignment sessions. The stakeholder management. The six-month grace periods when your team shrinks below the magic number. The reorgs that exist not because the business changed but because someone needs to retain a flight risk or stretch a rising leader.
Evans is refreshingly honest about this. Reorgs start with business goals. But once the ship is leaving the dock, leaders throw everything else on the deck. Retention goals. Promotion setups. Quiet exits for underperformers. Every reorg is a political act wearing a business costume.
The Organism
The corporation is not a machine that sometimes breaks. It is a living system that optimizes for its own survival. And what it’s surviving for has almost nothing to do with the customer, the product, or the mission.
It’s surviving for headcount. For territory. For the next reorg that creates a slightly larger box on the org chart.
Evans tells a story about people being moved under peers not because the business needed it but because the peer needed scope to get promoted. Leaders creating narratives to justify decisions that were already made. Quiet people getting passed over because they didn’t make enough noise. The squeaky wheel gets the grease. The loyal soldier gets deprioritized.
This is not a failure of leadership. This is what leadership inside a corporation means. You are managing the political economy of a system that rewards self-perpetuation.
The Real Cost
We measure corporate dysfunction in dollars. That’s the wrong unit.
The real cost is human. It’s the senior IC who can’t figure out if she should go into management because no one will give her a straight answer. It’s the engineer who gets reorged under someone who openly says “I don’t really want your team.” It’s the director who spends more time building narratives for reorgs than building products for customers.
Every hour spent on internal competition is an hour not spent on the person you’re supposed to serve.
Wealth management is the clearest example I’ve ever seen. An RIA with 200 employees has maybe 40 people who touch a client. The rest are managing the friction. Compliance workflows. CRM updates. Account transfers. Onboarding paperwork. Report generation. None of it is the work. All of it is the overhead the work requires because the corporation demands it.
The Design Flaw
The corporation was designed for a world where coordination was expensive and trust was local.
You needed middle management because information didn’t flow. You needed headcount thresholds because you couldn’t measure impact. You needed six layers of approvals because you couldn’t verify work at a distance.
None of that is true anymore.
We can measure impact directly. We can verify work in real time. We can coordinate without coordinators. The technology exists to remove every layer that exists only to manage the existence of other layers.
But the corporation won’t do it to itself. Evans is the proof. He’s a good person. Smart. Self-aware. And he spent decades inside a system that optimized for empire building while telling itself it didn’t. The organism protects itself.
The Replacement
Corporations should die. Not in the apocalyptic sense. In the evolutionary sense.
The replacement is the trust-based business. Small teams of humans doing the work that requires human judgment, creativity, and relationship. Everything else handled by systems that don’t empire build. That don’t need reorgs. That don’t need narratives to justify their existence.
Digital workforces don’t lobby for headcount. They don’t need a promotion threshold. They don’t get demoralized when they are reorged under someone new.
The humans in a trust-based business do what humans are for. They advise. They decide. They build relationships. They exercise judgment. They take ownership of outcomes, not org charts.
Scale the trust. Automate the friction. Let the corporation die.
The Mission
Every RIA we work with has the same shape. A core of talented people buried under layers of operational overhead. The overhead isn’t evil. It’s just the tax the corporation charges for existing.
Remove the tax and you get something remarkable. People who are good at their jobs, doing their jobs, for the people they serve. No empire building. No scope stealing. No reorgs designed to check boxes.
That’s not a technology thesis. It’s a human one.
The best version of work is small groups of people who trust each other, serving people who trust them, supported by systems that don’t need to be managed.
Corporations won’t get there. They can’t. The organism won’t allow it.
So we build the replacement.