Reference reading
Greed
Treating the enterprise as a source of private gain whose legitimate claims can always wait.
Excessive desire for gain that persistently overrides fair claims or defensible limits.
Imagine this: The enterprise's resources begin to look like a private reservoir rather than provision for a purpose shared with others.
How the pattern works
The private briefcase fills while the maintenance tray loses the means to supply a small part. Gain can serve a worthwhile purpose, and an executive can properly earn a return. Greed appears when the demand for more repeatedly overrides fair claims and defensible limits.
Entrusted power can enlarge that demand’s reach. The person deciding the reward may also decide which needs are recognized, which costs are postponed and whose contribution receives credit. Each additional claim is presented as an isolated entitlement, while its cumulative effect on the undertaking is left unexamined.
What it costs the work
Resources needed for continuity can become unavailable without any single dramatic extraction. Colleagues, customers or future participants absorb the gap. A relationship that depended on a fair exchange becomes harder to sustain when one party repeatedly treats every available increment as theirs to take.
A distinction worth keeping
A reserve, an ambitious target or a reasonable reward does not by itself establish Greed. The question is how the claim responds to enough and to other legitimate interests. Profligacy indulges spending; Miserliness resists warranted provision. Greed concerns acquisition and can coexist with either lavish private expenditure or tight organizational budgets.
What a useful response can change
Explain a claim through contributions, risks and defensible purposes rather than the power to obtain it. Availability does not settle entitlement.
Distinguish what the enterprise needs to do its work from what the decision maker would like to receive. Make recurring transfers visible together instead of defending each in isolation.
Repair may require relinquishing an excessive benefit or recognizing another contributor’s share. An unrelated generous gesture does not correct a continuing extraction.
Questions for reflection
- What would count as enough for the purpose this reward is meant to serve?
- Which recurring cost is disappearing from the account because somebody else bears it?
Other perspectives
The acquisition of knowledge may, it is true, protect a man against the meaner felonies of life; but not in any degree against its selfish vices, unless fortified by sound principles and habits.
Samuel Smiles · Self-Help · Read the source
Self-Help refuses to treat intellectual accomplishment as protection against selfish conduct. The executive’s technical ability does not settle whether the private claim gives other interests their due.
It is because mankind are disposed to sympathize more entirely with our joy than with our sorrow, that we make parade of our riches, and conceal our poverty.
Adam Smith · The Theory of Moral Sentiments · Read the source
Smith links the display of wealth with a desire to be noticed. This excerpt concerns that incentive; his surrounding generalizations about workers’ material sufficiency are not adopted as contemporary facts.