"Business is about more than extracting the most you can." Um - no. Certainly not once a company is publicly owned or where the focus of the board of directors

"Business is about more than extracting the most you can." Um - no. Certainly not once a company is publicly owned or where the focus of the board of directors shifts from focusing on how to be the best company doing whatever we are doing to maximizing "value" for the shareholders. Once the focus is on the shareholders instead of the core business that core business starts to be talked about as a commodity and its value is its cash flow not how good it is at the business it is in. cf: Virgin America. Regarding the issues with Wells Fargo it may be some stay "because the competitors are just as bad" but may also simply indicate how entrenched the services Wells provided are to the company. Things like credit card processing, loans (which you can't just switch easily), lockbox services and so on. I know from personal experience there's no problem with the folks having to interact with the bank referring to them in highly negative terms all the while that interaction takes place. "Unhappy customers is bad for business." Really? That's why Comcast is having such a hard time? Why it's facing so much opposition to the micro monopolies it creates and perpetuates? No one likes Comcast. OK, that's a bit broad. I do not personally know anyone who likes Comcast and I know a lot of folks, including myself personally and professionally, who have been and are customers. They use the 3 tarrif pricing model BTW: you pay the monthly fee for your basket of services which include some amount of unit transactions and an overage when you bust your limit. I like a pod cast called "Make me smart". The folks who run it have a question they like to ask at the end of interviews: "What's the one thing you thought you knew and found out you were wrong?" I'm 63 and started my first restaurant when I was 21 and my second when I was 23. I thought if I worked as hard as I could, was fair with the people I dealt with, produced the best product I possibly could while keeping costs in check and charged a fair price everything would be OK. I was wrong. For better or worse I held on to my ideals instead of adapting to the realities of business. It looks to me like the focus of being in business has shifted from business as a way to be better/bigger/faster at whatever the bussiness does to simply being a means to establish a cash flow and sell to a larger business. I don't know if that's inherently good or bad but it certainly looks and sounds like the new normal. So, from what I see, business has indeed become about extracting the most you can as fast as you can from as many as you can.