That's the thing— it does not require any great leap of faith or imagination to conceive of things that work this way, because there are already so many example

That's the thing— it does not require any great leap of faith or imagination to conceive of things that work this way, because there are already so many examples in the real world. To build on a previous example, Jimmy Wales leapt further in conceiving Wikipedia, which had no precedent before it was created. The leap I ask for is therefore less. Companies have to make money to exist and survive— but optimizing for money above literally all else is a choice. Again, the word for that is "greed", and it's optional. The leaders of a company can steer towards it or away from it; the company will follow where they lead, raise or lower itself to the standards that they (fail to) set. I worked for 10 years at a successful, well-known company which emphasizes quality over easy money, and it's maddening to see people claiming that such a thing is impossible. It's really not. This is the exact perspective that I'm talking about. It's the perspective of the GM manager in the 1980s who'd insist— despite all the evidence to the contrary— that Toyota's worker-positive, lean production strategy is impossible. Not only is he wrong, but he'd be losing money because of his lack of imagination and his unwillingness to raise the bar out of the dirt. It's the attitude of officials in second- and third-world countries, who see corruption, fraud, and abuse— the bottom of the moral barrel— and shrug their shoulders; they justify it to themselves, to others, to the public under the mantra "it can't be helped; the bar cannot possibly be any higher. It's too much to ask". Lo and behold, those countries are economically irrelevant, while countries with higher institutional integrity exist and dominate all around them. Lowering the bar doesn't help them. Given all the examples available, "a company with high standards" is not "theoretical" at all. Saying so is but an excuse to insist on a pitifully low bar. And it's disappointing to me to encounter the perspective that "behaving with integrity" is beyond conceivable.