Corporations are meant to be well oiled machines that extract money from the sands of humanity. The harkonnen's harvester from Dune would be a good analogy. Thi

Corporations are meant to be well oiled machines that extract money from the sands of humanity. The harkonnen's harvester from Dune would be a good analogy. This machine is meant to be soulless, blindly doing the will of its owner. Today, corporations have to be made of employees, who have their own will, and their will is often not aligned with the will of the owner. It's as if the harkonnens would have to hire freemen to do work that would harm their own people. From the owner's perspective, those employees are defective mechanisms that must be fixed, and the owner creates a control framework that fixes them. That's what metrics do: they reduce employees to small parts of the machine, with well defined functions, inputs, outputs and measurable qualities. This is what makes modern corporations smell so off. One day in their careers, managers realise that they have to make a choice: side with the employees or fuse themselves with the machine.