This is a great point, and I wish some of the executives as my previous employers understood this. For awhile, things seem great. The company has a core produ

This is a great point, and I wish some of the executives as my previous employers understood this. For awhile, things seem great. The company has a core product that is showing great growth. That in turn leads to even more ambitious goals. The value from the above allows the company to offer generous perks. Life is good. Then what happens? The core product begins to plateau. Executives begin to abandon long-term, ambitious projects, in order to squeeze more juice from the lemon to hit quarterly goals. Finally, perks are cut because it's just way too lavish to have free soda when you're only growing profit 33% year over year instead of 100%. As the OP indicated, the employees are no longer left with any stories. You may still enjoy your day to day work, you may still be well compensated in terms of salary. But without that intrinsic motivation, it's only a matter of time before your enthusiasm flags and you're looking for another job that can offer you what you had before. For company leaders, products plateau and nobody is successful all the time. But goals and perks are under their complete control, and especially for the latter, it usually requires only as nominal amount of money. It can mean all the difference in retaining your talent during bumpy times, or having everyone abandon ship because they feel abandoned already.