The Invisible Acid: How We Let Our Cultures Corrode
The fluorescent hum of the conference room barely masked the sharp, almost imperceptible intake of breath. Sarah, a new hire, had just finished presenting her analysis, her voice a little too earnest, a little too hopeful. “And based on these projections,” she concluded, “we forecast a 15% increase in efficiency by Q3.” Her gaze flickered to David, a senior manager known for his ‘directness.’ He didn’t miss a beat. “Projections are cute, Sarah,” he drawled, pushing back from the table. “Like a puppy showing you its first trick. Let me know when it can hunt.” A collective gaze fell to various notebooks, screens, and chipped coffee mugs. No one met Sarah’s eyes. The silence stretched, confirming, as it always did, that this was just David being David. This was normal. This was just how things were.
This moment, replaying in countless forms across countless organizations, isn’t a one-off incident. It’s a drip. A persistent, slow-motion disaster we’ve become experts at ignoring. We talk about ‘toxic culture’ as if it’s some grand, unforeseen calamity, a sudden eruption that demands immediate, dramatic intervention. But the truth is far more insidious, and frankly, far more terrifying: we cultivate it. We water its roots with our silence, our shrugs, our convenient blindness. We build entire systems around accommodating the Davids, the little tyrants, the casual destroyers of morale, all while wondering why our teams feel perpetually drained, why innovation stalls, why good people quietly slip







- 2 min
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56 years
- 255 words
Tagged business