Executive coach: 'Finance is an amoral world, bordering on the immoral'

"[W]ho are the owners of those major banks and corporations who figured out that if they want to make so much money, they need to get a psychopath in who will then turn the entire organisation into a ruthless money-making soul-destroying machine? That's pretty clever, isn't it? To find a psychopath to do that for you?

"In youth psychology there's a well-known phenomenon regarding collective self-harming. You have a shelter that's housing, say, 50 boys. All of a sudden and apparently out of nowhere, they all start mutilating themselves. A wave. It's only natural for outsiders to assume that something must be very wrong with that shelter. However, research and experience demonstrate that all you need to do is find the one person who started it. Isolate him from the group and lo and behold, the wave stops and everything goes back to normal.

"Individuals have very powerful influence over groups, and it makes you wonder about banks and financial firms; what if they were like the shelter, and you need to find that one switch, that one person, to turn a whole group around?"

Read the rest from Joris Luyendijk at The Guardian's Comment is free here.