EP. 2 Who built this
The History of Modern Corporate Culture.
If you’ve ever felt like a replaceable cog in a machine that values spreadsheets over people, it’s because the system was redesigned to feel exactly that way.
IN THIS EPISODE
Aparna and Lars sit down with finance veteran Bachul Koul to trace how we moved from small, community-rooted businesses to a world where "shareholder primacy" is the only law that matters. We dig into the 1970s shift that turned managers into enforcers of the bottom line and explore how the saturation of "junk" products has hollowed out the meaning of our daily labor. It’s a look at the "frozen middle" of management and the moment "burnout" became an official part of the human experience. This isn't just a history lesson; it's a map to help us find our way back to a definition of value that actually includes our humanity.
THE QUESTION WE'RE SITTING WITH
If the world will never define "enough" for you, how do you calculate it for yourself?
TAKE THIS WITH YOU
Calculate Your "Enough": Reflect on what a beautiful life looks like to you and the actual cost required to support it, rather than chasing external markers of success.
The Employee Primacy Block: Reclaim your time by putting a two-hour "made-up meeting" on your calendar this week to nap, move your body, or simply rest.
Human Connection over Productivity: Break the isolation of the "shareholder model" by asking a coworker what they actually care about outside of their deliverables.
RESOURCES MENTIONED
The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business — Alfred Chandler Jr.
The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits — Milton Friedman, The New York Times
Ownership Works — An organization focused on providing all employees with a stake in the value they help create
Tech Workers Coalition (TWC) — A community of tech workers organizing for labor rights and ethical technology
CONNECT WITH US
Aparna on LinkedIn:linkedin.com/in/aparnarae
Lars on LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/lars-gallien
Visit us ataparnarae.com
Want to bring this conversation into your organization? Aparna and Lars speak at HR conferences, Fortune 1000 ERGs, and philanthropic foundations. Reach out at pod@circleback.club.
New episodes every week. Follow Circle Back Club so you never miss one.
Full Transcript
Hosts: Aparna Ray & Lars Gallian
Guest: Bachul Koul
Lars: Hey, I'm Lars Gallian.
Aparna: And I'm Aparna Rae. Welcome to the Circle Back Club, a podcast for white-collar workers who suspect that the problem isn't us. We are here to reimagine and rebuild workplaces to strengthen communities instead of depleting them, to see your coworker as your comrade rather than your competition, and to stand up for the dignity of all humans and this beautiful planet together. Welcome to our second episode.
Lars: Today, we are going to start at the beginning—or at least a beginning—to make sense of why corporate work is the way it is today. We’ve all signed this social contract in the way we speak, produce, and relate to each other. While it’s entertaining to make fun of—which is why we named this the Circle Back Club—we know that when workers are rooted in their history, they can envision other ways of working.
Today, we’re dipping our toes into business history. We’ll explore the shift from entrepreneurial capitalism to managerial capitalism and discuss the "shareholder primacy doctrine". We’ll also talk about how the relatively recent shift to quarterly, exponential growth has impacted the modern corporate worker. Spoiler alert: we’ll find out exactly when "burnout" was introduced to the world.
Aparna: I have a feeling listeners might want to grab something to write with for this one. We’re getting nerdy.
Lars: It’s not a club unless we’re hanging out together, so we are joined by our friend, Bachul Koul. Bachul is a very non-traditional human who has worked exclusively in very traditional spaces. He currently offers selective advisory services, but focuses much of his time on social justice and mental health. Bachul, thanks for being with us.
Bachul: Thank you for having me. This topic is near and dear to my heart after spending over 25 years in the white-collar corporate world.
Aparna: Bachul, you’ve spent a lot of your career in finance, right?
Bachul: Yes. I’m an immigrant to this country from India. Neither of my parents came up in the United States, so they didn't know what it was like to build a career here. I grew up with the immigrant value that I needed to do better than they did. I was told there were a few avenues: doctor, lawyer, engineer, or finance. I muddled my way through investment banking on the legal side, worked for a large national bank, spent a decade in management consulting, and most recently worked in private equity.
Now, I’m taking a step back to think about how we got here and what future I’d like to see. I hope the juniors I left in the workforce can be a different type of leader for a different tomorrow.
Lars: We share that hope. To start our history lesson, I'm curious: what’s your favorite type of history to learn?
Aparna: I’m really into historical fiction—specifically the Outlander series. Eighteenth-century Scottish men in kilts—that’s my jam.
Bachul: For me, I’m currently re-evaluating the history I was taught in school. I’ve realized that because each state edits its own textbooks, there is so much "true history" I never heard—like the women featured in Hidden Figures. I’m interested in a more restorative justice view of history.
Lars: Mine is the history of jazz in the U.S.. It’s a way to learn the racialized history of the country through artists who were creating when the stakes for survival were incredibly high. It was also the birth of the original "hipster"—white people with money who were enamored by jazz artists living in poverty.
Bachul: That era was also an incredible time for trans people and butch lesbians living in the Harlem Renaissance. The history of jazz is so much more than just music.
Lars: Exactly. So, let's get into business history. Business anthropology actually set the trajectory of my career. I was captivated by the story of capitalism and why things are the way they are. Today, I want to draw from business historian Alfred Chandler Jr. and economist Milton Friedman.
First, let's look at the "social contract" in corporations. We often perform as if the person who can hire or fire us has inherently more knowledge than we do. We pretend they do to keep our job security.
Aparna: I’ve definitely felt that. I’ve had managers who had zero lived experience in the communities we were serving, yet they never could say, "I don't know". They just pretended.
Bachul: In my work translating strategy into operating models, I’ve been most surprised by how often leadership has no clue what they want or how to get there. But because of performance management, employees are incentivized to compete with one another for one "ring" rather than working together. It’s all about systems and structures.
Lars: When I say "worker history," what comes to mind for you?
Bachul: Stories of heroism from the front lines—fighting for safety, rights, and pay.
Aparna: I think of agricultural workers, especially those dying from heat in the Pacific Northwest. I think about the people growing our food and the conditions they endure.
Lars: I think of unions and coal mines. I recently met with tech workers organizing via the Tech Workers Coalition (TWC). They noted that many tech workers don't even think of themselves as "workers". That dissonance prevents people from realizing they are part of a contract that can be changed. White-collar work is often taught as an apolitical "neutral zone," but when we contextualize it, we can take action.
Why do you think managers are so important to this story?
Aparna: Someone has to be paid to liaise between the people doing the work and the people profiting from it.
Bachul: They call it the "frozen middle". You have the people at the top getting paid well, and the people at the bottom trying to get there. Managers will be key to the revolution if it happens, but right now, they are the ones we have the hardest time reminding where their value actually comes from. It’s not your performance season promise.
Lars: Let’s talk about Alfred Chandler Jr.. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1977 book, The Visible Hand. It charts the move from entrepreneurial capitalism to managerial capitalism.
"The Visible Hand" was a counter to Adam Smith (the "father of capitalism"), who wrote about the "Invisible Hand" in 1776. Smith’s idea was that if people pursued their own economic self-interest, it would advance society through competition and innovation. But Chandler argued that in modern business, the hand is very visible—it is the hand of the professional managerial class.
He tracked how companies moved from coordination to mass production to mass distribution. Think of Sears, which used to be the Amazon of its day. Management moved from direct business owners to professional managers running complex corporations with a separation of ownership and management.
However, the 1970s were a bad time for U.S. business. We had the oil crisis and massive inflation. Managers weren't delivering what shareholders wanted. Enter Milton Friedman, who wrote a 1970 New York Times article stating: "The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits". He argued that as long as a company stays within the rules of the game, its only job is to increase profit. This became the Shareholder Primacy Doctrine.
Aparna: That sounds like a Star Trek alternate universe where competition is the only value.
Lars: Friedman became an advisor to Ronald Reagan, leading to Reaganomics: fewer regulations and freeing the markets. We morphed from a decentralized but regulated society to a monopolistic, deregulated one driven by shareholder interest.
Aparna: This coincided with a shift from producing things people need (roads, homes, food) to a bunch of junk nobody needs. We have a saturation of "crap" in the market, all theorized in that 50s-70s timeframe.
Lars: Under Reagan, the stock market tripled, but labor protections weakened and the wealth gap solidified. This is the model we are still using today.
Bachul: Today, we have a "K-shaped" economy supported by "K-shaped" compensation. CEOs are paid 30 to 100 times more than their lowest-paid employee. I’m interested in alternative models, like "Ownership Works," which tries to give all employees a piece of the company so they feel invested in its success.
When the working class has a little extra, they have leverage to make different choices. Right now, a small portion of the population has control over your access to health insurance and retirement. I want to see more people on the top floors realize that one check can change a family’s trajectory for generations.
Aparna: I struggle with the idea that a small percentage of the population feels comfortable being complicit in this wealth inequity. In cities like Seattle and San Francisco, we see teachers who can't afford to live where they work because tech companies have driven home prices to $2 million. It’s creating labor challenges everywhere.
Lars: We’ve inherited this history. It’s also worth noting that the 1970s was the first time we heard the term "burnout". Psychologist Dr. Herbert Freudenberger coined it while observing emotionally depleted volunteers at a free clinic. In 1981, Christina Maslach created the Maslach Burnout Inventory, which analyzes emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment.
Bachul: That is 100% relevant. The ethos I was taught was that you had to get in before your boss and stay until they left—"face-time". I can't remember a single vacation where I didn't work. When my sister moved to Amsterdam, they had to tell her to stop coming to the office in August because it was vacation time. She couldn't believe what we put people through in the U.S.. We’ve been given a scarcity mindset.
Aparna: Even in the nonprofit sector, burnout was a badge of achievement. I started at $27,000 a year, which wasn't enough to live on, yet there was intense wage theft because people were working 60 hours a week without overtime. Corporatism has permeated every sector.
Bachul: They use the "carrot and the stick". The newest "stick" is the threat that AI will take your job if you don't produce more for less.
Lars: The World Health Organization added burnout as an "occupational phenomenon" in 2019. A 2024 Gallup study found that burnout causes $438 billion in lost productivity globally. The irony is that while shareholder primacy is the goal, the system is fueling a productivity loss the size of a mid-sized economy.
We tell this history so we can make new choices. Bachul, what’s one takeaway for our listeners?
Bachul: The world will never define "enough" for you. My advice is to figure out what a beautiful life looks like to you and calculate what it costs to support it. Calculate your own "enough," because if your markers for success are external, you’ll never win.
Lars: My takeaway is having empathy for the absolute mess we’ve put managers in. My advice is to talk to your coworker. Not just to complain, but to understand each other so you can support each other. Ask them how they feel about being in a company driven by shareholder value.
Aparna: I’ll offer the Employee Primacy Doctrine. Under this doctrine, you are encouraged to put a two-hour block on your calendar for a made-up meeting and use that time to take a nap, work out, or eat a long lunch. Take care of yourself.
I want to close by reading a note from a listener: "I am hopeful that corporate work can evolve from extraction to stewardship... I want to design systems that value collective care... I don't want to just optimize the current machine; I want us to question it. rediesgn it before it redesigns us".
Lars: Thank you to our listeners and to Bachul for being with us today.
Aparna: Next week, we’ll explore a common feeling in white-collar work: the fear of losing it all.
Lars: If you have a story about work, email us at pod@circleback.club. This is the Circle Back Club.
Lars: Cue the jazz.