Back in 2023, I interviewed a woman who had lost the rights to her own name…to a business.
When she was a young designer, up and coming, eager to make a name for herself (no pun intended), she built a massive following and was noticed by a very large corporation. This corporation eventually offered her a brand deal with a contract that employed her and gave her the step up she needed, taking that following to new heights with the backing of this company.
But when the marriage soured and she tried to leave, she found that she would not only be leaving the company behind, but that the contract she had signed meant she would not be able to ever use her name - the one given to her when she was born - again.1 The company owned her following now, along with her name…something we don’t ever imagine having taken from us, especially by a business.
I launched Target Snarket in 2023 with my then-team and a basic premise: Just because businesses can does not mean businesses should, and that was what we were out to discuss. We wanted to identify and explore the grey areas and loopholes and “technically allowed” areas that companies exploit for their own success, often at the expense of others, like employees, vendors, or clients and customers. I had seen plenty in my years running BROAD Digital Consulting, and had always taken care to advise clients that best practices did not have to mean extraction and exploitation, they did not have to mean shortchanging your teams or your customers in an effort to squeeze out more cash…especially since the people executing these practices were also generally not the ones who were seeing any of that cash in the first place.
Long before I started BROAD Digital, I attended a conference that asked the question, “What if companies practiced more transparency in order to build trust?” The outcomes were clear and positive; conversely, the outcomes of opacity, ignoring or lying to your customers, or simply not giving a fuck about them…well, they eroded trust. And erosion of trust had demonstrable impacts on the bottom line. It seemed obvious to me that there wasn’t just a good moral argument for not being a total bag of dicks to your people (your employees or your customers), there was a good financial argument for it as well.
Likewise, early in my BROAD Digital days, I attended a now-defunct conference on how companies could be ethical about data collection, storage, and use (the fact that the conference is now defunct is not lost on me and there’s a joke in there somewhere.) Study after study, case after case, the research showed that when companies treated people with care (since, after all, people are the reason they can even be allowed to exist), good things happened for them.
Idk about you, but I’m sensing a theme.
Which is why it threw me into a real “dark night of the soul” situation when, in my mid-30s, I had this glass-shattering moment: The people at the top were getting theirs, and frankly, they didn’t give two shits if anyone else was happy, cared for, okay, able to survive, even though it was proven over and over again that giving two shits was, in fact, good for business & the bottom line.
Why? Because it’s my firm belief that the people at that very top often actually don’t even give two shits about the business itself. There is one thing they understand, and it is: “Get yours and fuck the rest.”
While that might sound counterintuitive, because of course the C-Suite is hired to care about the long-term impacts of the business, I have repeatedly seen executives favor broken systems that secured their individual financial incentives in the short-term fiscal year or quarter instead of investing in new systems that work for everyone and work for the business long-term. It’s the difference between a professional sports team owner who knows the team is broken and doesn’t care/won’t fix it because he keeps making money no matter what, vs an owner that is willing to suck for a few “building years” because they understand they are trying to build a legacy championship team.
Not only is it not counterintuitive, it is happening every day. And you don’t need to be me, a consultant to F-100 companies, to get under the hood and see it: You can see it in the companies you work for, interact with, in the headlines constantly, eschewing long-term trust, growth, and impact over short-term exploitation & big cash days.
Does that mean they’ll all fail? No, for a few reasons:
There is “strategy” in reactivity. The long-term strategy of trust, growth, building, and investment is sound & impactful, but can come with growing pains. The “long-term” “strategy” of focusing on the short-term and prioritizing reactivity can keep companies around for a long time…because when things get bad, they can pass on the bad to everyone below them, in the form of workforce reductions, not backfilling roles, and leaving the work of those laid off to now be covered by those who were “lucky” enough to remain.
If things get really, really bad, those at the very top are usually insulated. This can be in the form of a very nice severance package, a buy-out, or even a government bail-out, complete with a golden parachute for the Chaos Architects who created the mess in the first place.
On the one hand, why shouldn’t they be focused on themselves? It’s just a job, right? This part might not be so galling if these same people didn’t also spend an inordinate amount of time convincing (or shaming) the folks at the middle and bottom of the pyramid to practice things like “stewardship” and being “entrepreneurial” about the business and really caring about whether the business lives or dies. It might not be so deeply offensive if these same people didn’t clutch their pearls at idiotic thinkpieces naming things like “quiet quitting” or insisting that everyone come back to the office “for culture’s sake”. Meanwhile, decisions that could improve conditions for everyone remain unmade, largely because it might also require further scrutiny of broken incentivization systems or massive disparities in the stated goals vs the actual individual executive objectives, ie: Let me make my money and leave me TF alone.
I truly believed for many years that we could right this ship, that by practicing what we preach, that by centering people, we could make this system one that could work for everyone. I believed that by building a business that was literally meant to advise companies in this way, and by holding firm on my positions and educating clients on why the courses of action we were advising were the best for long-term, repeatable success, that I would be contributing to the change and fixing my own corner of the world and improving the business world for all of us.
Instead, 11 years later, the scene feels a lot more like if Hans Gruber took the $640M in bonds from the vault, convinced everyone in the building that if they now worked for him, he would totally share some of that with them one day, gives John McClane a position as head of security, and then at the end of the movie lays everyone off, and heads back to Germany to live in a castle and write editorials for Forbes about how maybe it’s greedy for people to want to be able to eat three meals a day.
The situation feels bleak, to say the least.
Just because a business can does not mean a business should. Unfortunately, there are still too many of us who recognize that things are a lot harder these days, but still believe ourselves temporarily embarrassed millionaires whose ship just has not yet come in. We blame individuals for the failures of the system. We tell people that if they don’t like living on food stamps even though they have a full-time job at Walmart that they should just find another job. We pressure coworkers into giving up their own PTO days to a parent whose kid has a terminal illness because they’ve run out. We shrug our shoulders and tell that young woman that if she wanted to keep the name given to her by her parents at birth, she shouldn’t have signed the contract.
We should be asking why companies are allowed to pay their people that little and expect the taxpayers to shoulder the rest of the burden. We should be asking why a company can’t simply offer more PTO days to an employee (something that costs them nothing) instead of making others give up theirs. We should be asking why a company should be able to take the rights of a woman’s name at all, contract or not.
We should be making it deeply unpopular and shameful to de-center humans in the working world, as both employees and consumers (especially when their expense is directly connected to an executive’s gain). It’s easy to say that humans can be replaced in the working world by robots or even just workforce reductions never being backfilled, but here’s the truth: These same humans can’t be replaced in the consumer world. If we don’t have money to spend, these businesses will fail because they cannot survive without us. And before the giant corporations fail, the smaller companies will fold first, meaning that we should recognize swiftly that simping for Giant-Corp doesn’t put cash in our pockets.
Pledging fealty to the system over our fellow humans has never paid off for those who made that pledge, in all of history. There is zero good economic or self-interested argument for it. It’s not even about being a bleeding heart: It’s about being practical and understanding that you will never benefit from a system designed to benefit people who are a lot richer than you. They’re not going to let you get that rich. They don’t want or need the competition, babe.
Picking this project back up under a rebranded name “unstructured data” is meant to jump back into these conversations. I’m not here to be a watchdog, but to keep the conversations moving forward, and to reframe them from a business perspective so that we understand that there isn’t even a good business argument to keeping things as-is. I want to help readers & listeners understand the nuance and complexity of some of these conversations and pull back the curtain on some of these practices so that our arguments are harder to dismiss as dirty socialist idealist bleeding hearts because there is practical, realistic value to breaking this system down and making something that works for everyone. I want to center action: Instead of feeling powerless, what can we control and how do we do it?
It can often feel like the state of affairs for the majority of us continues to get bleaker. But we can do something, even if it’s brick by brick. Short-term survival is not our only option, and the current system is, as we know, unsustainable. Join me for the ongoing conversation about how we can build for what comes after.
1. Hayley Paige won her court battle in 2025 and is now able to use her name again; she has attached it back to the brand she started when she was forced to come up with a new name.
If you’re looking for more news sources that are straightforward, monitor biases, and are more concerned with reporting than editorializing, Danielle recommends the following:
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