“In the modern corporate sphere the desire to make profits, however, has been replaced with the desire to achieve growth at any cost. Often this means the adoption of loss-leading strategies where products or services are given away for free or subsidized — because people are unlikely to want to pay for them — for the purpose of capturing customers.

This is justified by two notions. First, these products and services are so visionary and forward thinking that we the customers can’t yet understand, or imagine, what they will mean to us. Hence, while we may not be prepared to pay for them today, one day in the future — perhaps once we have fully lost the skills to make our own food, drive, write lists or interact with people face-to-face — we will eventually be prepared to pay top dollar for them.

The second justification is that if you hook enough customers to your brand you will eventually be able to sell them something they will be prepared to pay for. What that thing is doesn’t necessarily have to be determined yet, and may or may not be determined in countless corporate pivots that follow onwards.

This is why the mystic vision officer is so important. Establishing a vision of what tomorrow’s needs may be, rather than what today’s needs actually are, is essential to keeping the investment case alive. It has little to do with the practical realities of operating a profitable and successful business on the ground in the here and now.

And it’s all very believable because this is exactly how a selection of today’s most profitable technology stocks have made it. The problem is, it’s a strategy closely linked to monopoly and not one that every single corporate can make work.

Thus, the more we mistake and celebrate this sort of bullshitting as legitimate corporate enterprise, the greater the risk actually worthwhile corporations mimic the exercise, and in so doing become increasingly useless.”

Source: Izabella Kaminska for the Financial Times