A corporation is typically considered evil if any of its employees are evil. If you're feeling generous, maybe you'd relax that to a small group of employees, say 0.1%. For example, AIG employs close to 100,000 people, yet I doubt that more than a few hundred were involved in the mortgage derivative mess. Yet we still pretty much universally revile AIG.
Say that 1% of people are evil. It's totally reasonable to expect an individual to be non-evil; after all, 99 out of 100 (in this model) are.
But then extend that out to a large corporation. The probability that you'll find at least one evil person in a startup of 10 is (1 - .99^10) = 0.095, or about 10%. The probability that you'll find at least 100 evil people in a corporation of 20,000 is (1 - .99^19900), which according to Google calculator is 1, i.e. virtually certain (there's some round-off error there, but you get the point). In order to have any fighting chance at being non-evil, a large organization has to actively seek out evil and eject it from the organization, simply because the organization as a whole tends to be judged by its worst members.
"Never attribute to malice what can be explained by math." - PG
the organization as a whole tends to be judged by its worst members.
I would qualify that by pointing out that it's only true if the worst members are in positions of power. If the evil members of an organization are its janitors, our problem is minimal. Unfortunately, your argument mostly holds true because in any broth, the scum always rises to the top.
That's not really the opposite, though, because the natural state is "doing nothing", and by your quote, that leads to evil prevailing. I did say that companies that want to remain non-evil have to actively seek out and expel evil from the organization...
A corporation is typically considered evil if any of its employees are evil. If you're feeling generous, maybe you'd relax that to a small group of employees, say 0.1%. For example, AIG employs close to 100,000 people, yet I doubt that more than a few hundred were involved in the mortgage derivative mess. Yet we still pretty much universally revile AIG.
Say that 1% of people are evil. It's totally reasonable to expect an individual to be non-evil; after all, 99 out of 100 (in this model) are.
But then extend that out to a large corporation. The probability that you'll find at least one evil person in a startup of 10 is (1 - .99^10) = 0.095, or about 10%. The probability that you'll find at least 100 evil people in a corporation of 20,000 is (1 - .99^19900), which according to Google calculator is 1, i.e. virtually certain (there's some round-off error there, but you get the point). In order to have any fighting chance at being non-evil, a large organization has to actively seek out evil and eject it from the organization, simply because the organization as a whole tends to be judged by its worst members.
"Never attribute to malice what can be explained by math." - PG