[context: a friend shared an infographic about how companies lose good talent, my response ballooned into a massive essay/rant. Enjoy]
I've been studying this a bunch to try and understand why business are ran so weird compared to like 30-50 years ago. It's become "more profitable" to have higher turn-over, higher burnout, more bullshit jobs, incompeteance rewarded and promoted. There's a bunch of factors at play here.
There's no slack at work anymore. Demands on a business are variable; seasonal sales, new competitors, regulation changes. Short-term Resources available to a business are variable; goods shortages, sick workers, environmental issues (pandemic), onbarding new workers, training.
So you have these two flucating variables. When supply is greater than demand it creates a surplus of potential output, when demand is greater, a shortage of potential output. Both cases are bad for businesses, so the goal is to minimize the total delta. However since you can't control these