The Profit Motive Skews Leaders’ Priorities from Silicon Valley to Washington

STANFORD, CA,USA - Aug 20 2022: Aerial view of Stanford University, Palo Alto, Silicon Valley, California, USA — Stanford University, Palo Alto, Silicon Valley, California, USA. Source: Shutterstock

Published on: October 30, 2026 at 9:49 am

In his debut investigative memoir, How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University, student journalist Theo Baker exposes an elite institution that he alleges has been co-opted by Silicon Valley wealth, highlighting instances when institutional crisis management and corporate-style venture incubation eclipsed academic integrity. The book chronicles Baker’s exposé of systemic research misconduct during his freshman year, which forced Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne to resign. It also delivered an incisive indictment of an administrative culture dominated by an obsession with boosting the university’s endowment, billionaire-backed slush funds, venture-capital scouts, and an aggressive public-relations apparatus designed to protect the university’s brand at all costs.

Academy of Management Scholar Jeffrey Pfeffer of Stanford University said that he sees a parallel between that example, which hits close to home, with US President Donald Trump’s personal profit-seeking and coziness with wealthy donors, including financiers and tech billionaires.

“It’s important to put this administration in a broader context of that widespread tendency for leaders’ priorities to skew toward the profit motive at the expense of various stakeholders,” Pfeffer said. “While Trump is obviously very visible and very extreme, the problem of leaders prioritizing profits over people and not being good stewards is common.”

Questioning whether layoffs are really necessary

As an example, Pfeffer cited Howard Behar, the retired president of Starbucks Coffee Company’s North America division, the founding president of Starbucks International, and board member.

“I know Howard because he’s part of the conscious capitalism movement—I met him when I went to a conscious capitalism conference, and he said to me, ‘In 2008, the economy was not in good shape, but Starbucks had plenty of money, and we were still making money. We just weren’t making as much money as before, and when we did a round of layoffs, I told [former Starbucks CEO and Chairman Emeritus] Howard Schultz that I thought that this was unconscionable,’ and Schultz resigned from the board,” Pfeffer said. “This goes back now almost 20 years.

“So profiteering, prioritizing profits and shareholders over all other stakeholders and treating employees as expendable, is not particularly new either,” he said. “It is a continuation of a trend that has been going on for a long time.”

A sample of Pfeffer’s AOM research findings:

Author

Daniel Butcher

Daniel Butcher is a writer and the Managing Editor of AOM Today at the Academy of Management (AOM). Previously, he was a writer and the Finance Editor for Strategic Finance magazine and Management Accounting Quarterly, a scholarly journal, at the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA). Prior to that, he worked as a writer/editor at The Financial Times, including daily FT sister publications Ignites and FundFire, as well as Crain Communications’s InvestmentNews and Crain’s Wealth, eFinancialCareers, and Arizent’s Financial Planning, Re:Invent|Wealth, On Wall Street, Bank Investment Consultant, and Money Management Executive. He earned his bachelor’s degree, Cum Laude, from the University of Colorado Boulder and his master’s degree from New York University. You can reach him at [email protected] or via LinkedIn.

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