A Letter to the Tyrants of Business

There was a time when leadership meant stewardship — when the weight of responsibility carried a kind of reverence, when power came with perspective, and when the corner office was a place of protection, not performance. But somewhere along the way, something broke. The pursuit of profit became the measure of progress, efficiency replaced empathy, and the very word leadership was hijacked by people who mistake control for competence.

I am writing to you — the tyrants of business — not as an outsider or a protestor, but as someone who once believed in the system you built. I am writing because the people you lead are exhausted, not from the work itself, but from the constant erosion of their dignity. I am writing because I have seen too many good people shrink themselves to survive your meetings, silence their truth to protect their paycheques, and apologize for not keeping up with demands no human should be proud of making.

You tell them they are a family, but you treat them like machinery. You preach culture while weaponising fear. You demand trust but give none in return. And in doing so, you have created a generation of employees who are loyal to the paycheck but disconnected from the purpose, who stay not because they believe, but because they are too tired to start again.

You tell them they’re family, but you treat them like machinery.

B

The Performance of Care

You’ve become fluent in the language of empathy without understanding its grammar. You talk about well-being in quarterly reports and post about “mental health awareness” during campaign months, but your calendars are still overbooked and your people are still overworked. You say “take care of yourself” in the same breath that you assign another impossible deadline.

Every time you do this, you teach your people that compassion is a brand position, not a belief. That kindness is seasonal, not structural. That rest is something you reward only when it no longer costs you productivity.

You treat culture like a product you can launch and measure, as if humanity can be quantified on a spreadsheet. But culture cannot be built through initiatives; it is built through intention. It is the tone you set when someone fails. It is the grace you extend when someone’s life interrupts their deliverable. It is the respect you show when no one is watching.

You cannot manufacture loyalty from the same fear you used to extract performance.

You have turned leadership into theatre — beautiful presentations, rehearsed empathy, predictable applause. And yet behind that performance, your people are quietly bleeding.

The Cost of Fear

Fear is efficient. It gets results. It pushes people to deliver, to stay up later, to check emails on weekends. Fear will meet your quarterly targets — but it will bankrupt your culture.

What you call “high performance” is often just survival instinct. The long hours, the polite compliance, the tired smiles — these are the symptoms of a workforce that knows the consequences of honesty.

When people stop speaking truth to power, the silence becomes poisonous. Meetings become rituals of pretense, where everyone nods at strategies they secretly know won’t work, because questioning them would cost them credibility. You call that alignment. It’s not. It’s quiet collapse.

If people can’t disagree with you, they’re not following you — they’re enduring you.

And yet, you seem proud of the exhaustion, as if burnout were proof of commitment, as if loyalty were measured in lost weekends and dimmed eyes.

The Myth of Merit

You tell your people that effort will be rewarded, that talent will rise, that those who deliver will grow. But we both know that’s not how your system works. Promotions go to proximity, not performance. Recognition goes to the visible, not the valuable. You talk about fairness, but your actions speak fluent favouritism.

And the saddest part is that many of you don’t even notice anymore. The system that benefits you has numbed your empathy. You’ve confused your privilege for perspective.

Meritocracy was a promise you once made, but you replaced it with metrics. And in doing so, you created a culture where politics replaced potential.

When people stop believing effort leads somewhere, they stop giving you their best — they give you their minimum.

The decay of trust doesn’t begin with betrayal; it begins with inconsistency. You say one thing and do another. You preach transparency but hide behind process. You ask for feedback but punish dissent. Eventually, people stop expecting integrity and start settling for survival.

Fear will meet your quarterly targets — but it will bankrupt your culture.

The Forgotten Humanity of Leadership

You’ve made leadership transactional — a negotiation of power instead of an act of service. You lead as if people exist to protect your reputation, forgetting that it was always your responsibility to protect theirs.

Leadership is not about control. It’s about custody — the careful holding of people’s potential, the deliberate choice to create an environment where others can be both ambitious and human.

Somewhere along the way, you forgot that your title does not make you important — the people who trust you do.

The true measure of leadership is how many people feel safe in your presence, not how many obey your instructions.

And if you’ve lost that safety, you’ve already lost the culture, no matter how strong your numbers look.

A Reckoning, and a Reminder

This letter is not written in anger. It’s written in hope — because I still believe you can change. The tyrant is not always a villain. Sometimes it’s just a leader who forgot what the role was for.

You can rebuild trust. You can listen again. You can stop performing empathy and start practicing it. You can recognize that your people are not lucky to have you — you are fortunate to have them.

But it begins with humility. With owning the damage done, not defending it. With admitting that leadership has become too self-congratulatory, too disconnected from the everyday exhaustion it causes.

You must remember what it means to lead, not as a title, but as a stewardship of lives that intersect with yours for eight hours a day.

Apologies don’t weaken authority. They humanise it.

If you want your people to be inspired, start by being believable. If you want them to stay, start by seeing them.

The future doesn’t belong to those who dominate. It belongs to those who dignify.

The Promise of a Better Kind of Power

Imagine, for a moment, a kind of leadership that doesn’t demand loyalty through fear, but earns it through fairness. Imagine an organization where empathy is not a strategy, but a standard. Imagine a culture where accountability flows upward as easily as it flows down.

That’s not utopian — it’s overdue.

Because the next generation of leaders — the ones watching you now — will not inherit your titles if they also inherit your toxicity. They will walk away and build their own tables, their own systems, their own languages of leadership that do not depend on fear to function.

And when they do, you will call them rebellious. But they’re not rebelling; they’re repairing.

“The future doesn’t belong to those who dominate. It belongs to those who dignify.”

The People You Forgot to Thank

Somewhere in your offices are people still trying. They show up early, stay late, hold things together you’ve long stopped noticing. They defend you in rooms you’ve never entered. They do the small things that make the big things work. And still, you overlook them.

They are not perfect. They are tired, flawed, sometimes afraid. But they are the soul of your organisation. Without them, you are just furniture and overhead.

So if this letter feels uncomfortable, it’s supposed to. It’s not an accusation; it’s an echo — of every voice that went unheard, every email that was never answered, every idea dismissed because it didn’t sound like yours.

The good news is that it’s not too late. But the bad news — the honest news — is that trust doesn’t come back through words. It comes back through action.

“You cannot demand loyalty in a system that forgot how to love its people.”

So lead again, if you still can.

But this time, lead like a human being.