This isn’t a review of Jennifer’s book. I will write that later, but as I begin it I feel palpable relief that people are saying these things out loud. Our management and professional development literature needs to stop speaking from a neutral position that assumes that the ethical landscapes within the companies we work are functional and working as they should. It concludes that there are things individuals can do to succeed in these corrupt environments.

Simple things like keeping notes, sending follow up emails, asking for agendas, or conducting internal stakeholder interviews, a mainstay of technology innovation from human perspectives, are deeply threatening when regulatory compliance and ethical practice is optional. Meetings with no notes and outcomes and action points leaves room for scapegoating. Undocumented interactions give cover to bullying. And too much clarity and documentation on anything hurts your strategic plausible deniability. Instructing young leaders to do these things especially when they have an underestimated identity in tech and business is putting them in peril.

Whenever I read advice to aspiring business leaders about how to comport yourself, establish authority, and deliver leadership, or when I read analyses of how and why underestimated populations fail to thrive in business, I think to myself, no one takes into account that at least 36% of the organizations we serve are in fact, criminal enterprises or entering into areas that have accelerated into grey areas regulatory bodies have yet to be able to define and contain. It is estimated that in 2021 we lost 1.7 trillion to vanilla white collar crime and 6 trillion to cybercrime specifically.

This is through discovered and reported crimes and ethical breaches only and not those that go undetected. Let’s not forget to include no-show jobs, crony networks, and nepotism place unqualified people into roles that cause data breeches and underestimate human and planetary harms in favor of driving revenue at all costs for short tail gains. Knowledge capital in these contexts are deeply threatening as they threaten to expose the lack of qualifications in the person leading.

Fraud is a persistent state in the anxious field of accelerating digital transformation as the number of fraudulent technology claims become exposed one by one as journalists and regulators catch up with the ways people do business in a world of sparkling front ends and black box backends.

We’ve been through cycles of regulatory overreach before but now, the law is becoming toothless.

I don’t have an answer to any of this. But my advice to hard working people failing to advance as they should and smart people feeling pushed out of rooms, like the ones we coach and support at Singular XQ: there is a reason you aren’t being allowed ahead. This combines with discrimination in pernicious ways and may drive inequity even more than plain old prejudice.

If you aren’t in the club, you aren’t a beneficiary of the organized criminal effort.

If you aren’t a beneficiary.

You might tell.