ACT I: THE FOUNDATION — Setting the stage
When we talk about responsibility in a company, it's almost impossible not to think of the famous term: Corporate Social Responsibility. This area has become so important that an entire library of methods and standards has been developed around it.
However, it seems that business leaders have forgotten some aspects of their responsibility that are not only significant but actually define the company itself.
A company is responsible—and by extension so are its executives—if it fulfills its reason for being: generating capital.
There's nothing more harmful to an entire society than a company that not only fails to generate capital but goes into debt. We don't need to ask who pays for the debts generated by companies and the impact on everyone around them.
Beyond generating capital, a company by definition must comply with all obligations under the law. Obviously, the term responsibility fits perfectly when referring to everything concerning compliance with the law.
But there's an aspect that's been largely forgotten: the responsibility for properly managing its people.
Countless studies analyze in detail the impact of work on people, but you don't need to be an expert on the subject to understand this relationship. The phrase "I spend more time here than in my own house" is universal. That says it all.
Work constitutes people's source of income and with it the present and future of themselves and their descendants. —Understand work as the action of working—.
Despite this evident and natural reality, executives and bosses operate their organizations as if they were playing with a joystick, by remote control, from a distance, leaving the weight of the operation on the shoulders of their workers while ignoring the impact of their actions or their inaction on them.
This situation exists because the business as such doesn't require attention to the impacts that the activity generates on its workers, plain and simply because the market doesn't care about how the organization functions in the slightest.
The market (the object of business) responds to its own needs, its own interests, and as such does nothing but demand products that satisfy its needs. Little matters the efforts made to achieve said product.
This results in large companies being managed like small startups, with the minimum essential resources or under an abysmal level of formality, and yet they achieve their financial results.
The cost of this relationship is absorbed strictly by the workers. It's them who, with their knowledge, their experience, their creativity, navigate the enormous difficulties that the business presents to them, when in theory the company should generate the necessary structures to face its challenges.
This generates a quite perverse relationship between workers and work, which assumes that a worker is valuable the more they resist—literally—this mode of operation.
In this way, individualism is stimulated, egotism, and dependency is generated, which workers use as a value or power, this being largely their own generator of dissatisfaction.
The circle has rings that link to each other and make this situation tend toward infinity.
I just think that we need to look more inward, pay more attention to the operation, not let it go alone, because that perception is false—it doesn't go alone, people carry it.
The Taleb Connection
The joystick captures it. Decisions on one end, consequences on the other, and a comfortable distance in between.
"The chief ethical rule is the following: Thou shalt not have antifragility at the expense of the fragility of others." — Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile (2012), Book VII, Ch. 23
La responsabilidad was written the year after Antifragile came out, in Spanish, without referencing it. It didn't need to. The mechanism is the same: a system in which the people making the decisions stay robust while the people executing them absorb the volatility. Workers' knowledge, experience, creativity — these aren't features the company is buying. They are the structure the company isn't building. The cost of running a large company like a small startup gets paid somewhere; the article's point is that it gets paid by whoever is closest to the work.
Hence: "It doesn't go alone, people carry it."
That single line is the article's whole thesis. The illusion of self-sustaining systems is what the chief ethical rule attacks. Strip the carrying, and the joystick has nothing to fly.
This article was translated from the 2013 Spanish original and revised in 2026 through human-AI collaboration — clarifying transitions and adding connections to Nassim Taleb's framework.