Earlier quoted context omitted.
> our operation has become brittle and subject to massive failures under the slightest pressure I somehow notice a lot of this lately, in many different areas. I wonder if there isn't a common cause behind those. Is it just covid or something bigger?
It is large due to corporations taking on lean-business models from MBAs over the last decade+. When a business runs lean, it becomes more fragile to disruptions. Unfortunately due to our economic system, there is a semi-regular boon-bust cycle, so if it wasn't COVID, it would have been something else that kicks the stool out from under the legs of these corporations. In the past this wasn't as big as an issue becaus…
The "religion" of profit maximization and cost minimization has a price - it's NOT GLOBALLY OPTIMAL OVER TIME for the survival of the organization (profits, anti-fragility, etc.) nor for the larger system of a national or global economy.
Mathematically, flat, non-cycle economic systems are IMPOSSIBLE. You can never achieve it WITHOUT introducing systemic instability because you are eliminating ALL the information REQUIRED to maintain feedback control and you are removing agility of the system. Once the error signal goes to zero, the system is 100% out of control! It's open loop. Then any "environmental" change can tip the entire system over where that could be a competitor, other nation or "act of God" disruption.
And this is what happens when you profit maximize/cost minimize to its ultimate limit. And on the way to that extreme, you are increasingly make the system more brittle and the probabilities of failure increase.
Re having all people being "productive", the reality of things like Price's Law also make reliability worse as an organization (corporation, government, etc.) grows.
Price's Law says that the number of people who actually do most of the work is proportional to the square root of the organization size. In the case of supply chains, most of the people who are "assuring system reliability" actually aren't and generally are incapable of doing so anyway. It's a reality due to network effects (adverse ones but the same dynamic as the good ones - you can't control or differentiate the two).
Note you can take it to the other extreme: not worrying about profits is just as bad if not worse. Socialism/Collectivism doesn't work either for similar reasons actually.