In "Becoming Steve Jobs", Tim Cook says the following in regards to Apple's collusion scandal:
"I know where Steve's head was. He wasn't doing anything to hold down salaries; it never came up. He had a simple objective: if we were working together on something, like with Intel, where we threw everything in the middle of the table and said, 'let's convert the Mac to the Intel processor', well, when we did that, we didn't want them poaching our employees that they were meeting, and they didn't want us poaching theirs. Doesn't it make sense that you wouldn't, that it's an OK thing? I don't think for a minute he thought he was doing anything bad. And I don't think he was thinking about saving any money. He was just very protective of his employees."
Ed Catmull of Pixar, a seemingly gentle person, is similarly unapologetic about the issue. Why is it that, at a certain level, intelligent company leaders seem to stop thinking of their employees as individuals and instead start thinking of them as company assets?
(I don't mean this as an anti-Apple comment. In fact, I want to give Jobs, Cook, and Catmull the benefit of the doubt, in the sense that they probably did approach the issue from the perspective of doing what's best for their companies, not as a quick way to save some paltry money. But that's kind of the underlying problem, isn't it? Once you've internalized the idea that your employees are company assets — that they aren't hard workers who make the company tick, but that they literally are the company — it's easy to slide down the slippery slope towards incredibly unethical and shady dealings like collusion. I wonder how this can be avoided.)