Consulting with corporations about the importance of putting “people before profits” is mutually beneficial to both corporation and speaker: the former is afforded cheap virtue and the latter an expensive lifestyle. In the world of speaking and corporate consulting, espousing the People-Before-Profits narrative — as with the virtues authenticity and diversity — is simply good business practice.

This value-for-value model is lost on the very same speakers who take it for granted that profits are suspect. These self-styled experts fail to see that, unlike President Obama’s facile description of the tension between liberty and security, the choice between people and profits is a false one. Yet companies throughout the United States are happy to self-flagellate before speaker after speaker, pretending to temporarily forget what reality will forever remind them: that profits are a darn good measure of the extent to which you have served others.

At the heart of the People-Before-Profits movement is an ambivalence about the dignity and morality of business. In popular culture, this idea is most evident in movies and on television, where businessmen are almost invariably portrayed as either moral bankrupts (Wall Street) or courageous heroes who unveil the moral bankruptcy of business (Michael Clayton).