How to Run Your Business Into the Ground

Lessons from the Fabian Society and Middle-earth

So you’ve got a business. It’s doing fine. People are motivated, the culture’s alive, there’s a spark.
Disgusting, isn’t it?

Don’t worry — help is at hand. The Fabian Society already figured out how to take anything alive, soulful, and human… and bureaucratise it into the nearest available grave.

If you’d like to do the same with your company, here’s your five-step plan — as tested in every committee meeting since 1884.

1. Replace Vision with a Strategy Document

You can’t have people running around with purpose. That sort of thing is dangerous. Purpose makes people unpredictable — they start taking initiative, building things, having ideas.

So stamp it out. Replace your story with a PowerPoint. Write a 50-page document about “alignment,” full of words like synergy and impact pathways. Then store it somewhere no one will ever find it again.

The result: no one remembers why they’re here, but they’ll have a laminated copy of how to be busy.

Tolkien’s alternative: tell a story so compelling it doesn’t need slides. Frodo didn’t attend a half-day vision workshop. He got a sentence: Take the Ring to Mordor. Clear, dangerous, unforgettable.

2. Centralise Everything (and Call It Leadership)

If you want to destroy initiative, centralise it.
Make sure all decisions flow through you or, better, a committee with a six-week turnaround.

You’ll be amazed how fast your brightest people stop thinking. They’ll spend their days filling in forms to request permission to do the thing you hired them for.

This is the Fabian way 👍👍: improve the world one policy document at a time, until everyone forgets what improvement means.

Tolkien’s alternative: the Shire worked because people were left to it. Farmers led farms. Families led families. Even the mayor’s job was ceremonial — imagine that. Try it once. See what happens when adults act like adults.

3. Redefine Virtue as Efficiency

Nothing says “soulless machine” quite like rewarding obedience over courage.
Make “efficiency” your highest value. If something takes less time but achieves nothing meaningful, perfect — give it an award.

Track everything. Create dashboards, metrics, and KPIs until the only people left are the ones who enjoy updating spreadsheets more than serving customers.

Bonus points: sack anyone who questions the system. They’re “not aligned.”

Tolkien’s alternative: remember that loyalty, humility, and courage don’t fit neatly on a pie chart. Sam Gamgee didn’t need an annual review. He just kept showing up — something your efficiency experts can’t quantify.

4. Strip the Sacred (and Rebrand It as Innovation)

Rituals, meaning, shared humanity — these are inefficiencies. Remove them.
Turn every celebration into a “quarterly performance alignment.” Replace your Christmas party with a wellness webinar.

When people start talking about purpose, nod wisely and quote productivity data. Remind them that emotion is unprofessional.

Within a year you’ll have a workforce that clocks in, clocks out, and quietly despises everything they do. Perfect.

Tolkien’s alternative: keep a few sacred things. Shared meals. Handwritten notes. Time to think. You don’t need religion to treat your work as sacred — you just need respect for the living souls inside your system. Mordor had none, and look how that went.

5. Promote the Clever, Not the Good

When you need new leaders, pick the people who sound smart, not the ones who are steady, kind, or trustworthy.
Give power to the loudest voice in the room. Ignore the quiet one who actually gets things done.

It’s what the Fabians did: worship intellect, trust theory, and assume morality will work itself out.

The outcome: a management class of ambitious Gollums, clutching their precious job titles and whispering about process improvements.

Tolkien’s alternative: promote stewards, not sorcerers. People who want to contribute, not rule. It’s slower. It’s safer. It’s sane.

How to Guarantee Collapse

To summarise:

  • Replace vision with jargon.

  • Replace trust with control.

  • Replace virtue with metrics.

  • Replace meaning with branding.

  • Replace leadership with cleverness.

You’ll have the modern British company: technically alive, spiritually dead, and somehow still scheduling a “culture audit” to find out why morale’s low.

Tolkien would recognise it instantly. It’s Mordor with better stationery.

If you’d prefer something more alive, burn half your policies, talk to your people, and tell them a story that matters. The rest will follow.