Wells Fargo claims it isn't the leadership - it is just a few thousand bad apple low-level employees and they have been fired.
http://money.cnn.com/2016/09/08/investing/wells-fargo-create...
http://money.cnn.com/2016/09/08/investing/wells-fargo-create...
The full statement is 'A few bad apples spoil the barrel' - which comes from the concept that a rotting apple lets off ethylene gas which will cause the apples surrounding it to also turn.
This is probably a better analogy than intended for the companies that incorrectly use it since bad behavior spreads like a corrupting influence through an organization and fixing it would really require larger changes than just getting rid of a couple people.
I'm deeply skeptical of the claim that you can have a few thousand instances of "rot" without there being somewhere higher in the company it's being spread from. If 1% of the company is "rotting", then something in leadership is "rotting".
The analogy is apt, but the question is identifying the bad apples - and asking if those on top are the bad apples spoiling the barrel.
None of them work for Wells Fargo anymore, and most have moved onto tech management or recruiter roles in the area. I'm not close friends but we're still in the same social circles, and I haven't heard of repercussions impacting them.
It's sad really. It seems to me that the whole Wells Fargo scandal is ultimately a lesson about how this company abused their employees and set them impossible tasks like "each customer should have X credit cards and Y accounts."
But that's not what people seem to have taken from it. Instead, the whole incident has been presented as "just another big bank defrauding its customers." In reality though, the goal of the fraud was not to enrich anyone, it was just for these employees to keep their jobs.
It feels like this whole incident could have spurred a conversation about the toxicity of these kind of unrealistic sales goals that provide no benefit to the customer, but it didn't.
Some Uber drivers literally have criminal records for driving for Uber, Uber even recruited and paid bonuses for drivers to unknowingly leave counties where they were operating legally to counties they were violating the law, think anyone from Uber corporate is going to jail anytime soon?
Where?