The East India Company was an exploitative, ruthless and dishonorable organization that put millions of people in the Indian subcontinent to untold suffering.
Perhaps, the takeaway is to learn NOT to do that?!
The answer to that question is public relations, or exploiting human psychology to get the turkeys to vote for Christmas.
Modern news events are illuminating from that perspective.
The history is full of exploitative, ruthless and dishonorable organizations that barely had shards of success of the British East India company. So they obviously did something right.
"Rommel, you magnificent bastard, I read your book"
From whatever reports the upper management and regulators could scrape up at that time, there were many voices raised against the mayhem this enterprise was causing, but all complaints were quickly shot down after they saw the kind of riches the company was sending back home.