And that depressing book The Selfish Gene? It fit right in with 1970s-era thinking – a time hailed as the ‘Me Decade’ by the New York magazine. In the late 1990s, an avid Richard Dawkins fan decided to put his take on Dawkins ideas into practice. Rather than making him feel pessimistic, the book inspired CEO Jeffrey Skilling to run an entire corporation – the energy giant Enron – on the mechanism of greed. Skilling set up a ‘Rank & Yank’ system for performance reviews at Enron. A score of 1 placed you among the company’s top performers and gave you a fat bonus. A score of 5 put you at the bottom, a group ‘sent to Siberia’ – besides being humiliated, if you couldn’t find another position within two weeks you were fired. The result was a Hobbesian business culture with cut-throat competition between employees. In late 2001 the news broke that Enron had been engaging in massive accounting fraud. When the dust finally settled, Skilling was in prison. These days, 60 per cent of the largest US corporations still employ some variation of the Rank & Yank system.

— Humankind by Rutger Bregman (Page 71)