Why do organizations keep causing harm? And how do we cure toxic cultures?

Not a week goes by with out yet another major organizational scandal: Open AI’s agents going rogue, Volkswagen’s emissions cheating, Boeing’s persistent safety issues, endemic police misconduct at the Oakland PD, and sexual abuse at yet another Roman Catholic Church. So why do do organizations keep causing these harms?

Benjamin van Rooij and Nicholas Lord argue that to truly understand and address the impacts of dysfunctional organizations we must look beyond leadership and understand the deeper problems in the organization itself. To do so, Toxic uses dozens of in-depth case studies to connect the dots between various scandals and illustrate the deeper toxic patterns within organizations that lead to them.

Each chapter recounts compelling stories of individuals caught within these toxic systems and addresses urgent societal challenges such as environmental degradation, the opioid epidemic, the harms of social media, and police abuse. Stories include: 

• Facebook sought to grow from 1 billion to 5 billion users, leading it to enter Myanmar’s volatile ethnic context without having the knowledge or capacity to do proper content moderation, and thus contributing to genocide.
• Don Parus, a BP engineer made an all-out effort to warn company leaders to invest in safety, just months before a major explosion killed fiteen and injured hundreds at its Texas City Refinery.  
• Keith Batt, a rookie at the Oakland Police Department, was made to witness, condone and participate in falsifying arrest records, planting evidence, and even in unsanctioned violence, all within two weeks on the job.

Revealing, accessible, engaging, and unsettling, Toxic breaks down the core characteristics of toxic organizations and shows readers how to recognize and address toxicity in their everyday lives.