Mr. Beast Discovers HR

Experienced consultants will not find this story surprising: Mr. Beast, a company with over $700 million in revenue, is embroiled in a harassment scandal and is trying to address it by hiring their FIRST head of HR.

As I often seen with my grad students, a lot of people just getting into the business world assume “surely these big companies know what they’re doing” but you quickly discover that almost all corporations are reactive – someone had a good idea once upon a time that made some money, and ever since then, they’ve been in an unending scramble to keep the company alive and out of trouble.

In this leaked email from Mr Beast himself, you can see related brilliant insights like “maybe we should train people” and “maybe independent outside experts could help.” I do appreciate that Mr Beast didn’t start his YouTube channel to become a manager, but founder responsibilities change a lot when you start to make millions.

On the bright side, this sort of practice keeps my AI consultancy in business, as AI companies trying to work in talent management keep discovering that there are laws about what they’re doing or get sales-blocked by internal IOs asking for tech reports or at least “evidence,” and suddenly they need some expert advice or risk losing massive customer accounts.

But geez… even so, I do wish for a little more proactivity within these companies, which could reduce the pure chaos that this creates for the people working there, just trying to make a living.