[inglor_cz]

"Take any example of companies "going woke" and the answer is always the same: it was more profitable."

[Citation needed.]

How do you even measure such stuff as "the effect of wokeness on profitability"? Notoriously, even in politically-neutral activity such as advertising it is nigh impossible to tease out its real impact on revenue and profits. Does Tesla suffer from low profitability because its owner is notoriously non-PC?

I have a different explanation. All big organizations, not just for-profit companies, have a huge principal-agent problem, where internal infighting among several cliques for dominance slowly starts to dominate the original externally-oriented goals. "Going woke" can plausibly be interpreted as a side effect of such internal power struggle.

As an analogy from a different field of human activity: I am old enough to remember the Soviet Union; factional conflicts within the politburo eventually led to the collapse of the entire empire and independence of the more developed nations, some of which have previously been under imperial control of Russia for centuries.