Over the Mid-Autumn Festival holiday I watched eight straight episodes of the popular Japanese soap opera Hanzawa Naoki, a show that offers an exceptionally unflattering perspective on what it takes to survive in the workplace. The titular protagonist pulls no punches, stating flat out at one point that managers take all the credit for the work of their subordinates while laying the blame for their own failings on those same subordinates. I’m sure that many among the show’s viewership can relate.

In the first episode, Hanzawa’s boss orders him to make a ¥500-million loan to one of their bank’s clients while barring him from investigating the company’s finances. When the loan goes bad, Hanzawa initially blames himself, but then discovers that his boss had received a kickback from the company. Realizing that the default had been planned from the outset, he begins gathering evidence for a counterattack.

Hanzawa decides not to report his boss’s criminal receipt of the kickback. Instead, he demands a promotion to the head office as the price for keeping his mouth shut.

In a rational world, a good manager would make full use of a capable, responsible subordinate like Hanzawa, but it rarely works that way in the real world, particularly with managers who have acquired their positions via connections or a backdoor. In the show, for example, the executive director of the bank’s Tokyo headquarters runs the workplace like a gangster, spreading disinformation and setting factions against one another as a means of moving himself up the company ladder.

Ho Fei-peng, CEO of Cité Media Holding Group, refers to such people as “office mobsters” and recalls crossing swords with one in particular. He describes that person, a manager of equal seniority, as a slippery individual who would make molehills of mountains, and nothing at all of molehills, and whose avoidance of real work negatively affected the operations and efficiency of the company. When Ho couldn’t help but speak out about him in a meeting, this individual became furious and spread the word that Ho had better watch himself.

Believing that tolerating such “mobsters” within a company is a recipe for disaster, Ho made a point of identifying them and getting rid of them when he himself moved into senior management.

Turning from the employment market to corporate competition, the dominant thinking nowadays is that 2008’s global financial crisis and the subsequent global recession were brought on by a particular variety of dog-eat-dog capitalism, and that this form of capitalism has reached a dead end. This state of affairs has resulted in more attention being directed towards social enterprises, that is, organizations that “earn money while doing good, then put their profits to work doing more good.”

According to the Social Enterprise Research Center at Fu Jen Catholic University, Taiwan currently has more than 5,000 active social enterprises. The entrepreneurs behind these companies have little interest in building the next Apple or HTC, and refuse to let a lack of capital slow their pursuit of their objectives—things like fostering community development, cultivating small-scale organic agriculture, creating job opportunities for the disadvantaged, and supporting third-world producers.

Social enterprises are challenging contemporary exploitative business models and focusing the power of the people on changing the way our society thinks and acts. With consumer awareness rising, these organizations are beginning to garner support. Though not yet very powerful, they are slowly coming into their own.

Judging corporate and personal value in terms of money and power is twisted, unsettling and unsustainable. Mutually supportive small economies and cooperative enterprises that seek to make others happy and address humanity’s yearning for trust, happiness, and a sense of connection to the natural world represent a much healthier way forward.