Success Quote by Lee Scott

There is a neat little rhetorical trick in Lee Scott's line: it reframes accountability as trend-chasing. By calling criticism "fashionable", he slides the debate from facts to vibe, implying that the outrage cycle is less about what happened and more about what’s popular to condemn this week. It’s an executive’s version of saying: you’re not seeing a pattern, you’re following a script.

The phrase "individual actions and individual failures" does two jobs at once. First, it atomizes harm, turning systemic problems into isolated mishaps - the bad apple defense, polished for a media age. Second, it quietly asks for sympathy: any large organization will have mistakes; judging the whole "company" becomes unfair by definition. That’s the subtextual bargain: if scale is the reason you’re being scrutinized, then scale should also excuse you.

Then comes the "broadest possible brush" image, a vivid accusation that critics are careless artists smearing nuance. It’s a smart preemptive strike because it delegitimizes aggregation - the very method investigative journalism, labor advocates, and regulators use to show that repeated "individual" incidents are evidence of policy, incentives, and culture. Scott is defending the brand by defending the boundary between anecdote and indictment.

The likely context - big-box retail under fire for wages, labor practices, local economic disruption - matters because "trying to paint a company" is also about guarding the corporate personhood myth: the idea that a company has a coherent character worth protecting, even when it’s assembled from thousands of decisions made by people inside a machine built to optimize cost.