Scathing Punishment

From Alain de Botton's recent book, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, on entrepreneurs:

These individuals were writing their stories in a subgenre of
contemporary fiction, the business plan, and populating them with characters endowed with deeply implausible personalities, an oversight which would eventually be punished not by a scathing review by some bright young person from the London Review of Books but by a lack of custom and a prompt foreclosure.