I have yet to find a place that can maintain "basic standards of human decency" yet still be aggressive enough in its endeavors to push the limits without people getting hurt.
Listen, Uber gets lots of flak for being a nasty work environment, but maybe all it ever did was play very, very hard ball. People think the solution is to, figuratively speaking, play nice, but maybe the real solution is for the other side of the team to play just as hard, if not harder. Meaning for employees to not just own the assigned work, but also the work environment, to blow the whistle when they see something wrong, to dig up the hatchet when things get unfair, and most importantly to never be accepting of status quo just for political reasons or for lack of perseverance, but to confront every thing they disagree with, for the very simple reason of "communication" more than anything else.
The idea is not to punish but to make points known and push evil back into its hiding spot.