The Cold, Clinical Dampness of Completion

The mouse cursor hovered over the ‘Send’ button for exactly 22 seconds, a tiny white arrow vibrating against a backdrop of deep corporate blue. I felt the sweat on my palms, a cold, clinical dampness that usually only comes when I’m looking at a burned-out warehouse and realizing the accelerant was poured from the inside. This was different, though. I wasn’t investigating a crime of property; I was completing a crime of time. Behind that ‘Send’ button sat the ‘Q2 Strategic Vision’ deck-a 122-page beast that had consumed 2 months of my life and the lives of 12 other senior analysts. We had tweaked the kerning on the headings for 32 hours alone. We had debated the specific shade of ‘growth green’ for 12 meetings. And as the email vanished into the outbox of the entire executive suite, a hollow realization settled in my gut: no one was going to read it. Not really.

The Fraud in Plain Sight

In my day job as an insurance fraud investigator, I spend a lot of time looking at what people do when they think no one is watching. I look at the signatures that don’t quite match the driver’s license, and the ‘accidental’ fires that started right next to the kerosene heater. But corporate life has its own version of a long-con, and the strategy document is its centerpiece. When the 82-slide deck was finally unveiled during the all-hands meeting, the room was thick with the smell of expensive, burnt coffee and the sound of polite, rhythmic clapping. The CEO stood there, pointing at a ‘Value Realization Map’ that looked like a plate of blue spaghetti, and everyone nodded.

They murmured phrases like ‘synergistic alignment’ and ‘pivotal transformation.’ They looked like they were witnessing a revelation. But I saw the fraud. I saw the 42 people in the room already checking their watches, their minds drifting to the 102 emails they had to answer before 6:02 PM. The deck wasn’t a guide for the future; it was a ritual performance designed to signal that ‘strategy’ had been successfully performed, allowing everyone to go back to their actual jobs the very next morning.

Dying for the Concrete

I’m not proud to admit that I cried during a commercial last night. It was a 32-second spot for a life insurance policy-ironic, I know-showing a man teaching his granddaughter how to fix a bicycle. It was simple. It was direct. It had a beginning, a middle, and a tangible result. My strategy deck had none of those things. It had ‘strategic pillars’ that supported nothing and ‘growth levers’ that no one was allowed to pull.

The emotional weight of that commercial hit me because it represented the exact opposite of my professional existence. It was real. It solved a specific problem. Meanwhile, I had just spent 62 days creating a document that would live in a folder named ‘FINAL_STRATEGY_v52’ until the server it lived on was eventually decommissioned.

– The Investigator

“

We are a species obsessed with the abstract, yet we are dying for the concrete. We build these digital monuments to our intelligence because we are terrified of the simplicity of the work that actually needs to be done.

The Ecosystem of Infinite Scalability (and Lies)

I remember one specific slide-slide 72. It was titled ‘The Ecosystem of Infinite Scalability.’ I spent 12 hours on the graphic alone. It featured a series of interlocking hexagons that suggested a level of complexity usually reserved for quantum physics or the internal mechanics of a Swiss watch. During the presentation, the Chief Operating Officer paused on that slide for 22 seconds. He squinted. He nodded. He said, ‘This is where the magic happens.’ We both knew it was a lie.

There was no magic in slide 72. There was only the clever arrangement of shapes designed to make the mundane task of selling widgets look like a holy mission. This is the core of the corporate strategy ritual: we must make the simple look complex so that we can justify the salaries of the people who aren’t doing the work. If we just said, ‘We need to sell more widgets by being nicer to customers,’ we wouldn’t need a 122-page deck. And if we didn’t need the deck, we wouldn’t need the 12 analysts who made it.

The Ghost Story in the Data

This realization is a bitter pill, especially when you’re trained to find the truth in the wreckage of a lie. I’ve seen people burn down their own houses for $20,202, and while that’s a crime, I can at least understand the motivation. It’s a desperate act for a tangible reward. But the strategy deck is a desperate act for a phantom reward. We want the feeling of progress without the messiness of change. We want the ‘vision’ without the ‘sight.’

In my investigation of this particular Q2 deck, I found that the most used word was ‘innovation,’ appearing 92 times. The least used word? ‘Customer.’ It appeared exactly 2 times, and both were in the footer of a legal disclaimer on the final page. This tells you everything you need to know about the intent of the document. It wasn’t written for the people who pay the bills; it was written for the people who approve the budgets.

The Necessary Antidote

It’s a strange irony that in a world so obsessed with data and ‘hard facts,’ we spend so much of our intellectual capital on what are essentially ghost stories. We tell ourselves that if we can just map out the next 12 quarters with enough precision, the future will behave itself. We treat these decks like talismans, believing that if we carry them into the boardroom, they will protect us from the volatility of the market. But the market doesn’t care about our hexagons. The market is like a house fire; it doesn’t read the insurance policy before it consumes the living room. It just burns. And yet, we keep writing the policies. We keep building the decks. We keep performing the ritual because the alternative-admitting that we are often just guessing-is too terrifying to contemplate.

I’ve started looking for outlets that don’t require this level of performative complexity. I find myself gravitating toward spaces where the interaction is honest and the value is immediate. It’s why, after a day of auditing the ‘Value Realization’ of a non-existent future, I find a strange sense of peace at ems89ดียังไง, where the entertainment is tangible and the engagement doesn’t require a 42-page explanatory gloss. There is a profound relief in things that are exactly what they claim to be. A game is a game. A story is a story. A win is a win. There are no hidden slides or ‘strategic pillars’ to navigate. It’s a necessary antidote to the exhausting theatre of the modern office, a place where you can breathe without worrying about whether your breathing is ‘aligned’ with the corporate mission statement.

Is alignment just the secular word for a shared delusion?

– A New Question

?

The Typo on Slide 52

Last Tuesday, I went back into the shared folder to see if anyone had opened the deck since the meeting. The analytics showed 2 views. Both were from me. I was checking to see if I had left a typo on slide 52. I had. I wrote ‘stratgey’ instead of ‘strategy’ in a small text box at the bottom of a chart. It didn’t matter. No one saw it. The document was already dead, a beautiful corpse interred in the digital cemetery of the company intranet. I sat there for 12 minutes, staring at the screen, wondering what else I could have done with those 2 months. I could have learned to play the cello. I could have repaired the 12 broken shingles on my roof. I could have visited my mother 22 more times. Instead, I gave my life to a PDF that will never be printed.

The Loss Looking Like a Gain

Tomorrow, there is another meeting. It’s to discuss the ‘Next Steps’ from the Q2 Strategic Vision. I already know what the next steps are. We will create a task force of 12 people. We will meet every 2 weeks. We will create a new deck to track the progress of the old deck. And somewhere, in a basement office with a flickering light, I will be looking at a claim for a car that ‘mysteriously’ rolled into a lake, and I will realize that the driver and I are doing the same thing. We are both trying to make a loss look like a gain. The only difference is that the driver might actually get a check at the end of it, while I just get another 122 slides to color in.

I shut down my laptop at 5:02 PM. I don’t check my email. I walk out into the cool evening air, and for the first time in 2 months, I don’t think about hexagons. I think about the bike. I think about the wrench. I think about the truth, and how much it costs to keep it hidden behind a well-formatted slide.