The Mountain of Middle Managment
I used to stand in front of a room rocking a dry erase marker back and forth in my palm and give presentations every day. I would stand in front of 120 people and talk for six hours. And not just present in the manner of a PowerPoint deck properly branded with corporate colors and approved imagery with an agenda of talking points for an audience of those who attend because their calendar pinged with a vague string of words that titled that hour of their lives, but to an audience who recognized that even if the material was of dubious utility they were going to hear something they had never heard before with the potential seed to change their views and thoughts. There is shared mental exploration only reproducible in a Socratic walk into the unexpected with people who are genuinely thinking and questioning and doubting. Conversations that can only take place outside of org structures and the fear of losing a paycheck.
Although the genesis of many companies can be traced back to the garages and basements of people who left the system, their creations are inevitably commoditized and surrounded by the financial and bureaucratic walls of a corporate fortress to be systematized and drained of all but the essential form needed to bring the highest return. There is no further directive or goal following the inception, and any additional creative thought is a natural threat because it has the potential to change the luster of the cash cow supporting its structure. Corporations do not want vision and direction. They want a PowerPoint of insignificant and fiscally responsible best practices benchmarked and vetted by a sea of soulless thought leaders on LInkedIn babbled out in front of a conference room of senior leaders in corporate jargon and business buzzwords for a consensus of the lifeless.
The corporate captains want a list of safe objectives by which to set their autopilot for the the fiscal year like a dark northern star marked down on a goal sheet atlas properly documented and charted and calibrated against those who came before. They fearfully feel their way onward with every reef and shipwreck case studied in the footer so they can be reassured that nothing they do will dislodge the cargo of the treasure ship. And they all agree not to think or talk. They all agree to come to meetings and begin every sentence with "to your point" so they there is no danger of speaking a new idea or disagreeing with those already expounded in the round robin exercise of self glorification by assimilation.
