Parker H. is squinting at the screen, his fingers drumming a frantic, uneven beat on the edge of a mahogany desk that definitely cost more than my first car. He’s navigating through a SharePoint directory that looks like a digital graveyard, clicking past folders labeled ‘Synergy_Drafts’ and ‘Legacy_Pivot_V8’ until he finds it. The file is named ‘Project_North_Star_FINAL_v28.pdf’. It hasn’t been opened since October 18 of last year. It’s currently Q3, and the manager sitting across from him-a guy named Marcus who wears his anxiety like a cheap cologne-just asked if the current product roadmap aligns with the ‘Strategic Pillars’ established during the executive retreat. The silence that follows is heavy. It’s the kind of silence that happens right before a structural beam gives way.

We spent 188 days on this document. We hired a consultancy firm that sent 8 junior associates in slim-fit suits to sit in our glass-walled conference rooms and ask us how we felt about our ‘brand soul.’ They charged us exactly $208,888. And yet, as Parker scrolls through slide 48, which features a complex Venn diagram where ‘Innovation’ overlaps with ‘Customer-Centricity’ in a way that visually resembles a Venn-shaped black hole, nobody in the room can remember what we are actually supposed to do on Monday morning.

I’ve spent the morning testing every pen in my drawer, scribbling loops and jagged lines on a legal pad to see which nib feels the most honest. It’s a procrastination tactic, sure, but it’s also a search for something tactile in a world of abstract nonsense. Most of the pens are dry. The ones that work are the cheap, clicky ones you find at a bank. There’s a metaphor there about utility versus aesthetics, but I’m too tired to polish it. I’m thinking about that $208,888. That’s enough money to buy a fleet of 8 delivery trucks or to actually fix the broken HVAC system in the warehouse that makes the inventory team sweat through their shirts by 10:08 AM. Instead, we bought a 88-slide PDF that is currently serving as a very expensive digital paperweight.

Parker H., who identifies as a meme anthropologist when he’s three drinks in, finally speaks. […] He’s right, of course. We treat strategic planning like a religious ritual. If we go through the motions-the SWOT analysis, the vision casting, the sticky-note brainstorming-the gods of the Market will surely bless us with 8% year-over-year growth. We want the comfort of a plan without the mess of the execution. We want to feel in control of a reality that is fundamentally chaotic, unpredictable, and entirely indifferent to our PowerPoint animations.

The document is a security blanket for people with six-figure salaries.

This deep organizational anxiety is what fuels the strategy industry. We are terrified that if we stop planning, we will be forced to see the cracks in the foundation. It’s easier to debate the nuance of a ‘Mission Statement’ than it is to address the fact that our middle management is a bottleneck of ego and outdated spreadsheets. We create elaborate fictions of control because the alternative-admitting that we are mostly guessing based on 28-day-old data-is too frightening to put in an annual report.

Jargon as Barrier

Parker starts reading slide 58 aloud. It’s a list of ‘Actionable Deliverables.’ The first one is to ‘incentivize cross-functional transparency through holistic communication loops.’ Marcus looks like he wants to cry. I know exactly what that phrase means: it means we should talk to each other. But we can’t just say ‘talk to each other.’ That’s too simple. It doesn’t justify the $208,888. We need the jargon to act as a barrier, a way to make the mundane feel monumental. It’s the corporate equivalent of putting a tuxedo on a hamster. It’s still just a hamster, and it’s still going to run on its wheel until it dies of exhaustion.

In our office, however, the roof is metaphorically pouring. We have 48 different ‘priorities’ and 8 ‘core values,’ yet nobody knows who has the authority to approve a $888 spend on new software that would actually save us 18 hours of manual data entry every week. We are paralyzed by the plan. The plan says we must wait for the next ‘Alignment Session.’

Parker H. closes the laptop with a thud. The screen goes black, reflecting the fluorescent lights of the ceiling. ‘Do you know why no one reads this?’ he asks. […] ‘Because it doesn’t acknowledge our failures. A real strategy would start with a list of all the ways we screwed up last year. It would talk about the 8 clients we lost because we were too slow to respond to emails. It would talk about the fact that our ‘innovative’ product is actually just a reskinned version of something from 2018. But you can’t present that to the board. So we write the fiction instead.’

He’s onto something. The most expensive part of the strategic plan isn’t the consultant’s fee. It’s the opportunity cost of the honesty we traded for a polished narrative. We spend 6 months trying to find a ‘North Star’ while ignoring the fire in the kitchen. We are so busy looking at the horizon that we are tripping over the 18 boxes of unsold inventory blocking the hallway.

We have replaced operational competence with linguistic complexity.

Parker H. stands up and walks to the window. He looks out at the parking lot, where 28 cars are parked in neat rows. ‘I think I’m going to start a new project,’ he says. ‘It’s called Project Reality. There will be no slides. No Venn diagrams. Just a list of things that are broken and a list of people who are going to fix them.’

Marcus looks horrified. ‘We can’t do that. What about the board? What about the annual kickoff?’

‘Tell them the North Star went supernova,’ Parker says, his voice devoid of its usual sarcasm. ‘Tell them we’re navigating by the ground now.’

I pick up the one pen that actually worked-a blue ballpoint with a chewed-up cap-and write ‘Project Reality’ at the top of my legal pad. Underneath it, I write the number 8. Eight things we can actually finish by Friday. It’s not revolutionary. It’s not ‘disruptive.’ It doesn’t use the word ‘ecosystem’ even once. But as I look at the list, I feel a sense of clarity that $208,888 couldn’t buy. We don’t need a strategy to tell us to be better. We just need to stop lying to ourselves in 12-point Calibri font.

The tragedy of the modern corporation is that we have become so good at the fiction that we’ve forgotten how to read the truth. We build these elaborate, unread monuments to our own ambition while the actual work-the messy, unpolished, vital work-happens in spite of the plan, not because of it. We are all just Parker H., searching through folders for a guide that doesn’t exist, while the real world waits for us to just make a simple, solid choice and stick to it.