Your Strategic Plan is a Beautiful Work of Fiction

Your Strategic Plan is a Beautiful Work of Fiction

The glossy 54-page PDF. A document of order, control, and meticulously planned future. But what if it’s not a map, but a ritual?

The email arrives with a weight you can feel through the screen. A digital thud. SUBJECT: Our 2030 Vision: The Path Forward. Attached is the glossy 54-page PDF, the result of six months, 24 steering committee meetings, and a consultant’s bill that could have funded a small startup for a year. You open it. The first page is a stock photo of impossibly happy people pointing at a whiteboard in an office flooded with sunlight that doesn’t exist in your building. The CEO’s signature is scrawled at the bottom of a foreword talking about synergy, disruption, and becoming the undisputed leader in a category he just invented.

It’s a beautiful document. The fonts are perfect. The charts are clean. It whispers of order, of control, of a future so meticulously planned that failure seems like a statistical impossibility. You scroll through, looking for your department, for your project, for a single sentence that connects this grand vision to the email you have to answer in the next 14 minutes. You find a vague bullet point: ‘Leverage Next-Generation Auditory Solutions.’

The Ghost of Plans Past

And then, nothing. Six weeks later, the market shifts. A competitor launches something unexpected. The CEO has a ‘new insight’ on a flight back from a conference. Suddenly, the entire company is in an

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The Archaeological Gaze and the Perfect Gift

The Archaeological Gaze and the Perfect Gift

The paper tore with a sound like a sigh. David was holding the third bottle of single-malt whiskey, its amber liquid catching the light in the exact same way as the two bottles already sitting on the table beside a gift certificate for a steakhouse. He smiled that specific smile, the one that’s 94 percent social contract and 6 percent genuine feeling. ‘Wow, guys, thank you. You know me so well.’

We didn’t. That was the problem. We knew a template of him. A 40-year-old man who probably likes whiskey and steak. The gifts weren’t for David; they were for a demographic. Anonymous tokens for an occasion that was supposed to be anything but. I felt a familiar, low-grade shame, the kind that comes from a connection that just failed to connect, like the dead air after you accidentally hang up on someone important. You just stand there, holding a silent device, the intended message lost in the void.

For years, I told myself the entire ritual of gift-giving was a broken system, a capitalist mandate designed to generate anxiety and waste. I’d spend weeks circling the problem of a birthday or a holiday, feeling a pressure that mounted until I finally capitulated and bought a scented candle or a best-selling non-fiction book I hadn’t read. It was a transaction of obligation. Here, I have discharged my social duty. Please accept this object as a symbol of my temporary relief.

A great gift

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