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