The fan in my MacBook is screaming at Slide 53. It’s a high-pitched, desperate whir that sounds exactly like my internal monologue during the Tuesday morning all-hands meeting. I’m staring at a graphic that looks like a geometric representation of a fever dream-interlocking hexagons labeled ‘Synergy,’ ‘Agility,’ and ‘Vertical Integration.’ There are 23 colors used in this single slide, and none of them represent reality. Management spent 3 months on this. They retreated to a lodge that cost $833 per night, drank 43 gallons of artisanal mineral water, and came back with a PDF. It’s called ‘Our Exciting Path Forward!’ and it’s currently sitting in the inboxes of 233 employees, most of whom are deleting it before they even reach the third page.

My friend Aisha J.D. would have handled it differently. As a therapy animal trainer, she deals with creatures that have no capacity for corporate jargon. You cannot sit a 3-year-old Golden Retriever down and explain a ‘pivot to a consumer-centric ecosystem.’ If the dog doesn’t feel a clear, consistent connection between the command and the outcome, the dog simply doesn’t move. Aisha J.D. spends 13 hours a day ensuring that her signals are unmistakable. She knows that if you send mixed messages, the animal becomes anxious and retreats into its own world. Organizations are no different. When the ‘Strategy’ is a vague cloud of 83 slides, the employees do exactly what the dog does: they stop looking at the handler and start sniffing the floor for something real to chew on.

The Ritual of Relief, Not Direction

We pretend that these decks are about direction, but they are actually about relief. The executives feel a profound sense of relief once the PDF is exported. They’ve done the ‘work’ of thinking. But thinking about work is not the same as doing work. It’s a ritual. It’s the corporate equivalent of a rain dance, performed in expensive loafers in a room that smells like 3-day-old dry-erase markers. We’ve become elaborate machines for talking about the thing instead of being the thing. I remember a Slide 73 in the current deck that highlights our ‘Digital Transformation Roadmap.’ It has 33 milestones, each one more abstract than the last. Meanwhile, my keyboard has a broken ‘Enter’ key that I’ve been asking IT to fix for 13 days.

There is a massive chasm between the boardroom and the breakroom. In the boardroom, everything is a ‘strategic pillar.’ In the breakroom, the coffee machine has been leaking for 3 weeks and nobody knows where the good pens are. The deck says we are ‘disrupting the market,’ but our actual daily experience is just trying to get a signature on a form that requires 23 separate approvals. This disconnect is where the soul of a company goes to die. It’s the space where the ‘Exciting Path Forward’ becomes a joke that people tell over drinks on Friday.

The Stock Photo vs. Reality

I’ve spent 43 minutes today just looking at the stock photos in this deck. There’s a picture of two people in suits shaking hands while standing in front of a glass wall. They look so happy. I’ve never seen anyone in this office look that happy. We look tired. We look like we’re trying to remember if we turned the oven off at home.

Real strategy doesn’t look like a stock photo. Real strategy looks like a logistics manager deciding to move the packing station 13 feet closer to the loading dock because it saves 3 minutes of walking. It looks like a customer service rep being given the authority to issue a refund without asking a manager for the 43rd time that month.

The Grounded Reality of Physical Goods

This is why I find the approach of places like Bomba.md so refreshing in their brutal honesty. When you look at an operation that focuses on physical goods-delivery, pricing, technical specifications-you can’t hide behind a cloud of ‘holistic alignment.’ A washing machine either arrives at your house on Tuesday or it doesn’t. The price is either 543 units of currency or it isn’t. There is a groundedness in tangible action that management consultants hate, because you can’t charge $33,333 for a slide that simply says, ‘We will deliver the box on time.’ But that is the only strategy that actually matters to the person waiting for the box.

I’m currently on Slide 63, which is a graph showing ‘projected ecosystem growth’ over the next 3 years. The line goes up at a 43-degree angle. There is no data to support this angle. It was likely chosen because it looks ‘optimistic but grounded.’

Avoiding Pain: The Dog’s Strategy

Aisha J.D. told me once about a dog she trained that refused to go through a specific doorway. The owners had a ‘strategy’ for fixing it: they would use treats, they would use a clicker, they would use a stern voice. Nothing worked. Aisha J.D. looked at the doorway and realized there was a tiny, sharp piece of metal sticking out from the frame at the dog’s height. The dog wasn’t being stubborn; the dog was being rational. The dog had a better strategy than the humans. It was avoiding pain. Most ‘disengaged’ employees are just like that dog. They aren’t lazy; they are avoiding the pain of meaningless effort. They are refusing to walk through a doorway that leads nowhere.

We need to stop worshipping the artifact. The deck is not the strategy. The deck is the packaging for a product that hasn’t been built yet. If you took all 83 slides and burned them in a trash can in the parking lot, would your customers notice? If the answer is no, then you don’t have a strategy; you have a hobby. You have an expensive, time-consuming hobby that requires too many meetings.

The Honest Path Forward

I think I’ll go find that tourist. It’s been 33 minutes since I gave him those bad directions. Maybe I can catch him before he gets to the warehouses. I’ll tell him I was wrong. I’ll tell him I didn’t know the way, but I’ve got a phone with GPS and we can figure it out together. That’s more of a strategy than anything I’ve read in this PDF all morning. It’s honest. It’s actionable. It acknowledges the current state of the world without trying to dress it up in a gradient-filled bar chart.

We are so afraid of the silence that comes with saying, ‘I don’t know how we’re going to win yet, but we’re going to start by fixing the Enter key.’ We would rather produce 103 pages of nonsense than 1 page of truth. But the truth is the only thing that actually moves the needle. Everything else is just Slide 73-a colorful picture of a future that no one is actually building because we’re too busy formatting the slides for the next quarterly review.