The Ritual of the Empty Deck: Why Strategy is a Performance
The Mechanical Buzz and the Sacrificial Offering
The projector hums with a low-frequency vibration that I can feel in my molars, a mechanical buzzing that seems to synchronize with the blinking cursor on slide 14. Marcus, our CEO, is gesturing toward a Venn diagram that overlaps ‘Innovation’ with ‘Market Synergy,’ his shadow momentarily decapitating a stock photo of a smiling woman in a hard hat. I’m sitting in the third row, counting the ceiling tiles-there are 144 of them, roughly the same number of minutes we’ve been trapped in this temperature-controlled vacuum. Beside me, the head of Marketing is nodding with a rhythmic intensity that suggests she’s either deeply inspired or trying to stay awake by sheer force of kinetic energy. We all know the secret, though. It’s the same secret I’ve carried through 44 different bankruptcy proceedings over my career as an attorney. This 84-slide deck, titled ‘Vision 2024: The Horizon of Excellence,’ will never be read again after the catering trays are cleared. It isn’t a map; it’s a sacrificial offering.
I realized recently, with a sharp pang of mid-life humiliation, that I have been pronouncing the word ‘epitome’ as ‘epi-tome’ in my head for nearly three decades. I said it out loud during a deposition last month, and the court reporter gave me a look that was 14% pity and 86% confusion. It was a moment of profound decoupling-the word I thought I knew was a ghost, a performance of intelligence that missed the mark of reality. These strategic planning sessions are the ‘epi-tome’ of corporate life. We use the language of direction to mask the reality of drift. We spend 234 hours of collective management time debating the nuance of a mission statement that will eventually be printed on a breakroom poster and ignored by the very people it’s meant to galvanize. The document itself is an artifact of politics, not a tool for progress.
The Dangerous Psychological Rift
This decoupling of pronouncement from reality creates a dangerous psychological rift within the workforce. When the employees in the warehouse see the town hall presentation, they recognize the stock photos, but they don’t recognize their own lives. They know that while slide 14 talks about ‘Employee-Centric Growth,’ the actual Q1 priority is a 14% reduction in overtime hours. They see the performance for what it is. It’s a theatrical production where the script is written in jargon and the audience is required to clap at the appropriate intervals. As a bankruptcy attorney, I’ve sat in the wreckage of companies that had the most beautiful strategic plans I’ve ever seen. They had leather-bound binders full of ‘Strategic Pillars’ and ‘Value Propositions.’ But when you looked at their ledger, they were hemorrhaging cash because they spent more time polishing the mirror than looking through the windshield.
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They spent more time polishing the mirror than looking through the windshield. The contradiction between lofty goals and floor reality is where execution dies.
There is a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from participating in a lie. I see it in the eyes of the mid-level managers who have to translate these abstract fantasies into daily tasks. They are the ones who have to explain why the ‘Path to Digital Transformation’ actually means we’re using a legacy spreadsheet from 2004 that crashes every time you enter a comma. They are the ones who see the contradiction between the lofty goals of the CEO and the grit of the ground floor. It’s the difference between an architect’s rendering of a skyscraper and the muddy hole in the ground where the foundation is supposed to be. One is a dream of light and glass; the other is a mess of rebar and sweat.
The Rendering
Light & Glass
The Foundation
Rebar & Sweat
The Refreshing Honesty of Direct Feedback
When I’m not untangling the financial knots of failing enterprises, I often think about businesses that don’t have the luxury of abstraction. There are industries where the ‘plan’ is inseparable from the ‘do.’ Take, for example, the meticulous work of transforming a physical space. If you are working with Hardwood Refinishing, you aren’t dealing with 84 slides of theoretical flooring. You are dealing with the actual texture under your feet, the precise measurement of a room, and the reality of a deadline. In that world, if the plan says the floor is level and it isn’t, the plan is wrong. There is no ‘political ritual’ that can make a crooked tile look straight. There is a refreshing honesty in that kind of work-a direct feedback loop between the intention and the result that corporate strategy decks desperately lack.
Strategy vs. Execution (Conceptual Data)
Satisfied Everyone
Guided Progress
Strategy as a Scalpel, Not a Sponge
In the courtroom, I’ve watched executives try to use their strategic plans as a defense. They point to the ‘Sustainability’ slide as if it somehow offsets the fact that they haven’t paid their vendors in 154 days. They treat the document as a shield, hoping that the sheer volume of words will deflect the reality of their insolvency. But a strategy is not a shield; it should be a scalpel. It should be used to cut away the things you aren’t going to do, to create focus and clarity. Instead, we use it as a sponge, soaking up every department’s pet project until the resulting document is a bloated, heavy mess that satisfies everyone and guides no one. I once represented a firm that had 44 ‘Primary Strategic Goals.’ If everything is a priority, then nothing is. They didn’t have a strategy; they had a wish list written by a committee that was afraid of saying ‘no.’
Complexity is the Graveyard of Execution
Goals
Too many primary objectives.
Sponge Effect
Absorbs all projects, guides none.
Wish List
Committee-driven desire.
Aha Moment 2: Assuming Communication
I think back to my ‘epi-tome’ mistake. It was a small thing, but it revealed a gap between my perception and the truth. Most corporate strategies are built on a thousand small gaps like that. We assume we are communicating when we are merely broadcasting. We assume we are planning when we are merely predicting. And the most dangerous assumption of all is that the act of creating the document is the same as the act of leading the company. Marcus is still talking on stage, now moving to a slide about ‘Global Footprints,’ though our only international office is a three-person satellite in a time zone that makes everyone miserable. He is lost in the performance, and so are we. We are the actors in a play that has no audience, performing for a ghost that lives in the 234th row of a stadium we can’t afford.
The Email That Gets Filed and Forgotten
Eventually, the lights will come up. The PDF of ‘Vision 2024’ will be emailed to the entire company, where it will be promptly filed in a folder titled ‘Admin’ and never opened again. The real strategy-the one that involves the messy, difficult, and often boring work of actually running a business-will happen in the hallways, in the whispered conversations between managers, and in the quiet decisions to ignore slide 14 in favor of what actually works. We will survive the ritual, just as we did last year and the year before that. But as I look at the 44 people in this room, I wonder how much more effective we could be if we stopped pretending that the deck was the destination.
Final Insight: Buzzwords Etched in Stone
I’ll go back to my office and look over the bankruptcy filings of a retail chain that thought ‘Synergistic Re-imagining‘ was a substitute for ‘Inventory Management.’ I’ll see the same buzzwords there, etched into the tombstones of their corporate history. It’s a cycle of performance that costs us millions of dollars and billions of brain cells. Strategy shouldn’t be a dust-collector; it should be a floor we can actually stand on.
The Cost of Abstraction
Maybe next year, I’ll have the courage to stand up and ask Marcus why slide 14 contradicts our Q1 reality. Or maybe I’ll just keep counting the ceiling tiles, waiting for the moment when we can all stop pretending and go back to doing the work that actually leaves a mark on the world.
