The Language of Abstraction

The HVAC system in Marcus’s office hums at a frequency that usually reminds me of a C-sharp, but today it feels like a grinding tooth. I am sitting in a chair that cost the company roughly $601, and yet it feels like it was designed to extract secrets through my lumbar spine. Marcus is leaning back, his fingers interlaced behind his head, looking at a digital document that represents my last 361 days of existence. He sighs, not out of fatigue, but out of that performative empathy they teach in the two-day management seminars at the airport Hilton.

‘Zephyr,’ he says, his voice dropping into a register he thinks communicates authority. ‘You’re doing great work with the industrial pigments. Your color matching on the aerospace contract was 101% accurate. But we need to talk about your executive presence.’

I feel a familiar tightening in my chest. It’s 4:31 PM. I started a diet at 4:01 PM, and the lack of a mid-afternoon almond croissant is making my patience paper-thin. I ask him, as politely as a starving man can, what he means by ‘executive presence.’ Is it the way I tie my shoes? Is it my tendency to use words like ‘chromaticity’ in meetings where people just want to hear ‘blue’?

Marcus smiles. It’s the smile of a man who has no answer but has been told that the absence of an answer is a leadership style. ‘You know it when you see it,’ he says. ‘It’s just… a vibe. Be more strategic. Command the room. You’re just a bit too focused on the technicalities.’

I am an industrial color matcher. My entire life is built on the reality that ‘a bit too blue’ is a failure that costs the company $5001 in wasted substrate. In my world, feedback is a measurement. It is a Delta-E value of 0.5. It is a physical truth. But here, in the carpeted wasteland of the middle-management suite, feedback is a ghost. It is a vaporous collection of platitudes designed to keep the giver safe from the discomfort of being specific.

The Uncalibrated Spectrometer

This is the great corruption of the modern workplace. We have been sold this idea of ‘Radical Candor,’ a concept that was supposed to be about caring personally while challenging directly. Instead, it has been weaponized by people who lack the vocabulary for precision. They use it as a license to be vaguely mean or unhelpfully nebulous. They tell you to be ‘more senior’ or ‘less intense’ without ever defining the coordinates of the destination. It is like being told to drive to a city that doesn’t exist, using a map drawn in disappearing ink, while your manager complains about your fuel efficiency.

I spent 11 years learning how to distinguish between 41 shades of black. I know that the human eye is a lying organ, easily deceived by the surrounding light or the state of one’s own blood sugar. That is why we use spectrometers. We use tools that don’t have feelings, tools that can’t be ‘too intense,’ tools that simply report the wavelength. In the office, however, the manager is the spectrometer, but he hasn’t been calibrated since 1991. He is reading his own biases and calling them my performance.

My stomach growls. The diet is going poorly. I am thinking about a slice of pizza with exactly 31 slices of pepperoni. The hunger makes the abstraction of Marcus’s words even more insulting. If I told a production line to make a batch of paint ‘more strategic,’ the machines would just sit there in silent judgment. Yet, I am expected to go back to my desk and somehow ‘command’ a room that contains three broken Herman Miller chairs and a whiteboard that hasn’t been erased since the Obama administration.

There is a specific kind of demoralization that comes from being told to fix something you cannot see. It creates a cycle of anxiety where you start performing a version of yourself that you think they want, only to be told that you now seem ‘unauthentic.’ You are trapped in a hall of mirrors where every reflection is slightly distorted by the subjective whims of a person who is primarily concerned with not being sued.

We’ve optimized for the delivery of feedback-the ‘sandwich’ method, the ‘feedback loops,’ the ‘361-degree reviews’-but we have completely abandoned the quality of the content. We are obsessed with the box and indifferent to the gift inside. Most of the time, the gift is just a handful of damp sand.

The Honesty of Gravity

I remember a time when feedback felt different. It was 51 days ago, during a team-building exercise that I initially dreaded. We were in a setting where the laws of physics replaced the laws of the corporate handbook. I was standing on a device that didn’t care about my ‘vibe’ or my ‘executive presence.’ It only cared about my center of gravity. It’s a sensation I only truly understood when I took a team out with segwayevents-duesseldorf last spring.

On a Segway, the feedback is instantaneous. If you lean forward, you move. If you lean back, you stop. If you stiffen your knees and try to ‘command’ the machine through sheer willpower, you wobble. The machine doesn’t send you a vague email three months later saying you should be ‘more balanced.’ It tells you right now, through the soles of your feet. There is a profound honesty in that interaction. You can’t lie to a gyroscope. You can’t use corporate jargon to negotiate with gravity.

When I was riding through the streets of Düsseldorf, I realized why I hate my annual reviews. It’s because the office lacks that physical truth. We spend our days in a digital soup of ‘touch-bases’ and ‘synergies,’ where no one ever has to stand on their own two feet and admit they don’t know what they’re talking about. Marcus doesn’t know what ‘executive presence’ is. He’s just leaning forward because he thinks that’s what a leader does, but he’s not actually going anywhere. He’s just a man in an expensive chair, trying to describe a color he can’t see.

The Cost of Being Specific

I think about the 21 technicians who report to me. I wonder if I have been a Marcus to them. Have I ever told someone to ‘take more ownership’ without giving them the keys to the building? Probably. It’s easier to be vague. It’s safer. To be specific is to be vulnerable; if I give you a clear target and you hit it, I have to reward you. If I give you a moving target that is invisible, I can keep you in a state of perpetual ‘improvement.’

My hunger is now reaching a point where I can see colors that don’t exist in nature. I imagine the ‘Executive Presence’ as a neon-green cloud floating above my head. Maybe if I buy a more expensive watch, the cloud will turn blue. Maybe if I stop eating altogether, I will become so thin that I can finally fit through the narrow door of Marcus’s expectations.

I look at Marcus. He is waiting for me to say something profound, something that shows I have ‘internalized’ the feedback.

“Marcus,’ I say, ‘could you give me one example of a moment in the last 11 weeks where a lack of executive presence negatively impacted a project outcome?'”

He taps his pen 31 times on the desk. ‘It’s not about one moment, Zephyr. It’s the aggregate. It’s the way you… occupy space.’

I am 181 centimeters tall. I occupy exactly as much space as the displacement of my mass. I want to tell him about the Segway. I want to tell him that if he were a machine, he’d be vibrating with error codes. Instead, I just nod. I give him the ‘strategic’ look he wants-the slightly tilted head, the furrowed brow, the silence that people mistake for deep thought.

‘I see,’ I lie. ‘I will work on my spatial occupation.’

He beams. He thinks he’s just coached me into a new tier of leadership. He thinks he’s a gardener and I’m a rosebush he’s just pruned. In reality, he’s just a guy who moved some air around the room.

The Salty, Honest Feedback

I walk out of the office and head toward the breakroom. It is 5:01 PM. My diet has lasted exactly 60 minutes. I find a bag of pretzels that someone left behind. They are salty, hard, and provide immediate, crunching feedback to my teeth. They are the most honest thing I’ve encountered all day.

As I chew, I realize that the only way to survive the culture of useless feedback is to treat it like industrial waste: acknowledge its existence, categorize it as toxic, and then dispose of it properly. You cannot build a career on the opinions of people who use adjectives as a substitute for evidence. You build a career on the things that are measurable-the colors that match, the machines that move, and the moments when you actually know where you stand.

I think about the Altstadt in Düsseldorf, the way the wind felt on my face when I wasn’t worrying about my ‘vibe.’ There is a world outside these cubicles where feedback is a physical sensation, where success is staying upright, and where the only ‘presence’ that matters is being there, fully, in the moment. Marcus can keep his ghosts. I’d rather have a gyroscope.

The Return to Self

I check my watch. 5:11 PM. I have 111 emails to ignore before I go home. I decide to start with the ones that ask for my ‘strategic input’ on things that haven’t happened yet. I’ll give them exactly what they want: a lot of words that sound like something, but feel like nothing. It’s the executive way, after all.

I wonder if anyone ever truly grows in these buildings, or if we all just slowly evaporate until we’re nothing but a collection of LinkedIn endorsements and a ‘soft’ tone. I hope I don’t evaporate. I hope I stay sharp, a bit too intense, and perfectly matched to the color of my own convictions. If that means I lack ‘presence’ in the eyes of the Marcuses of the world, then I’ll take that as the best feedback I’ve ever received.

It is a gift, after all. You just have to know which ones to return to the store.