I am currently staring at the 142nd row of a spreadsheet that supposedly tracks the integrity of our regional distribution centers, but the numbers are starting to blur into a gray static. It is exactly 5:02 PM on a Friday. Most of the people in the building have already ghosted, their Slack statuses turning to that passive-aggressive ‘away’ circle, yet here I am. My cursor is hovering over a cell that contains a 22% discrepancy in throughput, a gap that will likely cost us about $8002 in overnight shipping fees if I don’t reconcile it. Then, the notification pings. It’s an email from Marcus, the VP of Global Strategic Alignment. The subject line is ‘An Exciting New Chapter!’ and the preview text is filled with enough exclamation points to suggest he’s either won the lottery or had a complete break from reality. I know this email. We all know this email. It is the sound of the structural floor being ripped out from under us while we are told to enjoy the view on the way down.

Logan B.-L. is the only other person in my row… He probably got the email 2 seconds before I did. The irony of Marcus sending this at 5:02 PM is not lost on me. I tried to go to bed early last night, thinking if I got 82 minutes of extra sleep, I might actually have the mental bandwidth to deal with the inevitable Friday afternoon ‘strategy’ dump. I failed. I stayed up watching a documentary about deep-sea squids because their lives seemed simpler than managing 1002 SKUs across three continents.

They call it a re-org. They call it ‘being agile.’ But for those of us on the ground, it’s just chaos formatted into a slide deck. The plan, if you can call it that, is to merge the procurement and logistics teams into a single ‘Value Delivery Engine.’ Marcus claims this will reduce friction by 32%, a number he likely pulled from a hat or perhaps a very expensive consulting report. There is no plan for who reports to whom. There is only the expectation that by Tuesday, we will all have magically pivoted our entire professional identities to fit into his new Venn diagram. This is a profound display of organizational disrespect. It treats the 322 people in this department not as human beings with expertise and tribal knowledge, but as interchangeable blocks in a game of corporate Tetris. You can’t just move a human being from one box to another and expect their productivity to remain at 102%. Humans are messy. We have rituals. We have ‘the guy we call when the SAP system crashes.’ In Marcus’s world, ‘the guy’ doesn’t exist; only ‘Functions’ exist.

The Burden of “Resilience”

I find myself getting angry at the word ‘resilient.’ Every time leadership breaks something through sheer incompetence or a lack of foresight, they tell the workforce we need to be ‘resilient.’ It’s a clever bit of linguistic sleight of hand. It shifts the burden of their bad planning onto our nervous systems. If the re-org fails, it’s not because the PowerPoint was a fever dream of buzzwords; it’s because we weren’t ‘agile’ enough.

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I once spent 1222 hours building a predictive model for our West Coast lanes, only to have it scrapped because a director wanted to ‘try something more intuitive.’ The intuition failed, the lanes collapsed, and I was the one who had to spend my weekend fixing the 42 resulting shipping exceptions.

The lack of accountability at the top is staggering. They get to be the ‘visionaries’ while we are the ones picking up the shattered glass.

The Exhaustion of Flux

There is a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from working in an environment where the rules of gravity change every six months. It creates a low-level anxiety that never quite leaves you. I find myself checking my email at 10:02 PM on a Saturday just to make sure Marcus hasn’t decided to ‘disrupt’ my Monday morning again. We talk about ‘change management’ as if it’s a therapeutic process meant to help us adapt, but in reality, it’s often just a top-down exercise in forcing poorly planned ideas onto a workforce.

That is what a high-performing team actually looks like. It’s not a chart. It’s a rhythm. But Marcus doesn’t understand rhythm. He thinks you can just swap out the drummer for a tuba player and as long as the ‘Value Delivery Engine’ chart says it works, the music will be fine. It’s a delusion that costs companies millions of dollars and costs employees their sanity. My supply chain data is currently telling me that we have 82 units of a high-demand part stuck in a port because the new ‘streamlined’ approval process requires a signature from someone who was laid off in the last ‘Exciting Chapter.’

Seeking Fixed Lines

I look over at Logan again. He’s finally shut his laptop. He looks at me and just shakes his head. ‘I’m going to play pickleball,’ he says. It’s a strange thing to say at this moment, but I get it. He needs something with fixed lines. He needs a game where the rules don’t change because a VP had a dream after three martinis. He’s heading to the

Pickleball Athletic Club because there, at least, the court is always 20 feet by 44 feet. The net doesn’t move. The ball either goes over or it doesn’t. There is a terrifying beauty in that kind of predictability.

I have 12 years of experience in this field, and I’ve seen this cycle play out at least 22 times. Each time, we lose 22% of our best talent-the people who have the options and the self-respect to leave-and we are left with a skeleton crew of ‘resilient’ survivors who are too tired to do anything but follow the new arrows on the slide.

The Dignity of the Vacuum

I should probably head out too. The cleaning crew is starting to make their rounds, and the hum of their vacuum is the only honest thing I’ve heard all day. It’s doing exactly what it was designed to do: pick up the dirt. It’s not trying to ‘reimagine the floor-care paradigm.’ It’s just cleaning. There is a dignity in that. I think about the 72 emails I still need to answer, but they can wait. The re-org isn’t going to get any better if I sacrifice my Friday night to Marcus’s altar of ‘Agility.’ I need to find my own version of the court. I need to be somewhere where my effort has a direct, visible impact on the outcome, rather than being swallowed by the tectonic shifts of a mid-level executive’s ego.

The Rewrite of Tragedy

We will be ‘agile’ until we break, and then they will replace us with a fresh batch of 102% performers who haven’t yet learned that the ‘Exciting New Chapter’ is usually just a rewrite of the same tragedy. I wonder if Marcus actually believes his own PowerPoint. Does he go home and look at his family through the lens of a SWOT analysis? Or is it all just a performance he gives to justify his $500,002 salary?

As I walk to my car, I see the lights of the city flickering in the distance. There are 122 different office buildings in my immediate view, and I bet half of them are undergoing some form of ‘transformational change’ right now. It’s a massive, collective delusion. We are all running faster and faster, trying to stay ahead of the chaos, never realizing that the chaos is being generated by the very people who are telling us to run.

I start my car and see that I have 42 miles of range left. It’s enough to get home and then maybe get to the court tomorrow. I need to hit something. I need to feel the physical resistance of a ball against a paddle. I need a world that makes sense, even if it’s only for a 32-minute match. When everything at work is just a projection on a wall, the only way to stay sane is to find something that is undeniably, stubbornly real.