My eyes are burning, a dry, stinging heat that comes from staring at slide 41 of a deck that has no soul. I’m squinting at a pixelated box that supposedly represents my career, but right now, it just looks like a coffin for my productivity. The cursor blinks at a steady, rhythmic pace, mockingly consistent in a world where the floor is currently being pulled out from under me for the 11th time in three years. My chest feels tight, partly from the lukewarm coffee I chugged to stay awake during the town hall and partly from the sheer, unadulterated absurdity of it all.

We are in the middle of a ‘structural optimization,’ which is executive-speak for ‘I need to justify my salary by moving your desk to the other side of the digital ether.’ My manager is gone. Well, not gone, just moved to a different vertical that didn’t exist 21 minutes ago. My new manager is a guy named Greg who apparently specializes in ‘synergy harvesting,’ a term that makes me want to go live in a cave and communicate only through smoke signals. We are taking bets in the Slack channel-the one the bosses don’t see-about how long this new iteration will last. The over/under is 11 months, but I’m leaning toward 1.

The Architecture of Chaos

This isn’t about business. It’s performance art. When a new executive arrives, they feel this primal, desperate need to pee on the fire hydrants of the corporate campus. They can’t just come in and say, ‘Hey, things are working well, let’s keep doing that.’ No, that doesn’t get you a profile in the Harvard Business Review. You have to disrupt. You have to shake the jar until the ants start eating each other. It’s the illusion of decisive action. If they change the reporting lines, they can claim they’ve ‘streamlined the organization,’ even if the only thing they’ve actually streamlined is the process by which we all lose our minds.

I think about Hazel D.-S. sometimes. Hazel is a neon sign technician I met in a dive bar in Queens a few months ago when I was hiding from a particularly brutal quarterly review. She spends her days bending glass and filling it with noble gases. Hazel doesn’t have quarterly re-orgs. If she doesn’t bend the glass correctly, it breaks. If she doesn’t wire the transformer right, the sign doesn’t light up. There is a terrifying, beautiful clarity in her work. She told me once that the hardest part of her job isn’t the heat or the glass; it’s the vibration of the city. Everything is always shaking. If you don’t build a sign to withstand the constant hum of the subway and the wind, it will shatter from the inside out. Corporate structures are the opposite. They are built to shatter. They are designed for obsolescence because the people at the top are rarely there for more than 41 months before they hop to the next gig with a golden parachute and a list of ‘transformations’ they supposedly led.

The Ephemeral Library

In the wake of a re-org, institutional knowledge evaporates. It’s like a library where every 111 days, someone comes in and rearranges the books by the color of their spines rather than the subject matter. You want to find the documentation for the 2021 legacy system? Sorry, that’s now under the ‘Innovation and Heritage’ department, which is currently being audited by a team of consultants who don’t know the difference between a database and a grocery list.

We aren’t solving problems for customers anymore; we are solving problems created by the new org chart. I’ve seen high-performing teams, groups of people who had spent years learning each other’s rhythms, get dismantled in a single afternoon because they didn’t fit into a new VP’s ‘strategic pillars.’ It’s heartbreaking. You can’t just manufacture trust. You can’t put ‘collaboration’ on a slide and expect it to happen between strangers who are all terrified for their jobs. Trust is built in the trenches, in the late-night bug fixes and the shared frustration of a failed launch. When you break those teams up, you aren’t just moving boxes; you are severing the nervous system of the company.

The Power of the Long Horizon

There is a profound irony in the fact that while these companies are constantly reinventing themselves into a state of paralysis, there are organizations out there that understand the value of a long-term horizon. I was reading about legal legacies recently, specifically how some firms survive through the decades by maintaining a core identity rather than chasing every management fad.

We’ve become obsessed with the ‘new’ at the expense of the ‘good.’ We think that if we aren’t changing, we’re stagnating. But there is a difference between growth and churn. Growth is an oak tree adding rings; churn is a washing machine on the spin cycle. One produces something that lasts for 111 years; the other just makes a lot of noise and eventually breaks its own belt. I look back at my own career and realize that the most productive I’ve ever been was during a 21-month stretch where nobody changed my manager and nobody ‘reimagined’ our department. We just did the work. We improved our processes incrementally. We actually listened to what the people using our tools wanted instead of what a consultant thought they should want.

Accepting the Invite

But here I am, looking at the screen again. Greg-the new synergy harvester-has just sent a calendar invite for a ‘Team Sync and Vibe Check.’ I can feel a twitch starting in my left eye. I want to tell Greg that the vibe is ‘exhausted’ and the sync is ‘non-existent.’ I want to tell him about Hazel D.-S. and the neon tubes. I want to explain that if he keeps shaking the glass, it’s eventually going to explode and shower us all in shards of ‘strategic initiatives.’

But I won’t. I’ll click ‘Accept’ because I have a mortgage and a cat who enjoys the expensive wet food that costs $1.11 a can. I find myself wondering if the people at the very top-the ones making these decisions from their 51st-floor offices-actually believe their own hype. Do they truly think that moving the ‘Customer Success’ team under ‘Global Operations’ is going to fix the fact that the product is buggy? Or is it just a shell game? If you keep the balls moving fast enough, nobody notices that the cups are empty. It’s a distraction technique. ‘Don’t look at the declining revenue, look at our exciting new ‘Agile Hub’ structure!’ It’s a classic misdirection, and we are all the unwilling assistants in a magic trick that isn’t actually very magical. What happens when the music finally stops? … It’s a cycle of perpetual recovery, a state of permanent transition where ‘business as usual’ is a myth from a bygone era.

Finding the Fixed Point

I think I’m going to go for a walk. I missed the bus, but there’s another one in 11 minutes, and for once, I don’t mind the wait. There is something comforting about the bus schedule. It’s a fixed point. It doesn’t matter who the CEO of the transit authority is; the M15 is still going to try to get to 125th street. It has a purpose. It has a route. It isn’t trying to ‘disrupt’ the concept of transportation by turning the buses into mobile juice bars or whatever the latest trend is. It just wants to move people from point A to point B.

Maybe that’s the secret. Maybe the goal isn’t to find the perfect organizational structure, because the perfect structure doesn’t exist. Maybe the goal is to find the people who are willing to stand still long enough to actually build something. I think about those 91 years of legal history again. That’s not just a number. That’s a testament to the idea that some things are worth keeping the same. You don’t need to rename the team if the team is already winning the game. You don’t need to change the letterhead if the name on it still means something to the people who walk through the door.

Consistency is the only true innovation left in an age of disposable strategy.

The Glow of Work

I’m back at my desk. The sun is hitting the screen in a way that makes the org chart look like a series of faint, ghostly shadows. I’m going to close the deck. I’m going to ignore Greg’s vibe check for another 11 minutes. I’m going to do the one thing that the re-org isn’t designed to handle: I’m going to do my actual job. I’m going to write the code, I’m going to fix the bug, and I’m going to pretend, just for an hour, that the boxes on the screen don’t matter. Hazel would understand. You just keep bending the glass until it glows. You ignore the vibration of the subway. You focus on the light.