I am currently kneeling on the linoleum, trying to piece together the handle of my favorite ceramic mug. It’s a stupid thing to mourn-a heavy, salt-glazed piece of clay I’ve owned for 11 years-but it shattered when I dropped it this morning while reading an email about ‘radical ownership.’ There is something deeply poetic about holding a jagged shard of porcelain in your hand while a digital voice tells you that you are the master of your professional destiny. I tried to glue it back together, but the edges don’t quite meet anymore. It’s a mess. Much like the ’empowerment’ initiative that hit my inbox at 8:01 AM.

We were sitting in a conference room last week, a space that smelled vaguely of industrial carpet cleaner and the collective anxiety of 21 middle managers, when the Director of Operations leaned in with that specific, practiced intensity. He looked at me and said, ‘Leo, for this upcoming project, I want you to think of yourself as the CEO. You have full autonomy. You own this.’ It’s a seductive phrase, isn’t it? Being the CEO of something suggests a level of agency that feels almost tactile. It suggests that if the mug breaks, you have the authority to buy a new one, or perhaps even design a better mug entirely. But the reality of corporate ‘ownership’ is usually just a clever way to rebrand the psychological burden of failure without providing any of the tools for success.

The $31 Firewall of Permission

Two hours after that meeting, I tried to move the needle. I needed a specific data-scrubbing tool to analyze the 401 client profiles we were tasked with optimizing. It’s a standard piece of kit, nothing fancy, costing exactly $31 a month. I went to the procurement portal, filled out the 11 required fields, and hit ‘submit.’ Three minutes later, I received an automated rejection. My ‘autonomy’ had apparently collided with a pre-existing firewall maintained by a committee that only meets on the 21st of every month. To be the CEO of a project while being unable to spend $31 is like being given the keys to a Ferrari but having to ask a panel of strangers for permission to put air in the tires.

The Garden That Bloomed in November

This is the core of the contradiction. We are told to be innovative, to be disruptive, to act with the speed of a startup while being anchored to the weight of a century-old anchor. It’s a form of gaslighting. When you give someone accountability for an outcome but withhold the authority to manage the process, you aren’t empowering them. You are setting them up for a very specific, very modern kind of burnout. It’s the burnout that comes from screaming into a vacuum that has been labeled ‘The Suggestion Box.’

The Cubicle Participant

I’ve found myself doing it too. I criticize the system, I mock the ‘CEO of your desk’ rhetoric, and then I go right back to my cubicle and spend 41 minutes trying to figure out which of the 11 drop-down menus will allow me to request a monitor that doesn’t flicker. I am a participant in my own limitation. We all are. We take the title because it feels good to be seen, to be acknowledged as a leader, even if the ‘leadership’ only extends to choosing the font on a slide deck that 21 people will ignore.

There is a profound psychological cost to this. It’s called learned helplessness. When you repeatedly encounter obstacles that are outside of your control, your brain eventually stops looking for the exits. You stop asking for the $31 software. You stop suggesting the garden. You just sit there, staring at the shattered mug on the floor, wondering if you need to file a workplace safety incident report before you’re allowed to pick up the pieces. This gap between what we are told we can do and what we are actually allowed to do creates a cognitive dissonance that eats away at the soul.

The Physical Rejection of Bureaucracy

I think that’s why so many of us are becoming obsessed with physical spaces lately. When the digital and professional worlds become an endless series of ‘pending’ statuses and ‘waiting for approval’ notifications, the physical world becomes the only place where we can exercise true autonomy. It’s the reason I spend so much time thinking about how I want my home office to look, or why I’m so meticulous about the plants on my windowsill. In those small squares of reality, there is no committee. If I want to move a chair, I move it. If I want more light, I open a window.

This desire for tangible control is exactly why people are looking for ways to redefine their environments entirely. When you step into one of the Sola Spaces structures, the shift in energy is almost immediate. It isn’t just about the glass or the architecture; it’s about the fact that you decided it should be there. There were no 51-page requisitions or monthly steering committees involved in the feeling of the sun on your neck. You chose the space, you shaped the light, and you own the silence. In a world where ’empowerment’ is a buzzword used to mask a lack of trust, creating a physical realm that responds to your will is a radical act of self-care. It’s a rejection of the bureaucratic maze in favor of something clear, solid, and indisputably yours.

We often mistake ‘freedom’ for the absence of work, but true freedom is the ability to do the work that matters without having to beg for the tools. Leo G.H. once described a successful intervention he led where he bypassed the regional directors entirely and just bought the supplies himself. He spent $111 of his own money to fix a problem that had been ‘in committee’ for 21 months. He was reprimanded, of course. He was told he violated protocol. But the look on the faces of the seniors when they finally had their reading nook was worth every bit of the bureaucratic scolding. He took the accountability and the authority by force. Most of us aren’t that brave. We wait for the signature. We wait for the 11th hour.

I’m looking at the glue on my fingers now. The mug is back together, but it has these ugly, translucent scars running down the side. It will never hold liquid the same way again. It’s a reminder that once the trust is broken-once you realize the ‘autonomy’ you were promised is just a decorated cage-you can’t really un-see the bars. You can’t go back to believing the VP when he tells you that you’re the CEO of a project that requires five signatures to buy a pack of post-it notes.

The Final Conclusion: Zero Distance

Maybe the answer isn’t to try and fix the corporate mug. Maybe the answer is to stop bringing your favorite things into an environment that is designed to break them. We need to find the spaces where our agency isn’t a metaphor. Whether that’s a garden, a sunroom, or a side project that never sees a spreadsheet, we need somewhere where the distance between ‘I want’ and ‘I do’ is zero. Because at the end of the day, a title is just a collection of letters. Autonomy is a collection of actions. And I would rather have a small, quiet room that I built myself than a corner office in a building where I’m not allowed to touch the thermostat.

I wonder how many hours we lose every year to the ‘permission culture.’ If you add up all the 11-minute waits for a password reset and all the 31-day cycles for a budget approval, you probably lose an entire lifetime of creative potential. We are a species that built cathedrals and split the atom, yet we are currently defeated by a ‘Submit’ button that leads to a dead link. It’s a tragedy written in Times New Roman, 12-point font.

I’ll probably go into work tomorrow and pretend I didn’t see the jagged edges of the system. I’ll sit in the meeting, I’ll nod when they talk about ‘leveraging our internal synergies,’ and I’ll probably even say something about ‘taking ownership’ of the Q3 results. I’ll do it because that’s the game, and the game pays for the salt-glazed mugs and the quiet spaces. But I’ll know the truth. I’ll know that the only real CEO in the room is the one who doesn’t have to ask for a ticket number to fix a broken handle. The rest of us are just trying to keep the shards from cutting our hands.