The 43-Degree Ascent of Delusion

The projector hummed with a low, 63-hertz vibration that seemed to rattle the fillings in my teeth-fillings that were particularly sensitive today after a morning spent trying to explain the intricacies of local SEO to my dentist while she had three fingers and a high-speed drill in my mouth. It is a strange sensation, trying to articulate complex systems when your jaw is locked open and your tongue is a useless, numb slab of meat. It felt, quite honestly, a lot like this meeting. My VP was standing at the head of the mahogany table, pointing a laser at a line that didn’t just trend upward; it defied the laws of gravity, ascending at a sharp 43-degree angle toward a future that none of us had the equipment to inhabit.

He called it a ‘stretch goal.’ It is a beautiful phrase, isn’t it? It implies flexibility, athleticism, and the reaching of a potential that was always there, just waiting to be tapped. But as I looked at the 53 percent increase in expected output for the next quarter, paired with the 13 percent reduction in travel budget we’d been handed earlier that morning, the word ‘stretch’ felt more like a rack. He wasn’t asking us to reach; he was asking us to snap. He talked about ‘innovation through scarcity’ and ‘the power of a challenge,’ but what he was actually doing was issuing an unfunded mandate. He was offloading the risk of a poorly resourced strategy onto the central nervous systems of the 23 people sitting in that room.

The Ultimate Scarcity: Time

I think about my friend Charlie K.-H., a hospice volunteer coordinator who deals with the ultimate scarcity-time. Charlie K.-H. doesn’t have the luxury of ‘stretching’ a patient’s final 33 hours into a week through sheer willpower or ‘innovative thinking.’ He has to manage the resources he has: the volunteers, the medicine, the comfort, and the reality of the situation. In his world, an unfunded mandate isn’t a missed bonus; it’s a person dying in pain because someone at the top thought they could ‘optimize’ empathy.

Charlie K.-H. once told me that the hardest part of his job isn’t the death itself; it’s the families who refuse to accept the capacity of the body. They want a stretch goal for a heart that has already done 83 years of heavy lifting. Management does the same thing to departments. They look at a team that is already running at 93 percent capacity and tell them that for the sake of ‘growth,’ they need to hit 143 percent. They don’t provide more fuel. They don’t provide a better engine. They just tell the driver to press the pedal harder and then act surprised when the car ends up in a ditch.

The Rigged Game

There’s a subtle violence in being told to do the impossible without the tools to make it possible. It tells you that your time, your sleep, and your sanity are the ‘flex’ in the budget. If the goal is met, the VP gets a 33 percent bump in his year-end payout. If the goal is missed, the team is told they ‘lacked the grit’ or failed to ‘think outside the box.’ It is a rigged game where the house never loses and the players pay for their seats with their own health. We have normalized burnout as a key performance indicator. We have reached a point where if you aren’t feeling the physical effects of chronic stress, you aren’t ‘committed’ to the vision.

I remember trying to tell my dentist, through the haze of Novocain, that I didn’t think the crown she was fitting would sit right. She told me to ‘trust the process.’ I trusted it, and now I have a 3-millimeter gap that catches every piece of spinach I eat. Trusting the process is what people say when they don’t want to show you the blueprints.

The Calibrated System: Luxury vs. Liability

When we look at successful logistics, we see the opposite of this. Real success is built on the alignment of promise and resource. Think about the way physical movement works. When you book a high-end transport service, like when you arrange for Mayflower Limo, you aren’t just paying for a wish that you’ll get to your destination. You are paying for a calibrated system. They don’t tell the driver to ‘innovate’ their way through a snowstorm without the right tires. They don’t ‘stretch’ a 3-hour journey into 43 minutes by ignoring safety protocols. They understand that a safe, luxury outcome requires the right vehicle, the right maintenance, and a driver who isn’t being asked to perform miracles on an empty tank. This is how all business should function. It should be an honest assessment of what it takes to get from point A to point B without breaking the equipment.

But we aren’t treated like high-end vehicles. We are treated like rented mules. I once worked for a tech firm that set a ‘BHAG’-a Big Hairy Audacious Goal-to increase user acquisition by 233 percent in a single year. Our marketing budget? Zero. Our headcount? We actually lost 3 people to attrition in the first month. The CEO stood on a stage and told us that ‘the obstacles are the way.’ No, the obstacles are the obstacles. If I put a brick wall in front of your car, the wall is not ‘the way’; it is a reason to stop and find a sledgehammer or a detour. To tell someone to simply drive through the wall is not leadership. It’s a liability.

The Cost of Agreement

We’ve created this culture where ‘no’ is seen as a lack of ambition. If I tell my boss that we can’t hit the 53 percent target without an extra $43,000 for ad spend, I’m not being ‘unrealistic’; I’m being a professional. Yet, the pressure to be a ‘team player’ often forces us to nod our heads while our stomachs do 13 knots of anxiety. We agree to the mandate, knowing full well it is unfunded, and then we spend the next 93 days slowly eroding our lives to fill the gap. We trade our evenings, our workouts, and our presence with our children to satisfy a spreadsheet that was built on a lie.

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He tells me that no one on their deathbed ever says, ‘I wish I’d hit that 53 percent growth target in Q3.’ They talk about the times they didn’t stretch. They talk about the times they stayed within their limits and enjoyed the view.

– Charlie K.-H., Hospice Volunteer Coordinator

Funding the Future

If we want real innovation, we have to fund it. Innovation doesn’t happen when people are in survival mode. Survival mode leads to shortcuts. It leads to technical debt. It leads to the kind of ‘innovation’ that involves faking emissions tests or cutting corners on safety. Real innovation requires the luxury of time and the safety of resources. It requires a 103 percent commitment to the people doing the work, not just the output they produce. When you under-fund a goal, you aren’t encouraging creativity; you are encouraging desperation. And desperation is a terrible architect.

I think back to that meeting with the 43-degree line. I should have stood up. I should have pointed out that we were missing the $233,000 required to even buy the raw materials for that growth. But I didn’t. I sat there, feeling the numbness in my jaw and the dull ache of the dentist’s work, and I nodded. I became part of the unfunded mandate. I became the person who would go home and try to ‘optimize’ my own life just to keep the VP’s line moving up. It’s a mistake I’ve made 13 times in my career, and I suspect I’ll make it again before I’m done. We are conditioned to say yes to the challenge, even when the challenge is a hallucination.

The Path Forward

There is a growing resistance. There are leaders who are starting to realize that sustainable growth is the only kind that matters. They are the ones who look at a goal and ask, ‘What does the team need to make this happen?’ and if the answer isn’t available, they change the goal. They treat their employees like the high-end assets they are, rather than disposable components. They understand that a ‘stretch’ is only good if it’s followed by a period of rest, and that a mandate without funding is just a fancy way of asking for a sacrifice.

I think I’ll take the honest path. I think I’ll start asking for the funding before I accept the mandate. It might make the meetings more uncomfortable, but at least I’ll be able to chew my food without wincing.