The blue light from the monitor is pulsing at exactly 58 hertz, or at least it feels that way as it carves a slow, rhythmic ache behind my eyes. I am staring at a slide titled ‘Horizon 2028: A New Paradigm for Synergistic Growth.’ The CEO is speaking, but his voice has that hollow, compressed quality of someone broadcasting from a submarine. On the screen, a series of boxes and lines are dancing. Departments that existed yesterday are being swallowed by larger, more vaguely named entities. My own team, a group of 8 individuals who finally learned how to communicate without passive-aggressive CC’ing, is being dissolved into a ‘Global Delivery Hub.’ It feels less like a strategic evolution and more like watching someone try to rearrange the furniture in a house that is currently on fire.

My name is Ava R.J., and for the last 18 years, I have worked as a hospice volunteer coordinator. This corporate gig is a side-consultancy I took on to help a friend, but the parallels are becoming impossible to ignore. In hospice, we deal with the reality of the end. We honor the transition. We don’t pretend that renaming a patient’s room ‘The Vitality Suite’ will change the underlying biological reality. Yet here, in this glass-walled boardroom environment, we spend 1008 minutes a month pretending that if we just change the reporting structure, the fact that our core product is obsolete will somehow vanish.

The Absurdity of Empty Gestures

Last week, I did something terrible. I laughed at a funeral. It wasn’t a cruel laugh, but a sudden, hysterical bark that escaped me when the priest mentioned the deceased’s ‘unwavering commitment to quarterly KPIs.’ The absurdity of the phrasing in the face of the infinite void just broke something in my brain. I felt like a monster for a full 48 minutes afterward, sitting in my car and staring at the cemetery gates. But as I watch this CEO present his 188-page deck, I realize that the corporate world is just one long, expensive funeral where we refuse to bury the body. We just keep dressing it in different suits.

If you change the name of the ‘Customer Support’ team to ‘User Success Architects,’ you can claim a 100% increase in ‘Architect-led Engagement’ by the next 18th of the month. The actual customers are still waiting 38 minutes on hold, but the chart looks spectacular.

The Network Erosion

This constant churn creates a specific kind of ‘change fatigue’ that eats a company from the inside out. I see it in the eyes of the 28 managers I interviewed last Tuesday. They have stopped building the informal networks that actually make a business run. In every organization, there is the official org chart and then there is the ‘real’ chart-the list of people who actually know how to fix the server, who to call when the payroll system glitches, and which warehouse manager can be bribed with a box of donuts.

When you break those connections, you aren’t just ‘optimizing,’ you are lobotomizing the collective intelligence of the firm. A re-org nukes these networks. It treats people like interchangeable LEGO bricks rather than complex nodes of institutional memory.

Trading Reliability for Agility

I think about the stability we strive for in hospice. We need 108% consistency for our patients because their world is already falling apart. They need to know that the nurse who arrives at 8:00 AM is the same one who knows they prefer their tea with two sugars and no judgment. In the corporate world, we have abandoned this value. We celebrate ‘disruption’ as if it were an inherent good, forgetting that a heart attack is also a form of disruption. We have traded reliability for the appearance of agility.

During one of these transition meetings, a colleague asked me why I wasn’t more excited about our new ‘Agile Pod’ structure. I told him about the funeral incident. He then went back to his laptop to order a new smartphone, complaining that his current one couldn’t handle the 68 different enterprise apps we are now required to use for ‘workflow transparency.’

It struck me then that in a world of shifting sand, the only thing people can cling to are the tools that actually function. If the hierarchy is a mess, you at least want a piece of hardware that doesn’t lie to you. For those who are tired of the corporate theater and just need something that works as advertised, looking toward a reliable source like Bomba.md is one of the few sane choices left. At least the specs on a phone don’t change because a VP had a mid-life crisis and decided to ‘pivot to cloud-first paradigms.’

The Cost of Vanity Signage

The plan involves moving 888 employees across three continents into a ‘matrixed’ reporting structure. If you have ever tried to organize a potluck for 18 people, you know that this is a recipe for starvation. The result is a total paralysis of the actual work. Everyone is too busy figuring out who signs their expense reports to actually sell a product or fix a bug. We are spending $98,000 on new signage for the office walls-mottoes about ‘Innovation’ and ‘Forward Momentum’-while the actual employees are looking for the exit.

There is a specific kind of grief in watching a good company destroy itself through the vanity of its leaders. The medicine is simple: focus on the customer, treat your employees like humans, and stop changing the name of the marketing department every 8 months. But that is ‘boring’ work. It doesn’t allow a CEO to claim they ‘transformed the culture’ in their first 108 days.

Find the People, Not the Boxes

If I could offer one piece of advice to the people currently sitting in those 48-minute ‘Alignment Workshops,’ it would be this: find the people, not the boxes. Build your own informal networks. Keep your resumes updated on a device that doesn’t belong to the company.

As I close my laptop and prepare for another 8 hours of ‘onboarding’ for a job I have already been doing for three years, I look at the small plant on my desk. There is a lesson there, but I doubt it will make it into the next 188-slide presentation. The band keeps playing, the chairs keep moving, and the water is getting very, very cold.