CorporateTheater
How modern companies perform work instead of doing it — and the language they invented to make it look like the same thing.
Every company has two versions of itself. The one in the strategy deck — purposeful, aligned, moving fast — and the one you encounter on a Tuesday afternoon: the meeting about the meeting, the priority that isn't, the initiative that exists entirely to be announced.
Corporate Theater is the space between those two versions. It's the gap between what organizations say they're doing and what they're actually doing — and the elaborate systems of language, ritual, and performance they've built to make the gap invisible.
This is not a critique of individuals. Most people inside these systems are doing their best. It's an examination of how the systems themselves reward performance over progress — and what that costs everyone inside them.
Quick wins, vanity metrics, private equity, and the carefully managed ritual of the all-hands meeting.
- "Quick Wins" — The Corporate Strategy for Avoiding Strategy
- The Chief of Staff — Authority Without Power
- KPIs — The Illusion of Control, Measured Weekly
- Private Equity — What "Unlocking Value" Looks Like From Inside
- The All-Hands Meeting — Transparency as a Managed Experience
Family rhetoric, performance reviews, alignment theater, the pivot, and the cult of being busy.
- "We're Like a Family Here" — The Most Expensive Thing a Company Can Say
- The Performance Review — A Ritual for Telling You What You Already Know
- Alignment — The Word Companies Use Instead of Agreement
- The Pivot — When Strategy Fails and Failure Becomes Strategy
- The Cult of Being Busy — Hustle Culture's Quieter Successor
Every term that sounds like a concept but functions as a cover story. Defined honestly, for once.