Manager (Noun): Experienced Professional Who Creates Pointless Fires For Others

True as true is, unfortunately.

I lost one contract a bit ago, but before I lost it, two new people had come in. Within about a week, before they even had a chance to understand what the company did and where the assets were and the value proposition and everything else, they were already telling people how “busy” and “slammed” they were, and how they were “getting called into meetings” and “fighting fires.” Indeed. This is common at most places — people start, and they instantly fall into that cadence. A lot of it is performative bullshit built around the idea that being busy is some form of currency. It’s not, really, and I’d argue most executives want productivity — but I’d also argue that a lot of executives don’t know what “productivity” looks like except in sales and operations and general revenue management.

It is true that white-collar corporate-ish existence has a lot of meetings, especially as you go up in rank. That’s probably gotten worse since the pandemic, because some managers call hybrid meetings just to see if Dan or Sally will be on video and appear to be at home, as opposed to audio doing something else. That scares some managers, so they call extra meetings to check up on their people. Nice level of trust there.