At the Table or on the Menu

There is something immediately arresting about the aphorism, “If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.” It does not argue its case or offer advice. It simply presents a scene, and once seen, it is difficult to unsee. One recognizes it before one decides whether to endorse it.

The power of the phrase lies in its economy. The table is where decisions are made. The menu is where decisions are applied. What gives the aphorism its unsettling quality is the absence of a neutral space between the two. There is no bench on which one might sit out the meal. Abstention is not safety. It is exposure.

Seen this way, the aphorism is less a warning than a description of how authority already operates: decisions will be taken, strategies set, and costs allocated. The only question is who will be present when it happens.

In this light, certain institutional arrangements begin to look like literal responses to a metaphor.

German codetermination law, for example, guarantees workers’ representatives seats and votes on supervisory boards. It does not assume harmony of interests. It does not rely on consultation alone. It proceeds from a simpler recognition: that decisions affecting labour will be made regardless, and that the difference between representation and vulnerability lies in presence at the point of decision.

The contrast with Anglo-American corporate governance becomes visible in language as much as legal structures. A distinctive lexicon accompanies it: engagement, listening exercises, corporate surveys, voice of the employee. These terms recur with remarkable consistency, and they are not without significance. They draw on the moral vocabulary of democracy while stopping short of its institutional mechanics.

The prominence of voice is especially telling. Albert O. Hirschman famously argued in Exit, Voice, and Loyalty that voice names a mode of response available when exit is costly and authority remains intact: one speaks in the hope of influence, not with the guarantee of power. In contemporary corporate usage, the term retains its democratic resonance while detached from decision-making rights.

This vocabulary does not deny the importance of workers’ perspectives. On the contrary, it foregrounds them. But it does so in a way that quietly presupposes where power resides. One may speak and one may be heard. Or even thanked. Yet the location of the table remains unchanged. Participation is invoked in democratic terms while authority remains managerial.

At moments of relative stability, this distinction can seem academic. When conditions are favorable, the difference between being consulted and being represented may not feel decisive. It is under strain that the architecture of participation becomes visible. During restructuring, automation, mergers, or layoffs, the lexicon thins out. Surveys are postponed. Engagement gives way to execution. The menu is already written and is presented.

None of this requires imputing bad faith. The language of engagement reflects a coherent managerial worldview in which legitimacy is gathered after decisions are formed rather than built into the formation of those decisions themselves. It is a system that values feedback without confusing it with authority. The aphorism simply reveals the cost of that distinction.

For managers, the phrase draws attention to an ambiguity that is usually left unspoken: whether mechanisms of voice function as supplements to shared authority or as replacements for it. For workers, it highlights a difference that can otherwise remain blurred: between being heard and being present, between influence and participation.

The aphorism endures because it refuses consolation. It does not promise fairness or cooperation. It offers only clarity. Power will be exercised. Meals will be planned. The only open question is where one is seated when that happens, and what it means to notice the answer.
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photo by Jason Rosewell

Does this resonate?

Every Thursday night, around 2 AM, my bedroom window would start rattling violently. At first I blamed the garbage truck. But the shaking was too specific. Other windows stayed quiet.

Eventually I realized it wasn’t the engine. It was the compaction cycle: the hydraulic ram crushing garbage at a steady rhythm. That periodic motion happened to hit exactly the frequency my window was ready to vibrate at. My window wasn’t just glass anymore. It was a participant in a physics experiment.

Resonance is neutral. When frequencies align, the result can be beautiful amplification or catastrophic destruction. The Tacoma Narrows Bridge didn’t survive its own resonance. Neither did the wine glass.

You never hear: “Our restructuring announcement resonated. Three departments collapsed.” Or: “The CEO’s vision really resonated. It shattered our retention metrics.”

Corporate usage keeps only the amplification. It discards the bridge.

The stripping itself is an act of resonance management. The organization has tuned the word to vibrate only at approved frequencies.

Which means corporate resonance isn’t a misunderstanding of the physics. It’s a more faithful application of it than anyone intended.

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photo by Pawel Czerwinski

The day belongs to her

I don’t know when this thought first occurred to me, but for as long as I can remember I’ve never been especially interested in celebrating my birthday. The day always seemed like something that should be celebrated, but not by me. The celebration belongs to the person who gave me birth.

It feels less like a conclusion I’ve reached than something I’ve always known.

The birthday is a feast day for the mother, not the child. The child is mostly passive in the event: she did the work and bore the risk. I just arrived.

Yet birthdays are relentlessly directed toward the self being honored. That vector seems backwards to me. The day points not forward toward the person who emerged, but back toward the one who made that emergence possible. Toward an origin. Toward a gift that asks only to be remembered.

Merci, maman.

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What the Builders Know: on a recent Encyclical and what it doesn’t settle

The encyclical Magnifica Humanitas has been out for a few days. The image being received most readily as reassurance is from the presentation: an AI founder standing beside the Pope, saying that people outside need to remind those inside of the humanity they cannot see. The sentiment has been received as noble.

The founders of the major AI companies are warning publicly about the dangers of what they are building. The warnings are not vague. Yoshua Bengio, a Turing Award winner and one of the architects of modern AI, assigns a 20 percent probability to catastrophe. Geoffrey Hinton, Nobel laureate and the field’s most cited voice on existential risk, has suggested it might be sensible to stop altogether. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, wrote before founding the company that this might be the greatest threat to humanity’s continued existence. These are not hedged statements from cautious men. They are alarms pulled by the people who built the building.

And yet the proposed responses are almost entirely technical: better alignment, stronger safety protocols, governance frameworks, etc. The logic of the solution is the logic of the problem. What these companies mean by “ethics” is not the question of what this work does to the person performing it, or what it will do to the persons it reaches. It is another line of code.

A Spanish expression names what I think is actually on display in that image, though I have not found a satisfying English equivalent. The expression is dejación de deberes. It does not mean negligence, which implies a failure to notice. It does not mean error, which implies a good-faith attempt that went wrong. It names the relinquishing of one’s duty, of what one is expected to carry.

The founders know the stakes: they are the ones who published the warnings. The knowledge is not missing. Sincerity of alarm does not discharge the duty it names.

What is missing is the willingness to let that knowledge be constitutive: to make the question of the human person not a downstream ethical consideration but the premise from which the work begins.

Outsourcing that question to encyclicals and ethics boards while development accelerates is not collaboration. It is the appearance of responsibility in place of its exercise. Hiring philosophers does not resolve this. The question is not whether there are philosophers in the building. It is whether the anthropology carries the freight.

The technology being built operates by producing outputs statistically indistinguishable from understanding, without understanding. It is trained on the full recorded output of human thought while having none of its own. The output comes across as being from a person; the system is not a person.

The technology denies interiority by construction. The people building it deny it by choice.

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painting: Pieter Brueghel the Elder, The Tower of Babel, c. 1563, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria.

The invisible Bob and Martha

Humus is the thin dark layer, a few centimeters at most, that sits at the surface of the earth and sustains virtually all life on it. It takes roughly a century to form a single centimeter. It can be destroyed in an afternoon.

Most people walk over it without a second thought.

Organizations have their own humus. It doesn’t have a name on the org chart and it doesn’t appear in the annual report. It’s the accumulated living layer that makes everything else possible: trust, institutional memory, the relationships through which decisions get made and exceptions get authorized outside formal channels. Like humus, it forms slowly and invisibly, through thousands of small interactions over years. And like humus, it can be destroyed in an afternoon.

A restructuring. A betrayal. A leadership change that signals, loudly or quietly, that the old rules no longer apply. The layer doesn’t announce its departure. You notice it the way you notice soil erosion: invisibly for months, then unmistakably, when something that used to grow no longer does.

The reason organizations chronically underinvest in these things isn’t negligence. It’s visibility.

Humus doesn’t have a line item. Neither does trust. Neither does the knowledge that quietly exits when the wrong people leave. We fund what we can see and measure, which means we systematically defund the layer everything grows from.

The accounting logic is impeccable. The biological logic is catastrophic.

And the humus has a face. It’s Bob. It’s Martha. The ones who’ve been there for decades, who know where everything is and why it works the way it does, who remember what was tried before and what happened.

But here is something we don’t say: some of them chose this.

They saw, early or late, what the organization could and couldn’t see, and they settled permanently into the space between what the organization measured and what it needed. The invisible layer isn’t only where the unrecognized end up. It’s also where certain people go deliberately, because it’s the only place in the organization where the work is judged by whether it functions rather than by whether it’s visible, and the exposure to organizational politics is low enough to ignore. They knew they were invisible. Some of them preferred it that way.

Which means the organization’s failure to see them was not always unilateral. There was an arrangement. Informal and unspoken. It held. The organization got the benefit of the layer without having to account for it. Bob and Martha got to do the work they cared about without having to perform for systems that wouldn’t have known how to evaluate them anyway. It suited everyone. It cost everyone something.

We see them. We appreciate them in a vague, fond way. We call them lifers. We call them grinders. And when they retire we give them a plaque and a room full of warm applause, and six months later things start not working and nobody can explain why.

Meanwhile we celebrate the stars. The ones who rose. We built a recognition system that rewards only what our existing categories can name — ascent — rewarding the people who rise and ignoring the people who hold the ground. Then we’re surprised when the ground erodes.

The question isn’t whether your organization has this layer.

The question is whether anyone is tending it. And tending requires visibility. Which means the first problem isn’t resources or intention. It’s that some of the people who live in this layer may not want to be found. The arrangement protected them too. Making the invisible visible isn’t neutral. It changes what the layer is.

You can’t tend something you can’t see. But seeing it changes it.

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photo by Matúš Kovačovský

The one belief that generates all the others

Gary Hamel closed a recent LinkedIn post with a genuine question: What elements of the managerialist mindset are ripe for a rethink?

It’s the right question. But answering it as a list misses something. The beliefs Hamel names (that KPIs can guarantee right behavior, that competence tracks with rank, that employees are “resources”) are not independent errors sitting side by side. They follow from it. They are what you get once a more fundamental belief is already in place.

That belief is this: a person is a type of thing.

Not a subject. Not an agent with an inside that no system can reach. A thing. A unit with properties. Something that can be measured, allocated, optimized, and if necessary, replaced.

Once that belief is installed (quietly, structurally, before anyone arrives at work), everything else follows with a certain logic. Of course, you measure performance. Things have measurable properties. Of course, competence correlates with rank; someone had to assess the properties and sort accordingly. Of course, you call them human resources; resources is what things are when organizations need them.

Hamel is right to reach for Kuhn. But there is a floor below the assumptions.

Scientific revolutions happen because anomalies accumulate (things the reigning paradigm cannot explain) until what the paradigm cannot explain outnumbers what it can.

The managerial paradigm has been accumulating anomalies for decades. You already know what they are. The engagement survey whose results surprised no one. The transformation initiative that consumed two years and changed nothing that mattered. The knowledge worker (perhaps yourself, in an earlier role, or a current one) who gave exactly what was measured and protected everything else.

They are what happens when you govern persons as though they were things.

This is not a case against metrics. A well-designed KPI can protect a worker from a supervisor’s prejudice; in some contexts, quantified evaluation is more humane than subjective judgment, not less.

But a system that offers that protection still cannot see the internal assessment a person makes about what the relationship on offer is worth, and what to give to it. That calculation happens below any system’s threshold.

Hamel asks which managerialist beliefs are ripe for a rethink. There is one and it is the source of most of what isn’t working.

Large organizations genuinely require systems: budgets, accountability structures, operational metrics, and role clarity. Complexity without coordination is just chaos with good intentions. The problem is subtler.

Optimize a machine component and it does what the optimization requires. Optimize a person and they notice that they are being optimized, they notice what it means to be treated that way, and they respond to that.

Not necessarily by resisting. Sometimes they calibrate. Other times they give exactly what the system measures and protect everything else. And the system registers it as compliance. In reality, it is closer to the minimum viable performance of a person who has understood the terms of the relationship on offer.

No system can reach the inside of that transaction. The belief that it can is what’s wrong.

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Working with the Grain

Once you learn to read organizational dynamics, you can’t stop reading them. This is what happens when you take the practice seriously. Waste becomes obvious. The gap between stated values and actual practice becomes glaring. Sensing these undercurrents means feeling them.

This doesn’t make you noble. It makes you tired in specific ways that are hard to explain to people who don’t work this way.

The Practice Itself

A cabinet maker works with the grain, not against it. Not because it’s spiritual or beautiful, but because the material responds differently depending on how you approach it. The wood tells you something if you’re paying attention.

Management works the same way.

This means developing heightened awareness: how information actually flows versus how the org chart says it should. Where energy clusters and where it gets dammed up. The person who stops speaking in meetings after a particular decision. The shift in tone between front-stage and back-stage conversations. Subtle signals: a hesitation, a quick breath, the way someone’s hands move when they’re deciding whether to say what they actually think. You feel it physically: your chest tightens when something shifts, attention snaps to a pause that signals more than words convey. Over time you learn what that tightness means. Usually something important is about to happen or has just been avoided.

You learn through your hands, not books. The resistance when you push too hard. The smooth flow when your approach fits. The subtle feedback that tells you when to press forward and when to step back. This is craft knowledge: embodied and situational. Impossible to fully articulate.

What Gets Complicated Immediately

Each team, each situation has its own grain. What worked before may not work now. But here’s where it breaks: determining what the material “is” involves judgment that’s never purely objective. How much of what you see is actual pattern, and how much is your projection? The question matters more than the answer.

You will spend years learning to distinguish between reading what’s actually there and reading your own preferences into it. Some of what you’re seeing is real. Some is you. The line between perception and projection is thinner than most methods acknowledge.

There’s also this: people have agency.

Unlike wood, the grain responds to your touch, and your presence alters what you’re trying to read. You’re not just reading material. You’re in relationship with it, and the material is reading you back. This changes what craft means.

The Dangers

The practice doesn’t protect you from using it badly. You will meet people who use the language of craft to excuse slowness, who mistake their discomfort with metrics for depth, and who perform thoughtfulness while avoiding accountability.

Sometimes you are that person.

I spent six months convinced I was being patient with a person who needed time. It looked like craft. It felt like presence. What it actually was: avoidance. I didn’t want to have the hard conversation, so I called my hesitation “honoring their process.” They left the organization confused about what I thought, and the work suffered. Calling it craft made the avoidance feel noble.

Craft can become a way of not being accountable. “I see things others don’t” stops being an acknowledgment of cost and becomes a reason to stop being questioned and to stop engaging with people who don’t see it. The loneliness of the practice gets mistaken for evidence that you’re right.

There is a difference between working with the grain and just being slow, and calling it craft. Between being patient and avoiding decisions, and calling it patience. The danger is mistaking slowness for wisdom.

The central question is whether you can practice craft in systems designed for something else entirely: staying curious when the organization demands certainty or working with care when speed is rewarded.

What Happens Over Time

Early on, you begin noticing what others miss: tension, hesitation, a pause. Your attention snaps to subtle signals. This heightened perception is both a gift and a burden. You can’t unsee what you’ve learned to see.

Perception without wisdom about intervention makes things worse. Early on, I walked into a meeting reading silence as resistance. Something needed to be said, I thought. I broke the silence. Three hours later I learned that person had spent the whole meeting trying to find courage to speak, and my stepping in made them disappear further back into the room.

That was fifteen years ago. I still feel it.

Now when I see silence, I wait longer. Sometimes I wait too long. That’s another kind of harm. You learn—mostly through getting it wrong—when your seeing calls for action and when it calls for staying still.

Over time, something unexpected happens. Responsibility deepens while grandiosity falls away. You stop trying to fix things that aren’t yours to fix. A person resists a change you believe in and you watch yourself wanting to persuade them, but instead you say nothing. You notice the relief in your shoulders. That’s the lightness of releasing what you cannot carry.

This is the daily tension between caring deeply and accepting that your caring doesn’t control outcomes. Last week someone important to the organization resigned because of a decision you supported. You were right about the decision. They were right to leave. Both things are true. The tension doesn’t resolve. You learn to work within it.

Failures accumulate. Some reveal patterns you’d missed: you misread a person’s motivation and your intervention made things worse. Some show a mismatch that no intervention could fix: you did everything right and the person had already decided to leave. Learning to distinguish between these takes time and leaves marks.

Something shifts in how you hold difficulty. In a crisis last year, the room was fractured: two factions, impossible positions, language breaking down. You felt the panic just below the surface of everyone’s voice. You didn’t fix it. Instead, you asked questions no one wanted asked. And the resolution came from somewhere else. The room stopped fracturing while you were there. You felt that.

But other times nothing resolves. The conflict stays messy. The decision causes harm despite your care. You learn to value the attempt even when the result falls short.

What Has Changed

What has fallen away is the need to control everything. You used to feel responsible for how others received what you said, for whether they made the right decision. Ten years in, you stopped. The clarity of knowing what’s actually mine to do came slowly: I cannot control whether they believe me or whether it lands.

What has intensified is the sensitivity to unnecessary harm. A person is being set up to fail and no one sees it. A decision is being made on incomplete information and the person making it doesn’t know it. The organization says it values connection and the structure prevents it. These things become impossible to ignore. You feel them. The intolerance for it is almost physical.

What remains uncertain is whether any of this makes the difference you hope it makes.

You lose certain illusions: that you can control outcomes, that the system will reward integrity, that doing good work is enough, that organizations are fundamentally rational. These illusions make work easier to bear. Losing them clarifies. It also costs.

The Loneliness and the Aliveness

Decades in, the practice doesn’t stabilize. Unexpected.

You’re still discovering new ways to sense a room. Last month you noticed something: the way people arrange themselves has changed. Tighter. More defended. No one said this was happening. But the geometry of the room tells you something about the organization’s nervous system. You mention it to someone who’s been here twenty years. They haven’t seen it. You wonder if you’re right or if you’re seeing patterns that aren’t there.

The master craftsperson isn’t someone who has arrived. They’re still tinkering, still playful with the fundamentals. They know the craft deeply enough to question it, to try combinations that might be wrong. There’s aliveness in this.

You notice your own perception more precisely. But the more you understand, the more you see you don’t understand. Mastery means holding permanently that you could be completely wrong about what you’re reading.

Sometimes you’re alone in sensing undercurrents. Not everyone works this way. Most think you’re too slow, too concerned with things that don’t show up in quarterly reviews. You’re in a meeting, you see something—a shift in someone’s tone, a decision being made sideways, the moment trust breaks—and no one else seems to notice. You can’t unsee it. But naming it would sound strange. So you carry it alone. And the carrying is real weight.

Occasionally you encounter another practitioner: a nod, a glance. Understanding without explanation. These moments are rare. They remind you the craft exists independent of whether this particular organization values it.

The Cost Is Real

This practice demands things if you take it seriously. It also assumes conditions—enough credibility to be slow, enough standing to value what doesn’t show up in metrics—that aren’t equally distributed.

You will see things you cannot unsee. And you will feel them in your body.

You will keep experimenting. Not because you’re dissatisfied, but because you’re alive to possibility. The craft keeps revealing new questions and new ways of seeing. This continues as long as you practice.

The curiosity doesn’t diminish. It deepens.

Some people find they cannot work any other way because once you see the grain, you cannot pretend it isn’t there.

What Remains

Management as craft doesn’t guarantee good outcomes. Careful attention doesn’t ensure success. Working with the grain doesn’t mean the organization will flourish. Sometimes you do everything right and it still fails. Sometimes the system is too broken for craft to matter. Sometimes caring deeply just means feeling the harm more acutely.

Your hands learn to read the grain more precisely even as you become less certain about what the reading means. The practice continues.

This is what long practice looks like: not mastery as completion, but mastery as sustained attention, ongoing curiosity, the capacity to keep working thoughtfully with material that never fully reveals itself.

The craft is the work. Humanity is what prevents it from becoming manipulation. Whether any of it matters depends on questions you cannot fully answer, working in conditions you rarely control, with people who may or may not recognize what you’re trying to do.

The practice continues. That’s the whole thing. The practice continues.

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photo by Ted Balmer

On Any Given Day

The Signal and the Sorting

What you project is what you attract. Not what you say you are. Not what your website claims. Not the values posted in the lobby or the purpose statement ratified by the board. What you project: the signal that emanates from every decision, every tolerated behavior, every crisis handled and mishandled. That signal is always on. It is never neutral.

The institution you lead attracts people who read it correctly. Not because people conspire to find each other, but because the signal reaches them first. And the people with options read it and move on.

A university that has stopped believing it can change anything will, over time, fill itself with faculty who have also stopped believing that. No one plans it. No one sees it happening. The institution projected something. The right people for that projection showed up.

This is not a metaphor. The mechanism doesn’t require your awareness or your cooperation. It runs regardless.

Organizations emit through what they reward quietly and what they punish quietly, through who gets promoted and who stalls, through how they treat someone on the way out. All of that is signal. It reaches people who are deciding whether this is a place where someone like them belongs.

And what you actually are is, uncomfortably, a function of what you have been willing to risk (or not risk) over time. Institutions that play it safe long enough become genuinely safe: safe to enter, safe to stay in, safe to give a mediocre decade to without consequence. They attract people for whom that is enough. Which then makes them safer still.

The reverse is also true. A genuine act of institutional courage changes the projection. It tells a different story to people who had written you off, who were waiting for exactly that signal before deciding to bet on you. You don’t have to announce the change. You have to make it. The announcement follows by itself, carried by the people who noticed.

This is why culture change is so difficult and why so many attempts at it fail. They work on the surface: the messaging, the workshops, the new leadership competencies. None of it touches the underlying projection. And the underlying projection is made of decisions, not declarations. Decisions about what you will defend when it costs something. What you will refuse when refusal is inconvenient. What you will acknowledge when acknowledgment is humiliating. The surface work is a choice, which means something else is being protected.

Every institution signals. The question worth sitting with is not “what signal do we want to send?” That question is too easy. The question is: what signal are we actually sending, as evidenced by who keeps showing up?

And who keeps leaving. Over time, not case by case. The pattern, not the story any individual departure comes with.

The exit interview is almost beside the point. You are in that data. Not the institution you intend. The one you have been building, one unframed decision at a time.

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photo by Markus Spiske

The Gandhi Paradox

You are not Gandhi.

Gandhi was a private citizen when he began. No title, no formal authority. People followed him because they chose to. They could walk away, and some did, and that was their right, and the movement survived anyway. The commitment of those who stayed was real precisely because it was voluntary. You could see it because leaving was an option.

Your direct reports operate inside a legal framework of employment. Their income depends on meeting your expectations. Their career depends on your assessment of them. The question this creates is one most managers never ask: how much of what I read as engagement is engagement, and how much of it is the entirely rational behavior of people who have learned that agreement is safer than dissent?

I watched this once in a team meeting. A new initiative was presented. Everyone engaged: questions, notes, apparent buy-in. Weeks later, in a casual conversation, I learned that several people in that room had serious reservations. Reservations they took home with them. They had done everything right. Their compliance had been indistinguishable from commitment.

It was not commitment. And the room never knew.

The manager who recognizes this pattern has usually decided it doesn’t apply to them. The open door is real. The invitation to candor is sincere. And none of it changes what people will risk saying to someone who controls their livelihood. The effort was genuine. The structure doesn’t register it.

This is not a culture problem. It is not a communication problem. It is not a psychological safety problem, though it will be diagnosed as all three. The power differential does not disappear because you have made yourself approachable. It shapes what people will risk saying in every conversation you have with them. It shaped what they said to you this morning.

What you are reading as engagement is real. It is also insufficient evidence. The question worth pondering is not how to fix the structure. You can’t. It is what kind of attention you owe people you cannot fully read.

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photo by 愚木混株 Yumu