He said it like it was wisdom. Like he had read it somewhere important and filed it away for exactly this moment.
What he was actually describing was three teams working on the same problem. Same budget. Same deadline. No idea the others existed.
From the executive floor it looked like energy. Initiative. Teams pushing each other toward better solutions. The dashboard showed activity everywhere and activity felt like progress.
It was not progress. It was the same work being done three times while the company paid for all of it.
Nobody had defined who owned the problem. So everyone did. And because information had quietly become territorial in that culture, nobody was sharing what they knew. Each team built their version in isolation, convinced they were the ones who would get it right.
Leadership called it healthy competition. The teams called it survival. What was actually happening was simpler and more expensive than either framing. Without clear ownership, without a defined line between this team's problem and that team's problem, the organization had no way to stop the duplication. It just kept funding it.
Quarter after quarter. Project after project.
Then the money ran out.
Not dramatically. Just the slow arithmetic of a company that had been spending three dollars to do one dollar's worth of work finally catching up.
The layoffs started quietly. Then continued. Good people. Careful people. People who had done exactly what was asked of them inside a system that was burning resources they never knew were being wasted.
They did not see it coming. How could they? They had been too busy working.
I watched it happen. I stayed as long as I could to protect the people who worked for me. Eventually I put my own name forward instead of theirs.
It did not feel like a sacrifice. It felt like the only honest thing left to do.
The only thing those people did wrong was trust the wrong leadership team.
Imported from Post Archives — Master List of Posts 061326.docx