The projection flickered on the screen, a perfect, glossy rendering of the future. Our CEO, beaming, gestured with a practiced sweep at the $5,000,007 platform, claiming it would revolutionize everything from inventory management to employee satisfaction. I stood there, rooted to the spot, a familiar metallic taste coating my tongue. The air, usually thick with forced enthusiasm at these all-hands, felt brittle. Because I knew, with the weary certainty of a tired parent watching a child promise to clean their room, that behind that slick facade lay the same tangled, manual approval chain we’d been struggling with for the last 7 years. The same bottlenecks, the same fear of blame, just prettier buttons.
It’s the cargo cult of our corporate age.
We see successful companies-the disruptors, the agile giants-and assume their success stems directly from their tech stack. So, we buy the software, we implement the platforms, we announce the ‘digital transformation’ initiatives with grand fanfare. But often, we forget the underlying culture, the painstaking process re-engineering, the uncomfortable conversations that precede true change. It’s like buying a Formula 1 car but continuing to drive it on a dirt track, wondering why you’re still getting stuck. The problem wasn’t the car; it was the terrain, the training of the driver, the entire ecosystem around it. I remember once, convinced that a new CRM would fix our sales pipeline, I spearheaded a 27-month
