The projector hums, casting a pale, anxious light across the room. On the screen is The Slide. Not the mission statement slide, with its soaring eagles and stock photos of diverse teams laughing over laptops. Not the financial slide, with its aggressively optimistic upward arrows. The one that actually matters. The new org chart.

It’s a web of boxes and lines, mostly dotted ones, connecting names to other names in ways that defy logic and gravity. It looks less like a corporate structure and more like the frantic scribblings of a detective tracking a conspiracy. For the next 48 days, maybe more, nothing of value will be created. No code will be shipped, no campaigns will be launched, no clients will be delighted.

The Lie of ‘Synergy’

We are told, of course, that this is about synergy. It’s about agility. It’s about breaking down silos and future-proofing our vertical integration. The new VP, a man named Henderson who still has the plastic film on his company laptop, uses these words like incantations, as if saying them enough will manifest a reality where this makes sense. But it’s a lie. A comforting, well-rehearsed lie we all agree to believe for the sake of our paychecks.

Reorgs: A Tool of Conquest

Reorganizations are almost never about strategy. They are a tool of conquest. This is the corporate equivalent of a newly crowned king replacing all the regional lords with his own cousins. It’s about power. Henderson isn’t trying to unlock shareholder value; he’s trying to figure out who is loyal to the old regime and who can be bought. The dotted lines are tests of allegiance. The newly created departments with vague names like ‘Strategic Initiatives’ are holding pens for people he needs to sideline without the HR paperwork of a direct firing. The whole exercise is a brutal, bloodless coup disguised as a team-building exercise.

I should know. Eight years ago, I helped orchestrate one. I was a junior manager, hungry and full of ideas I’d read in books written by people who had never managed anyone. I built a PowerPoint deck that made a compelling case for restructuring our 28-person department. I used words like ‘efficiency’ and ‘streamlining.’ I truly believed it. My director loved it, promoted the idea upstairs, and it happened. It was only six months later, after two of the best engineers I knew had been managed out by a new team lead they couldn’t stand, that I realized my ‘brilliant’ plan was just the weapon my director used to neutralize his chief rival.

The Executive’s Chocolate Bar

I’ve tried to justify my role in it over the years, but the truth is I enjoyed the temporary chaos, the feeling of being an insider. It’s a cheap high. It’s now 4 PM, and I haven’t eaten since breakfast because I decided, with the spectacular lack of foresight only a dieter possesses, to start a new health kick this morning. All I can think about is the chocolate bar in my desk drawer. The satisfaction would be immediate and intense, and the consequences-the sugar crash, the broken commitment-would come later.

A re-org is an executive’s chocolate bar. It’s a quick hit of decisive action that feels productive, but the long-term cost is metabolic ruin for the entire organization.

The Prison Librarian’s Wisdom

My friend, Max J., is a prison librarian. It’s a job that sounds either terrifying or profoundly boring, but he describes it as an exercise in managing low-level, perpetual chaos. He has 8,888 books and a rotating clientele of men for whom the rules are the only fixed point in their world. He once told me,

“The worst thing you can do in here is change a rule for no reason. Not a big rule. A small one. Like when breakfast is served, or how many books they can check out.”

– Max J.

He said the moment you introduce arbitrary change, the trust is gone. The system isn’t the system anymore. It becomes a game of who you know and what you can get away with.

The Dissolution of Institutional Knowledge

That’s what a re-org does. It destroys the single most valuable asset a company has: its institutional knowledge, which is a fancy term for the informal web of relationships that actually gets work done. You think productivity comes from the official org chart? Productivity is knowing that you can call Sarah in finance directly because you helped her with a spreadsheet two years ago, bypassing 18 layers of bureaucracy. It’s knowing that David in engineering is the only one who remembers why a certain piece of legacy code was written that way, and you can grab him for coffee.

After a re-org, Sarah reports to someone in the Dublin office and David is now under a new ‘Center of Excellence’ and isn’t allowed to speak to your department without a formal request.

Survival Mode and Destabilization

The social fabric dissolves. For months, employees are not focused on their jobs. They are in survival mode. They are updating their resumes, having hushed conversations, trying to perform loyalty to a new boss they’ve never met. They are mapping the new political landscape, not the customer journey. The cost of this isn’t just a dip in quarterly output; it’s a permanent wound. The best people, the ones with options, quietly leave. The ones who remain learn a dangerous lesson: that political skill is more valuable than actual skill.

And I find it so strange that we treat this destructive cycle as a normal part of doing business. We are asked to dedicate our lives, our best waking hours, to these companies. We pour our creativity and energy into projects, only to have the entire context shattered every 18 months by an executive who needs to make their mark. It’s profoundly destabilizing. It’s exhausting. It makes you crave something, anything, in your life that is simple, reliable, and just works as advertised. An employee gets home after a day of decoding dotted lines and trying to sound enthusiastic in three separate ‘introductory’ meetings with three potential new bosses. They don’t have the energy to build, to create, to even think. They just want to collapse on the couch and find a stable, reliable stream of something to watch, a simple Meilleure IPTV that doesn’t require a six-week integration plan or a new strategic vision.

The most ironic part is that often, 28 months or so down the line, a new executive will come in, look at the spiderweb created by the last guy, and announce their own brilliant vision. It will involve streamlining, synergy, and breaking down silos. And the new org chart they present will look suspiciously like the one from two re-orgs ago.

We all clap, of course. We have to. But we know. We know the next six weeks aren’t for work. They’re for survival. The real work, whatever that was, will have to wait until the dust settles and we figure out who’s in charge of the coffee machine.