When I was younger, I was genuinely naïve.

I watched too many Disney movies and truly believed leaders were supposed to be magical heroes. Maxed out intelligence, flawless competence, charging into battle, talking strategy in meetings and memorizing KPIs in private.

Then I entered the corporate world and realized: most leaders aren’t heroes. They’re just… leaders.

Many positions don’t exist because someone fits them, but because the organization created a hole that must be filled. You can even see people who actively make things worse yet never get laid off, while the ones who actually do the work end up exhausted like background goblins in someone else’s story.

The 80/20 rule in companies isn’t theory, it’s a blood-soaked field report. 20% of people are actually working. The other eighty percent are in meetings discussing how to look like they’re working.

Some executives are full-scale performance artists. They can talk endlessly, turn a meaningless data point into a TED Talk, inflate a sesame seed into a watermelon, then inflate the watermelon into a strategic weapon.

I used to ask, sincerely: “Why don’t they put the right people in the right roles?” “Why not restructure the system and eliminate these efficiency black holes?”

Then society taught my naïve self the real rule: they’re not unaware of the problems. They’re just afraid to touch them. Because once a company reaches a certain size, the system becomes like ancient legacy code: Who wrote it? No one knows. Why is it written this way? No one knows. Can it be changed? Don’t joke, touch it and you die.

Even changing one seemingly harmless line can cause the entire system to collapse like a Jenga tower, right onto your face. And all responsibility will land on you, while the original author of the bug
left the company six and a half years ago.

That’s when I understood: in big companies, competence is not hard currency. Don’t touch anything is.

When everyone is busy maintaining balance and preserving the status quo, the more you try to do good, the more likely you are to become an incident.

Yes, Minister isn’t a comedy. It’s a documentary. It’s not that the corporate world is rotten. It’s just too big for anyone to fix.

All you can do is find a corner where you won’t get crushed, learn the rules of the game, stay clear-headed, and decide whether you still want to keep playing.



—— XC Scribbles · 參拾肆 XXXIV 🗂️