The Long Game
Pages from Corporate Life
I came back with a reputation instead of a blank slate. That’s both a head start and a target.
The years that followed were, honestly, good ones. A manager who fought for compensation when the system resisted. A team without the weaponised insecurities of the first stint. Work that had real organisational stakes — driving a metric that the whole company eventually decided it needed, just not at the level it had been sitting at.
Then the usual forces. Org changes. Leadership musical chairs. Four managers in twelve months — not a reflection of performance, just how large organisations shed skin when uncertain about their own direction.
2024 and 2025 brought their own texture. Return-to-office mandates, AI anxiety, the quiet competition between those who returned to the office and those who didn’t. Someone even found a way to badge in, get a coffee, and be back in traffic before the metrics reset. Coffee badging, as it came to be known.
Customer Sentiment got centralised, rebranded, redistributed. Progress, apparently.
The span shrank. The role shifted. Each change arrived with a rationale that made sense at the level it was communicated, and meant something different at the level it was lived.
At 48, the calculus is different. The org chart is less a scoreboard and more a weather forecast — worth checking, not worth arguing with. The scheduled 1x1 moved for the dozenth time. For the first time, I didn’t care.
The parallel investments had something to do with that. Quiet Saturdays tracking microgreen failure rates. Learning the patient, unhurried logic of a beehive. Things that grow on their own schedule and don’t have a quarterly review. These have stopped feeling like side interests. They feel like the point.
The company will do what companies do. The question worth sitting with isn’t what they’ll decide next. It’s what I’m building on the ground that doesn’t depend on that answer.
The soft landing is already in motion. Which, on reflection, is the only real advantage of playing a long game.
This is the third and final piece in Pages from Corporate Life. Part One — The Newbie in the Room — covers 2002–2008. Part Two — Exits, Experiments, and a Phone Call in June — covers 2009–2015.