Season 1
Corporate theatre like you've never heard before. An original musical podcast celebrating AI, software engineering and the magnificent art of organisational self-sabotage. Featuring award-unwinning songs, executive optimism, strategic pivots, return-to-office mandates and enough corporate jargon to justify a steering committee. So true you won't believe it's fiction. So ridiculous you won't believe it's reality. Experience the overnight success days in the making.
A mandatory meeting, dear listener. Nine hundred badges, one auditorium, and a calendar invite titled 'Exciting Update'. If you have ever worked anywhere, that title tells you everything and nothing at all. The rumours are plentiful. The coffee is insufficient. Leadership has prepared a song about the journey ahead. Settle in, dear listener, and listen closely. Some announcements say rather more than they intend to.
Every transformation begins somewhere, dear listener. Usually in a windowless room, in front of a whiteboard that says DO NOT ERASE for reasons nobody living can explain. Tonight: a dreamer finally gets his twenty-five minutes, and seven executives say yes to his idea. All seven of them. Enthusiastically. Unanimously. To the same idea? Come now, dear listener. You know better than that.
The kingdom requires a unicorn, dear listener: twenty years' experience with a three-year-old technology, nine careers in one body, and a salary described, with breathtaking courage, as 'competitive'. The advert goes out. A thousand hopefuls answer. And somewhere far away, at exactly the wrong hour of the night, a tired engineer stops scrolling. How many interviews does it take to find a miracle? More than you think. Fewer than they planned.
Day one, dear listener. A fresh lanyard, a warm welcome, and a company eager to explain itself. Twice, as it happens, in two rather different versions. Our hero arrives with a new shirt and his optimism fully buttoned. He is told everything here is flexible, and everything here is easy. Both of these statements are true. And yet, neither of them is.
The project begins, dear listener. Officially, loudly, and with a keynote. There will be buzzwords. There will be applause. There will be a slide with a mountain on it, because there is always a slide with a mountain on it. And then the vision itself is unveiled to the assembled company, and it is stirring, and it is bold. And to exactly one person in that room, it is strangely, terribly familiar.
Alignment, dear listener: the sacred ritual in which a room full of intelligent people hear the same words and agree on them completely. Tonight, one clear vision enters a team meeting. What leaves the meeting is harder to count. And listen for the voice you barely hear, the quiet one in the corner, agreeing with everyone. The most dangerous person in any meeting is the one taking no notes.
Tonight the executives review the project, dear listener, and the project makes a strategic error: it presents evidence. Four reasonable questions are asked. What answers them cannot be described as language, exactly, though it is fluent and wears a blazer. By the end, a conclusion will be reached that nobody proposed and everybody supports. Also tonight: our hero discovers that every company keeps two handbooks. Yours does too.
A manager joins his own team's meeting, dear listener. Twenty-five minutes late, camera on, microphone mercifully off. What he witnesses in the final five minutes will inspire him. It will inspire him considerably. Tonight: a diagnosis is made from a distance, a phone call is placed about 'culture', and an announcement follows with all concerns warmly acknowledged and gently converted. How much damage can one man do on mute? Attend, and be counted.
Something unprecedented occurs tonight, dear listener. Something this kingdom has no process, no playbook and no appetite for. The project... goes well. Leadership responds the only way leadership knows how: decisively, generously, and from one floor too far away. Help is coming, dear listener. Senior help. Experienced help. Help with a diagram. Nobody asked for it.