The blue dry-erase marker is squeaking against the board, a sound that usually reminds me of a nib scratching against cheap, toothy paper, but today it just feels like a headache. My wrist is throbbing. I spent 44 minutes this morning wrestling with a jar of kosher dills that refused to acknowledge my authority as a sentient being. I failed. The jar remains sealed, a glass-bound monument to my own physical inadequacy, and now I’m sitting in this ‘Strategic Alignment Summit’ trying to pretend that my thumb doesn’t feel like it’s been crushed by a hydraulic press. On the board, someone-I think his name is Dave, but he wears a vest that screams ‘Product Owner’ so loudly his name becomes irrelevant-is drawing a circle. Inside the circle, he writes: ‘Operationalize Core Competencies.’

I’m looking at the word ‘operationalize’ and wondering if it would be more or less effective than the towel-and-rubber-band method I used on the pickle jar. There are 24 people in this room, and every single one of them is nodding. It’s a rhythmic, hypnotic movement. We are all participating in a collective lie. We are pretending that ‘leveraging synergies’ is a tangible act, like replacing a cracked feed on a 1944 Parker Vacumatic. But it isn’t. It’s a defensive crouch. When I’m at my bench, hunched over a client’s precious heirloom, I can’t hide behind vagueness. If the ink doesn’t flow from the reservoir to the tip of the gold nib, I have failed. There is no ‘alignment’ that can fix a physical blockage in a capillary tube. You either clear the dried iron gall ink, or you don’t.

If I tell you that we need to ‘vertically integrate our value propositions,’ you can’t tell me I’m wrong, because you have no idea what I’m actually suggesting. I don’t know what I’m suggesting either. We are just two people throwing handfuls of glitter into the air and calling it a roadmap. It’s the language of non-commitment. If you don’t say anything concrete, you never have to be responsible for the results. It’s a strategy born of fear, a way to occupy space without ever leaving a footprint.

I’ve spent 34 years looking at the world through a loupe, examining the microscopic fissures in celluloid and the way iridium tips wear down over decades of use. Precision is my life. If a customer asks why their pen is skipping, I don’t tell them we’re experiencing ‘sub-optimal flow-state paradigms.’ I tell them the tines are misaligned. I tell them they’re using ink that’s too thick for the feed. There is a brutal honesty in manual labor that corporate culture has spent the last 64 years trying to excise. We’ve replaced the screwdriver with the spreadsheet, and the spreadsheet with the ‘holistic dashboard.’ The further we get from the object of our work, the more flowery the language becomes. It’s a direct correlation: as the clarity of the task decreases, the complexity of the jargon increases by a factor of 4.

Clarity vs. Jargon Correlation

Take the phrase ‘actionable learnings.’ It’s a linguistic car crash. A learning, by its very nature, should be something that informs future behavior. Adding ‘actionable’ is like saying ‘wet water’ or ‘painful pickle-jar-induced wrist sprain.’ We use it because it sounds more professional than saying, ‘We made a mistake and we’re going to try not to do it again.’ The latter requires vulnerability. It requires admitting that we, the people in the 104-dollar dress shirts, are capable of being wrong. But if we ‘operationalize learnings,’ we are simply adjusting a machine. The human element-the shame, the growth, the messy reality of being a person-is scrubbed clean. We become cogs in a machine that doesn’t actually produce anything other than more meetings.

Utility vs. Value-Add Obession

I remember a client, an old man who brought in a Pelikan that had survived a literal war. He didn’t want it to be ‘optimized.’ He wanted it to write. He understood that the value of the tool was in its utility. We’ve lost that. We’ve become obsessed with the ‘value-add’ instead of the value itself. When you look at the way we plan our lives now, it’s all filtered through this lens of optimization. Even our celebrations have become projects to be managed. We don’t just have a party; we curate an experience. We don’t just give a gift; we fulfill a demand-side requirement. It’s exhausting.

Sometimes, you just want a list of things that people actually need, without the fluff, which is why something like

LMK.today feels like a splash of cold water in a desert of ‘synergistic’ nonsense. It’s the difference between a clear instruction and a 54-slide deck on ‘gift-giving modalities.’

I once spent 24 hours trying to find a replacement cap for a rare Montblanc. I searched through old catalogs, messaged collectors in three different countries, and eventually found one in a dusty drawer in Berlin. It was a specific solution to a specific problem. If I had approached that problem the way we approach corporate strategy, I would have spent those 24 hours in a breakout room discussing the ‘ideation of cap-adjacent solutions.’ I would have come out of that room with a ‘strategic framework for top-end enclosures,’ but I still wouldn’t have had a cap. This is the disconnect. We are so busy building frameworks that we’ve forgotten how to build the thing the framework is supposed to support. We’ve mistaken the scaffolding for the building.

This culture of obfuscation creates a profound sense of isolation. When we don’t speak plainly, we don’t connect. We are just broadcasting signals into a void, hoping they match the signals being broadcast back at us. It’s why so many people feel like frauds at work. We’re all terrified that one day, someone will stop the meeting and ask, ‘Wait, what does that actually mean?’ and the whole house of cards will come tumbling down. We’ve buried the bottom line under 444 layers of ‘strategic imperatives.’

If we stripped away all the jargon, what would be left? For most companies, it would be a terrifying void. If you can’t describe what you do to a 4-year-old, you probably don’t know what you’re doing. You’re just participating in a high-stakes game of charades. We need to embrace the vulnerability of simple language. We need to say ‘I don’t know’ instead of ‘I’ll circle back with some high-level insights.’ We need to say ‘This is a bad idea’ instead of ‘I’m not sure this aligns with our current trajectory.’