A Trail of Lipstick Smears and Corporate Mediocrity

I'm struck this morning by the gross incompetence that seems so fucking prevalent in modern corporate affairs. Not just the occasional incompetent person who somehow slipped through the hiring process, but an entire culture that seems increasingly comfortable rewarding people for appearing successful rather than actually accomplishing a goddamned thing.

There was a time when former military people were the norm where I work, not the exception. People who understood that a mission wasn't some aspirational statement on a PowerPoint slide. It was the fucking job. You had a responsibility, you executed it, and when something went wrong, you owned it. You didn't spend three weeks trying to figure out how to make the failure look like somebody else's problem. You fixed the fucking problem.

But somewhere along the way, our appetite for growth started exceeding our appetite for excellence. Corporate greed demanded more scope, more programs, more contracts, more revenue, and more people to support all of it. We expanded rapidly, and expansion meant hiring. Lots of fucking hiring. And when you need bodies faster than you can find talent, you eventually stop looking for the best people and start looking for people who can fill the fucking seats.

That's how you end up with what we've got today. A growing collection of punk bitches who've never pushed a fucking thing across the finish line in their careers, but have somehow cultivated the appearance of success by kissing the right asses along the way. Their résumés are impressive, their titles are impressive, and their ability to speak fluent corporate bullshit is apparently fucking legendary.

But ask them what they've actually accomplished, and suddenly the conversation gets a whole lot less specific.

Their career paths are marked by a trail of lipstick smears, mediocrity, and cronyism. They know who to flatter, whose opinions to repeat, which meetings to attend, and how to make sure their names appear somewhere near the success of people who actually did the fucking work.

And somehow, they keep getting promoted.

Meanwhile, the people who are genuinely curious, motivated, and capable of delivering results are left trying to figure out how the fuck we're supposed to accomplish the mission while navigating an increasingly elaborate obstacle course of political bullshit.

And that's the tragedy of it. Because the mission still matters. The work still matters. The outcomes still matter. But too many people seem interested in those outcomes only to the extent that they can use them to advance their own careers.

They're not invested in the mission. They're invested in what the mission can do for them.

And those are two very fucking different things.

I've been thinking about whether it was always this way.

I'd like to believe that ten or twenty years ago, we had a better workforce. That people were more committed, that work ethic meant something different, and that organizations were more interested in hiring people who could actually do the job than people who looked good talking about the job.

And I do think there's some truth to that. I've watched expectations change. I've watched the definition of acceptable performance shift. I've watched things that once would have been considered basic professional responsibilities become accomplishments worthy of recognition.

But I also have to acknowledge something else.

For much of my career, I was an individual contributor. I had a job to do, and the expectations were relatively straightforward. Somebody needed something accomplished, and I was responsible for making it happen. Either I delivered or I didn't. Either the system worked or it didn't. Either the problem got solved or it didn't.

There wasn't a whole lot of ambiguity in that.

And maybe that shielded me from some of the political bullshit happening above my head. Maybe I was so focused on doing my own fucking job that I didn't notice how many people around me were building careers on the appearance of doing theirs.

Because the closer I've gotten to organizational leadership, the more I've realized that competence and advancement aren't necessarily related.

And that's a fucking disturbing realization.

Here's what I don't understand. We know how to measure performance. We do it all the time. We establish requirements, define deliverables, set schedules, measure quality, and evaluate outcomes. We know how to determine whether an organization is doing what it's supposed to do.

So why the fuck do we suddenly lose that ability when it comes to leadership?

If an organization consistently fails to deliver, why aren't we examining the people responsible for leading it? If a team repeatedly misses commitments, why aren't we asking whether its leadership has the competence, resources, and judgment necessary to accomplish the mission? If an entire department spends more time explaining why something can't be done than figuring out how to do it, why isn't somebody asking some very uncomfortable fucking questions?

Instead, we seem content to measure leadership by how well leaders perform the rituals of leadership.

Did they attend the meetings? Did they produce the slides? Did they communicate the strategic vision? Did they use the approved language? Did they cultivate the right relationships? Did they successfully avoid saying anything that might upset somebody with a more impressive title?

Wonderful.

But did they actually accomplish the fucking mission?

Because that's the question that seems to get lost.

And I don't know whether this is primarily a problem with lower and middle management or whether the same disease infects senior leadership. I can only speak to what I see from my perch near the bottom of the corporate leadership ladder. Maybe the people at the top are just as frustrated as I am. Maybe they're looking down at the same dysfunction and wondering how the fuck it happened.

Or maybe they're part of the problem.

I don't fucking know.

What I do know is that politics seems to have become a substitute for performance in far too many places. And the people who are best at navigating that political environment aren't necessarily the people who are best at leading others or accomplishing difficult work.

In fact, sometimes those skills seem almost inversely related.

The people who can explain a failure most elegantly are often the least interested in preventing the next one. The people who talk most enthusiastically about accountability are sometimes the first to disappear when somebody needs to be held accountable. And the people who spend the most time advertising their commitment to integrity can become remarkably flexible about what integrity means when their own careers are at stake.

It's fucking sickening.

And I think part of why it bothers me so much is where I came from.

My first job out of high school was operating a nuclear power plant underwater. I was seventeen years old when I joined the Navy, and I entered a world where accountability and integrity weren't abstract concepts to be discussed during leadership retreats. They were essential to survival.

On a submarine, you don't get to redefine success because you missed a requirement. You don't get to massage the numbers to make a system appear operational. You don't get to hide a mistake because admitting it might make you look bad.

You tell the fucking truth.

You own your responsibilities.

And you do your fucking job.

Because other people's lives depend on it.

That experience fundamentally shaped the way I approach work, leadership, and personal responsibility. It taught me that integrity isn't something you claim to possess. It's something you demonstrate through your actions, particularly when those actions might have uncomfortable consequences for you.

Accountability works the same way.

You don't get to call yourself accountable because you attended a seminar about accountability. You don't get to claim integrity because you put the word in your email signature or included it in your annual performance review.

You either live those values or you fucking don't.

And living them means telling the truth when lying would be easier. It means admitting mistakes when blaming somebody else would be more convenient. It means accepting responsibility for the people and outcomes entrusted to you, even when things don't go the way you planned.

It means understanding that your word is worth something.

Say what you mean. Mean what you say. Do what you promised to do. And when you fuck something up, own it and fix it.

That's not some revolutionary leadership philosophy. That's basic fucking character.

Yet somehow, we've managed to build entire corporate cultures where people can recite those values beautifully without demonstrating any meaningful understanding of them.

And perhaps that's the real problem.

We hire people based on experience, credentials, presentation skills, and their ability to convince an interview panel that they know what the fuck they're talking about. We promote people based on visibility, relationships, and how effectively they navigate the organization's political landscape.

But we don't always spend enough time determining whether they're actually curious. Whether they're motivated. Whether they have the personal integrity to acknowledge what they don't know and the initiative to go fucking learn it.

Those are the qualities I want in the people around me.

Curiosity and motivation.

Give me somebody who's genuinely curious about how things work, who wants to understand the problem, who asks questions because they actually give a shit about the answers. Give me somebody who's motivated to accomplish something, who takes ownership of their work, and who doesn't need to be chased around like a fucking toddler to fulfill a commitment.

I can teach that person the technical details of a job. I can help them develop the skills they don't yet possess. I can give them opportunities to grow, make mistakes, learn, and become genuinely exceptional at what they do.

But I can't manufacture curiosity in somebody who doesn't give a fuck.

And I can't motivate somebody whose only real interest is collecting a paycheck and positioning themselves for the next promotion.

You can't build a high-performing organization out of people who are more interested in looking successful than being successful.

You can certainly build an expensive organization that way. You can build a complicated organization. You can build an organization with an impressive hierarchy, elaborate reporting structures, and enough PowerPoint presentations to wallpaper the fucking Pentagon.

But you can't build an organization that consistently delivers difficult things well.

Not without people who genuinely care about the work.

And that brings me back to the question that's been bothering me all morning.

Has something fundamentally changed about our workforce? Have we become a society that's less interested in responsibility, personal integrity, and the satisfaction of doing something exceptionally well? Have we allowed corporate growth and the relentless pursuit of profit to dilute the very qualities that once made organizations successful?

Or has this bullshit always been here?

Was I simply too busy doing my own job to notice the people who were making careers out of not doing theirs?

I suspect the answer is some combination of all of it. Organizations have grown more complicated. Incentives have changed. The distance between the people doing the work and the people taking credit for it has increased. And perhaps I've simply reached a point in my career where I can see more of the machinery behind the corporate curtain.

Whatever the explanation, I don't find it particularly encouraging.

Because the consequences aren't theoretical.

Every incompetent leader who gets promoted because they know the right people makes the job harder for everyone who actually gives a fuck. Every failure that gets explained away instead of corrected teaches the organization that accountability is optional. Every talented, motivated employee who watches mediocrity get rewarded receives a very clear message about what the organization truly values.

And eventually, those people stop trying.

Or they fucking leave.

Then the organization looks around, wonders why it can't attract or retain exceptional talent, and commissions another goddamned study about employee engagement.

Maybe we don't need another study.

Maybe we need to stop confusing political skill with leadership ability.

Maybe we need to stop rewarding people for looking busy and start holding them accountable for accomplishing something.

Maybe we need to remember that integrity and accountability aren't corporate vocabulary words. They're character traits that have to be demonstrated, particularly when nobody's watching and when doing the right thing might cost you something.

And maybe, just fucking maybe, we need to start hiring people who are curious, motivated, and genuinely interested in doing the job.

Because I don't give a fuck how impressive somebody's résumé looks, how many important people they know, or how beautifully they can explain the organization's strategic vision.

I want to know one thing.

Can you do the fucking job?

And if you're supposed to be leading other people, can you help them do theirs?

Because if the answer is no, all the lipstick smears in the fucking world aren't going to save the mission.