The Master’s Tournament

If you work in an office, you’ve met them.

The blowhards. The windbags. The self-declared saviors of the spreadsheet.

They show up one day—laptop in hand, confidence through the roof, knowledge through the floor—and immediately start acting like they’ve cracked the code to every problem your organization’s ever had. They speak in acronyms. They “circle back” to ideas you didn’t want to visit the first time. They say things like “let’s not reinvent the wheel,” while simultaneously reinventing the wheel.

They are the competitors in what I like to call The Master’s Tournament—not the golf one, but the corporate kind. A bloodless battlefield where the goal isn’t to accomplish anything meaningful, but to appear accomplished enough to justify your existence. And the only prerequisite to enter? A master’s degree that ends in anything but “D.”

You know who I’m talking about.

The MBAs.

The MFAs.

The MAs and the MSs.

Those three-letter champions of self-importance who somehow get paid twice as much to contribute half as little.

They walk into meetings with their heads held high and their PowerPoint decks even higher, ready to showcase “new” Excel tricks the rest of us mastered twenty years ago. They call themselves the data masters of the universe—yet they can’t explain the difference between an inner and outer join. Their working assumption? That every problem still unsolved was simply waiting for them to arrive.

Now don’t get me wrong—I’m not anti-education. Far from it. I don’t want a TikTok mechanic designing our next rocket. I want someone who actually understands thrust-to-weight ratios and, you know, physics. But those folks usually aren’t the ones roaming the halls explaining to us how we’ve been doing it wrong this whole time with a color-coded Gantt chart and a half-baked “change initiative.”

What I am against is the rise of the master’s degree as corporate cosplay.

Let’s be honest: a lot of these programs were built for people too scared or too average to jump into the workforce—and too lazy or too intimidated to pursue a doctorate. So instead, they sunk a bunch of money into a credential that lets them slap an impressive signature block under their email—one that took them eight billable hours to write, workshop, and justify to their supervisor.

It’s not always their fault. Colleges saw the market gap—probably pointed out by someone with a PhD in Organizational Development—and they capitalized. “Master your future,” the brochures promised. “Stand out from the crowd.” And the insecure masses came running, eager for a shortcut to authority.

And the promise was kept. Because man, they sure do stand out.

Now, to be fair, some master’s degrees actually serve a purpose. If your MS gets me better medicine, or your MA helps kids learn to read, then you’re not who I’m talking about. You’re not even in the same damn arena.

I’m talking about the ones who got their credentials in business buzzwords and now spend their careers polishing LinkedIn profiles and offering unsolicited “strategic guidance” to people doing actual work.

They don’t design.

They don’t build.

They don’t fix.

But by God, they manage the hell out of things—especially if those things can be tracked in a dashboard no one asked for.

And so they march through the office, chests puffed and jargon-loaded, unaware that the rest of us are watching them the same way we’d watch someone swing a golf club backwards—technically impressive, but functionally useless.

But hey—every tournament needs its players.

So pull up a seat.

Grab a scorecard.

And welcome to The Master’s Tournament—where the metrics are made up, the deliverables don’t matter, and the trophy is always billed to overhead.