How to Waste Millions and Look Good Doing It

Theatre. Rituals. Dashboards. Delusion.
Welcome to the high art of modern corporate performance.

In the land of quarterly OKRs and endless alignment meetings, a new kind of leadership has risen. Not the visionary kind. Not even the competent kind. These are the high priests of organisational performance theatre, leaders who have perfected the art of appearing industrious while delivering very little.

They speak in acronyms. They operate through presentations. They leave a trail of dashboards, hackathons, and symbolic rituals in their wake.

Act I: The Hackathon of Legacy Preservation

What better way to protect your irrelevance than by hosting a hackathon focused on the edge tech du jour like AI, blockchain, quantum widgets, or whatever the quarterly hype demands. Pull a dozen of engineers off actual product work and have them build throwaway prototypes for imaginary use cases.

The deliverable? Not working software. Not even feasible ideas. Just photos. Photos of people smiling with post-its, pizza, and vague captions about "accelerating innovation". None of the projects will ever ship. None of them were meant to.

This time could have been used to move forward on decommissioning an outdated monolithic database, or finally replacing a brittle message broker choking every team. But no. That would require focus, ownership, and engineering depth. Not a photo opportunity.

Act II: The Metrics Board of Delusion

Why fix real problems when you can invent fake metrics? These leaders are connoisseurs of dashboards no one reads. They craft charts with fancy names. We all have. The difference is whether we keep believing in them, or start calling the bluff.

No one knows what they mean. Especially not the teams being measured. Meanwhile, we overlook fundamental data such as engineering performance, lead time to change, MTTR, cost-to-serve. Instead, we build ornate networks of dashboards that obscure rather than illuminate, losing all sight of how efficiency truly plays out. But they look stunning in a steering committee deck. Add colour-coded trend arrows and a quote from a McKinsey report, and you are golden.

Act III: The Virtual Centre of Conceptual Excellence

Delivery is hard. Creating real value is risky. But forming a "Pole of Excellence" around an abstract theme like "Resilience", "Enablement", or "Synergy"? Now that is safe.

This is where empty structure meets noble-sounding intent. These centres are usually staffed by people who could not get anything built, and now proudly coach others in building nothing.

In the worst cases, they pervert the system entirely, using these virtual constructs to create the illusion that they are moving the company forward. Being the virtual leader of a virtual area allows them to steal capacity, deflect accountability, and prepare for failure by pre-emptively blaming lack of support. And when things do inevitably collapse, they reappear on stage as the misunderstood hero. It is not strategy. It is sabotage, dressed in synergy.

Act IV: The Blame Monologue

Whenever scrutiny arises, when someone dares to ask what, exactly, has been delivered, the script is ready:

"We are a strategic function. Our impact is systemic. We are not being enabled by the rest of the organisation."

Translation: "We have not shipped anything, but we are definitely not to blame."

It is a well-rehearsed monologue. The spotlight turns, the voice drops to a serious tone, and the usual narrative unfolds: they are misunderstood, under-supported, and heroically carrying the weight of the company’s future. The irony is painful. Having consumed resources without ownership, introduced complexity without delivery, they now weaponise their own failure as proof of indispensability. If only others had aligned. If only someone had cleared the way. If only the system had supported them. But in truth, the only system they ever built was one that kept them at the centre of attention.

Act V: The Rituals

Like a Broadway show, their peak performance arrives whether at a monthly, quarterly, annually cadence . But not always in the open. These leaders often skip the main stage, the real all-hands, where engineers and teams might ask uncomfortable questions. Instead, they perform in top leadership sessions, or executive-only committees, proudly presenting company-wide metrics as if they were their own.

Nothing they show reflects their actual contribution. There is no traceability, no accountability, just appropriation. If the company succeeds, they were obviously pivotal. If it fails, well, they were under-supported.

Metrics are cherry-picked, stripped of context, and delivered with gravitas. Progress is declared. Vision is repeated. Clarity is avoided. And everyone claps, because to not clap would be political suicide.

Somewhere in the distance, a real engineer fixes a bug in production. Unnoticed.

The Real Theatre: Historical Parallels

Sometimes, truth outperforms satire. These real-world examples echo every act of this performance:

🎭 Duolingo’s AI Pivot (2023)

A shining example of tech theatre. Duolingo launched a new premium AI feature, claiming it would revolutionise language learning. The buzz was real, but the delivery was shallow. Generic chatbot interactions wrapped in flashy UI, sold as breakthrough innovation. The result? Upsell, not uplift.

Fits: Act I – The Hackathon of Legacy Preservation

"The deliverable? Not working software. Not even feasible ideas. Just photos."

💸 WeWork and the Cult of Metrics (2019)

WeWork famously introduced "Community Adjusted EBITDA" to hide financial losses. The theatre was spectacular: slides, slogans, soft lighting. Meanwhile, fundamentals collapsed. Investors eventually saw through the fog, but only after billions were lost.

Fits: Act II – The Metrics Board of Delusion

"Why fix real problems when you can invent fake metrics?"

🧠 IBM Watson for Oncology

The promise was enormous: AI that could diagnose cancer and assist doctors worldwide. But behind the scenes, the system struggled with basic clinical relevance. Internal teams warned it was not fit for real-world use, but leadership pressed on with press demos and executive charm offensives.

Fits: Act IV – The Blame Monologue

"They now weaponise their own failure as proof of indispensability."

🚀 Google Stadia (2019–2023)

Heralded as the future of gaming, Stadia launched with big claims and high hopes. But Google pulled internal support early, failed to engage game developers, and kept promising what no one believed anymore. The concept was visionary. The execution was missing.

Fits: Act III – The Virtual Centre of Conceptual Excellence

"It is not strategy. It is sabotage, dressed in synergy."

🧪 Theranos: The Grand Illusion

Few cases match the sheer scale of performative leadership like Theranos. Visionary branding, dramatic keynotes, and complete technical collapse. Elizabeth Holmes did not just avoid accountability. She turned the vacuum of delivery into a platform for raising billions.

Fits: All Acts

⚙️ GE’s Predix and the Industrial Internet (2010s)

GE spent billions building a digital empire with Predix, claiming to become a tech company. Dozens of virtual innovation units popped up. The software was fragile, the strategy incoherent, and the engineers sidelined. When it failed, the blame fell on adoption, not vision.

Fits: Acts III–V

"Progress is declared. Vision is repeated. Clarity is avoided."

The Hidden Damage

This is not harmless. Behind the theatre lies waste of time, talent, and trust. Teams burn out trying to follow incoherent visions. Stakeholders lose faith. Technical leaders either check out or leave.

Meanwhile, the theatre continues. More ceremonies. More "strategy". More noise.

Final Act: What You Can Do

• Do not clap by default. Ask what was actually delivered.
• Refuse abstract performance rituals. Focus on what helps teams.
• Challenge metric theatre. If no one can explain it, bin it.
• Back the builders. Quietly, consistently, relentlessly.

Because in the end, the only true strategy is execution.

And real work needs no theatre.

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