The laser pointer is vibrating. Not much, but enough to see that the twenty-six-year-old holding it has had exactly one too many espressos and perhaps not enough sleep. He is wearing a suit that fits him perfectly-too perfectly-and he is currently pointing at a slide that contains a four-box matrix. In the top-right quadrant, highlighted in a shade of blue that likely has a trademarked name, is the phrase ‘Customer-Centric Iteration.’ My boss, a man who has spent 29 years building this company from a garage operation to a mid-market powerhouse, is nodding. He looks mesmerized. He looks like he’s just seen the burning bush.
I’m sitting there, holding a pen I’ve clicked 49 times in the last three minutes, realizing that the ‘Customer-Centric Iteration’ the kid is talking about is literally just a sentence I wrote in a frustrated email 19 days ago. I said, ‘Maybe we should actually ask the people buying this stuff why they’re returning it.’
Now, that sentiment has been distilled, filtered through a spreadsheet, and repackaged as proprietary intellectual property. We are paying five million and nine dollars for this. I know the extra nine dollars is probably just a rounding error in their billing software, but it feels like a personal insult.
It’s the price of a mirror. We’ve hired a group of very bright, very expensive people to hold a mirror up to our own faces and describe what we look like, but they’re doing it with such confidence and such sophisticated vocabulary that we’ve forgotten we already have a bathroom mirror at home for free.
As someone who spends most of my time balancing difficulty curves in game design, I understand the need for external perspective. When you’re too close to the code, you don’t see the spikes; you only see the logic. But this isn’t that. This is something far more cynical. It’s decision insurance.
The Cost of Consensus
I realized this yesterday while I was comparing the prices of identical ceramic mugs on two different websites. One was $9, and the other was $39 because it was branded with a ‘minimalist lifestyle’ logo. We aren’t paying for the mug; we’re paying for the feeling of being the kind of person who buys that mug. In the corporate world, executives aren’t paying for the advice; they’re paying for the ability to say, ‘Well, the experts agreed with me’ if the ship hits an iceberg. It’s a $5,000,009 life jacket made of PowerPoint slides.
[The matrix is a cage for the timid.]
The consultant, let’s call him Tyler-his name is definitely something like Tyler-is now moving on to the ‘Strategic Roadmap.’ He’s using words like ‘leverage’ and ‘pivot’ and ‘holistic ecosystem.’ I’m looking at the faces around the table. There’s Sarah from Marketing, who has been begging for a budget increase to do exactly what Tyler is suggesting for the last 159 days. She looks defeated. There’s Dave from Ops, who actually warned us about the supply chain bottleneck back in 2019. He’s staring at his fingernails.
The tragedy isn’t just the money leaving the bank account; it’s the quiet, systematic erosion of internal trust. When you hire someone from the outside to say what your own people have been screaming for years, you are effectively telling your staff that their eyes don’t work unless they’re viewed through a third-party lens.
It’s like a video game where the developers ignore the beta testers who have 5,000 hours of playtime and instead listen to a focus group of people who have never held a controller. The focus group says, ‘The jumping feels weird,’ and the developers go, ‘Aha! Revolutionary insight!’ while the beta testers throw their headsets against the wall. We have built an entire economy around the validation of the obvious. We have replaced courage with consensus. And not just any consensus-expensive consensus. If I tell my boss we need to change our pricing model, I’m ‘uninformed’ or ‘too close to the product.’ If Tyler says it while wearing a slim-fit blazer, he’s a visionary.
I wonder sometimes if Tyler knows. I wonder if he sits in his hotel room at the end of the day, looking at the $239 room service bill, and thinks, ‘I just told a room full of grown adults to talk to their customers.’ Does he feel like a genius or a con artist? Or is he just a balancer, like me, trying to smooth out the difficulty spikes of corporate anxiety? Because that’s what this really is: anxiety management. The bigger the company, the more terrified everyone is of making a mistake. And when you’re terrified, you don’t want the truth; you want a shield. You want a document that is 149 pages long so that nobody can ever claim you didn’t do your due diligence.
Intermediaries VS Directness
This is why models like the Push Store are so disruptive, and why they terrify the old guard. They represent a directness that bypasses the layers of fluff. In a world where we’ve become addicted to intermediaries, the act of just going straight to the source feels almost illegal. It’s the same reason I prefer small indie games over the AAA behemoths. In an indie game, if a mechanic is broken, the dev fixes it because they want the game to be good. In a AAA studio, they have a meeting to discuss the feasibility of a committee to investigate the mechanic’s impact on the quarterly KPIs. We’ve professionalized procrastination.
Indie Dev
Fixes broken mechanics because the game must be good.
AAA Studio
Forms committee to discuss KPI impact on mechanic fix.
I remember a project I worked on about 9 years ago. We were struggling with player retention. We hired a firm to tell us why people were quitting after the third level. They spent three months and $499,000 to tell us that the third level was too hard. I knew it was too hard. The testers knew it was too hard. The players on Reddit were literally posting ‘Level 3 is too hard’ in all-caps threads. But the Lead Producer wouldn’t budge until he saw a bar graph from a guy in a suit showing that ‘Friction point 3.1’ was causing a ‘downward engagement trajectory.’ We didn’t need data; we needed the Lead Producer to feel safe enough to admit he was wrong. That’s the real commodity these firms are selling: the safety to be wrong, or the permission to finally be right.
“We didn’t need data; we needed the Lead Producer to feel safe enough to admit he was wrong.”
– Internal Retrospective Note
The Beige Trap
Think about the sheer volume of intellectual energy wasted in that room today. You have ten people, with a combined 259 years of experience in this specific industry, listening to a guy who has never actually sold a product in his life. He’s a professional student of other people’s successes. He’s a librarian of best practices. But libraries don’t build things. They just categorize what has already been built. And when you rely on a librarian to tell you how to build a skyscraper, you’re going to end up with a very well-organized pile of bricks that looks exactly like every other building on the street.
That’s the other side of this: the homogenization of business. If every Fortune 500 company hires the same three consulting firms, every Fortune 500 company eventually starts making the same moves. They all ‘pivot to digital.’ They all ‘optimize the core.’ They all ‘leverage the cloud.’ It’s like a game where every character has the same stats and the same moveset because the balancer got too scared of one character being ‘too unique’ and causing a PR headache. We are optimizing ourselves into a state of beige. We are paying millions to ensure we are exactly as boring as our competitors, but with a slightly more modern slide deck.
“We are paying millions to ensure we are exactly as boring as our competitors, but with a slightly more modern slide deck.”
I’m looking at the clock. It’s 4:39 PM. Tyler is wrapping up. He’s asking if there are any questions. I want to raise my hand. I want to ask him if he’s ever felt the weight of a product failing because of a decision he made. I want to ask him if he’s ever had to look a worker in the eye and explain why their department is being ‘streamlined’ based on a spreadsheet he built in an airport lounge. But I don’t. I just click my pen one last time. My boss stands up and shakes Tyler’s hand. He looks relieved. He looks like a man who just bought a very expensive insurance policy and is now looking forward to a weekend where he doesn’t have to think for himself.
Implementation Timeline:
19 Weeks of meetings (59), emails (399), and restructures… to eventually talk to customers.
We’ll spend the next 19 weeks implementing ‘The Tyler Plan.’ It will involve 59 meetings, 399 emails, and at least two departmental restructures. And at the end of it, we’ll probably end up talking to our customers. We’ll realize they wanted the same thing they wanted five years ago: a product that works and a person to answer the phone when it doesn’t. We’ll celebrate this as a major victory. We’ll probably even hire Tyler back to do a post-mortem on the success of his own advice. The cycle will continue, a perpetual motion machine fueled by the fear of being the person who actually makes a call.
I go back to my desk and open a spreadsheet. I need to adjust the damage output of a lightning spell. I could hire a consultant to tell me how much damage it should do. I could spend $5,009 to get a report on ‘Elemental Power Dynamics.’ Or, I could just play the game. I could feel the rhythm of the combat, see where it drags, and make the change myself. It’s a small choice, but in a world of mirrors and matrices, it feels like the only thing that’s actually real.
We don’t need more analysts. We need more people who are willing to be wrong without a $5,000,009 safety net to catch them.