The Hum and the Hypocrisy
The projector bulb was still humming, cooling down after the CEO’s two-hour presentation on ‘The Ownership Mindset.’ I was sitting in my ergonomic chair-the one I had to justify via three separate committee reviews-watching everyone file out. Outside, the sun was blindingly bright, the kind of aggressive light that made you feel slightly guilty for sitting indoors. I didn’t get to bed early last night, and the persistent low thrumming of exhaustion always makes the hypocrisy sting sharper.
We were told, repeatedly, that we were empowered. That we were the strategic drivers of the organization. That the traditional hierarchies were gone, replaced by distributed authority. We clapped. We nodded. We even signed a commitment to ‘radical accountability.’
It wasn’t a strategic denial. It wasn’t even a human decision. It was a cold, three-line email from the procurement system declining my request to expense a $17 software subscription. This was a tool that would save my team, conservatively, three hours a week, and the system needed not just my manager’s approval, but the Finance Director’s and the Department Head’s sign-offs, too.
This is the central fraud of modern corporate life. They don’t give you empowerment; they give you motivational noise.
The Anesthetic of Ownership
The language of empowerment-‘taking ownership,’ ‘radical decentralization,’ ‘being your own CEO’-is a highly refined anesthetic. It numbs you to the reality that you have inherited 100% of the responsibility for results, but 0% of the structural authority required to achieve them. It is the ultimate sleight of hand: making the worker responsible for the failure of a structure they were explicitly forbidden from changing.
I remember talking about this with Michael V.K. He’s trying to ensure that people receiving care get basic, essential supplies-not luxury items, but the kind of items that fundamentally affect dignity and quality of life. He spent 107 hours over three months filling out forms to justify that $27 delta.
And that’s where the technical precision of this illusion hits home. Every sign-off exists to ensure that nobody can be blamed if something goes wrong, because theoretically, everyone signed off. The problem is, when everyone is responsible, nobody is.
The Machinery of Control
Empowerment
Risk Mitigation
My mistake, early on, was believing the words. I genuinely thought that when the CEO said, “We trust your judgment,” that trust was a currency. I spent it immediately, trying to solve a tiny structural bottleneck, and got slapped by the system. The contradiction wasn’t announced, it just *happened*.
I was focusing too much on the denial of the $17 software and not enough on the underlying mechanism that allowed that denial to be automated in the first place. Who built that rule? Why was that threshold set?
The moment you realize that the company’s stated values conflict directly with its operational mechanisms, you hit peak cynicism. That cynicism isn’t unprofessional; it’s simply a clear-eyed assessment of reality.
It teaches employees a dangerous lesson: The official rules are lies. The *real* rules are the hidden ones, the ones that always centralize control even while professing decentralization. And adhering to the hidden hierarchy is the only way to survive.
Seeking Objective Data, Not Doctrine
If you are genuinely trying to figure out where the levers of power truly reside in an organization-who can change a budget threshold, who owns the definition of “essential”-you need data, not doctrine. You need objective mapping of authority flow, not inspirational rhetoric about feeling powerful.
Ask ROB provides that clarity. It’s about building a bridge between the proclaimed organizational structure and the operational reality, giving users actual levers of control based on visible, verifiable information, rather than leaving them guessing about the gap between the CEO’s speech and the procurement software’s denial logic.
The Teacup Analogy
I made the mistake of thinking I could change the structure by demonstrating success within it. That’s like trying to drain the ocean with a teacup. The system is indifferent to success if that success involves deviating from the prescribed path by even 7 cents.
I once spent an entire week trying to reverse-engineer the logic of the expense system because the documentation was 7 years out of date. What I discovered was not a set of logical rules, but a historical sediment layer-policies piled upon policies, each created to prevent a specific, often forgotten, past mistake.
The True Transformation
This is the great ‘yes, and’ of modern management: Yes, you are empowered to make decisions, *and* every decision you make must adhere to an infrastructure designed to prevent decisions from being made quickly or independently.
Exhaustion, Not Empowerment
When Michael V.K. finally got approval for Ms. L.’s $27 pads-47 days late-he didn’t feel empowered. He felt exhausted and cynical. He learned that the only way to win in a system built on procedure, not compassion, is to become a better procedural weapon yourself.
The real transformation isn’t feeling empowered; it’s *being* empowered. And that starts when the authority to change the system equals the responsibility for the outcome. Until then, you are simply a highly motivated cog, pushing against regulatory barriers while smiling and repeating the slogan about ownership.
Cynicism is just competence with a memory.
The question we need to ask ourselves every day is simple: If I failed right now, would I have failed because I made a bad judgment call, or because the process prevented my good judgment call from being executed? If the answer is the latter, you don’t work in a culture of empowerment. You work in a performance of it. And performances always cost more than they earn.