Mark is clicking through his 5th slide, and the blue on the screen is just aggressive enough to make my retinas twitch. It is a specific shade of cobalt-‘Visionary Cobalt,’ I call it-that seems to be a prerequisite for anyone entering the VP level in 2025. He is explaining his 95-day plan, which looks almost exactly like Sarah’s 95-day plan from 15 months ago, except Sarah preferred a muted forest green and liked to talk about ‘synergy’ while Mark is all about ‘velocity.’ I am sitting in the back of the room, rereading the same sentence on my notepad five times because my brain has simply refused to process any more corporate nouns. It is a defense mechanism. If I don’t let the new buzzwords in, the old ones might actually stay long enough to produce a result.

This is the endless onboarding of new managers. It is a cycle of performance theatre that has become the standard operating procedure in modern business. Every 15 to 25 months, the deck is cleared. A new leader arrives, driven by the frantic need to justify their high-six-figure salary, and the first thing they do is burn the previous library of progress to the ground. They don’t call it burning, of course. They call it ‘realigning’ or ‘pivoting for growth.’ But for those of us on the ground, it feels like being a character in a video game where the developers keep patching the world until the original game is unrecognizable and nobody remembers how to play the primary quest anymore.

The Cost of Memory

I’ve spent the last 25 years watching this happen. I once spent 45 hours building a forecasting model that accounted for every possible market fluctuation, only for my new lead to delete it in 5 seconds because he ‘preferred to lead by gut’ and wanted the data presented on a single, horizontal bar chart that lacked any nuance. I didn’t even argue. I just watched the file icon vanish into the trash bin. That is the moment I realized that in the corporate world, memory is a liability. If you remember how things were done 15 months ago, you are seen as a ‘blocker’ or someone who is ‘stuck in the old ways.’ To survive, you have to develop a kind of professional amnesia.

Theo L., a digital citizenship teacher I know, calls this ‘The Ephemeral Authority Trap.’ Theo is 45 and spends his days trying to explain to 15-year-olds that while their Instagram posts might disappear in 25 hours, the data stays forever. He finds a delicious, bitter irony in the fact that his adult peers live in the exact opposite reality. In the corporate office, the data-the actual work, the processes, the hard-won efficiencies-is deleted every time a new person takes the corner office, while the platform (the company) remains as a hollow shell. Theo often tells me that we are raising a generation to be terrified of a permanent record, while we work in environments that have no record at all. He sees the burnout in his students, and I see it in my colleagues. It is the exhaustion of building on sand.

The performance of change is not the same as the achievement of progress.

Why does Mark feel the need to change the color of the slides? Because if he keeps them forest green, he is just a steward of Sarah’s legacy. And stewardship doesn’t get you a 25 percent bonus at the end of the fiscal year. We have built an incentive structure that explicitly punishes stability. If a manager walks into a department that is functioning at 85 percent efficiency and says, ‘This is great, I’m going to change nothing and just make sure everyone has the resources they need,’ they are viewed as redundant. They are seen as ‘maintenance managers,’ a term used with the same disdain as ‘expired milk.’

The Productivity Tax

So, Mark pivots. He renames the teams. He changes the project management software for the 5th time in 15 months. He introduces a ‘new culture’ that is basically just the old culture but with more mandatory afternoon coffees. Each of these changes requires a massive amount of cognitive energy from the team. We have to unlearn the old shortcuts and learn the new ones. We have to build new rapport. We have to translate our old successes into his new vocabulary. It is a tax on our productivity that never shows up on a balance sheet, but it is the most expensive thing the company pays for.

I remember a specific Tuesday in 2015 when I accidentally replied ‘You too’ to a ‘Welcome to the team’ email from a guy I was actually in the process of firing. My brain was so fried from the 5th reorg of the year that I had lost track of who was coming and who was going. We are all just ghosts in a machine that is constantly being rewired by people who don’t know where the fuses are.

There is a profound disconnect between this transient corporate existence and the human need for roots. People are tired of the ‘pivot.’ They are tired of the ‘rebrand.’ They want things that last longer than a manager’s tenure. While the office reshuffles its floor plan for the 15th time this decade, people are finding that the only walls they can actually trust are the ones they own. It’s why something like Sola Spaces feels less like a luxury and more like a rebellion against the temporary. There is a deep, primal satisfaction in building a room that doesn’t care about a 95-day plan-a space where the light stays the same regardless of who is the VP of anything.

The Legacy Gap

Theo L. recently told me about a lesson he taught on ‘digital legacies.’ He asked his students what they wanted to leave behind. Most of them said nothing. They didn’t want anything to stick. They had been conditioned to believe that the ‘new’ is the only thing that has value, and that the ‘old’ is just embarrassing baggage. It’s a terrifying way to live, but it’s exactly how we’ve been trained to work. We are building a world where the highest form of skill is the ability to adapt to pointless change without asking why.

I look back at Mark. He’s talking about ‘low-hanging fruit’ now. He’s used that phrase 15 times in the last 25 minutes. I wonder if he knows that the previous person already picked that fruit, and the person before that, and the person before that. We are all just staring at a bare tree, pretending it’s a bountiful harvest because that’s what the slide deck requires. Mark isn’t a bad guy. He’s actually quite bright. But he is trapped in the same performance I am. He knows that if he doesn’t change something, he is invisible. And in a world of high-velocity turnover, visibility is the only currency that matters.

I’ve started a small, quiet tradition. Every time a new manager starts, I buy a small stone and put it on my desk. I currently have 15 stones. The managers think they are ‘zen decor.’ To me, they are a graveyard. They represent 15 different ‘visions’ that I have outlived. They represent the hundreds of hours of work that were rendered obsolete not by market failure or technological obsolescence, but by the simple ego of a new arrival.

Finding Roots

Maybe the solution isn’t to fight the turnover. Maybe the solution is to acknowledge it for what it is: a game of musical chairs played with million-dollar budgets. We can participate in the theatre-we have to, if we want the paycheck-but we don’t have to believe in it. We can find our permanence elsewhere. We can invest our ‘legacy energy’ into things that don’t have a 95-day expiration date.

We can create spaces that are immune to the ‘Visionary Cobalt’ of a new VP.

The Unspoken Question

As the meeting ends, Mark asks if anyone has any questions. I look at my notepad. I have written the word ‘why’ 25 times in the margins. I look at my 15 stones. I look at Mark, who is already checking his watch, likely thinking about his 105-day check-in with his own boss.

“No questions, Mark,” I say, smiling the practiced smile of a survivor. “The slides look great. The blue is a nice touch.”

He beams. He thinks he’s made his mark. He thinks he’s changed the world. And for the next 15 months, he might be right. But as I pack up my laptop, I am already thinking about the drive home, about the solid wood of my front door, and the quiet, unchanging light of a room that doesn’t need a mission statement to exist.