Org Alignment

Org Alignment.

I sat through years of it. The name alone should tell you everything. We aligned nothing. We ranked people.

Once or twice a year a spreadsheet would show up. Never in the HR system where the real reviews lived. This one forced a percentage of your team to the bottom. It didn't matter how good they were. The curve needed bodies, so the curve got bodies.

I tried doing it honestly. I gave my team the marks they actually earned. The system read that as a team full of underperformers. So there was no honest answer. Rank your people against each other and someone falls. Refuse to play and everyone falls. Either way the spreadsheet got its sacrifice.

It didn't care what anyone did for a living. I was managing software engineers, on the same curve and in the same silo as IT and warehouse staff, because we all rolled up to the same chair. You only put an engineer and a warehouse role on one curve when the work has stopped mattering. The number was the only thing in the room.

It always came rushed. "Needs to be done by Friday." I filled a few of these out from the road, between meetings, on trips. No time to be thorough. I'm fairly sure that was the design. And it always landed at the same times: the weeks after an acquisition, and the first weeks of January. The cuts had a season, and you learned to feel it coming.

The same script

Here's the part that took me years to see. The words never changed. Alignment. Below the line. RIF. The same vocabulary in every leadership cycle. When the script is identical everywhere, it finally clicks that you were never special to them. You were an episode. They'd seen the movie before. They were just running it again on your set.

I want to be careful here, because the people were good. I met some I'd call friends. Some I still look up to. Most have good intentions. They worked hard. They achieved. But most of them never made anything. Never started the thing. Never felt the pull of building it alongside the people who showed up to help. Never heard that first customer say yes. They were handed the only story they knew, and they replayed it. Run the movie well for the people upstream and you earn a bigger org to run it on next time. The reward for the playbook is a larger set.

So I don't blame the humans. The humans are good. The structure is what I detest. A structure built to extract, that treats people as line items and calls it alignment.

Why I build the way I do

That's why I build the way I build now. Slower. On purpose. Close to the people I'm building for. This is me holding a mirror up to the extraction forces that quietly pull the soul out of business. They've learned to hide behind good words. The least the rest of us can do is learn to see them.

I've seen the movie. I'm done watching it. I'd rather spend my time making something worth keeping.

Originally posted on LinkedIn on May 26, 2026.