The ‘I’ in ‘INNOVATION’ surrenders with a sticky, reluctant tear. It leaves behind a ghost of itself on the conference room wall, a faint, pale rectangle where the paint hasn’t been bleached by years of fluorescent light. The vinyl letter curls in my hand, surprisingly heavy, like a dead thing.
Down the hall, a manager is telling his team of seven to use the PowerPoint template from 2012. His reason is a quiet classic of corporate cowardice: ‘It’s just safer. We know it works.’ On the wall behind his head, the word INNOVATION, now missing its first letter, reads ‘NNOVATION.’ It feels more honest that way. A command to do nothing new.
Language: Manipulation, Not Communication
I know this because I helped write one. I was younger, convinced that language could architect behavior. We spent 47 meetings and burned through a budget of $77,777 to produce seven sacred words. Our masterpiece was ‘Radical Candor.’ We presented it in a beautiful deck. We screen-printed it on t-shirts. We etched it into glass panes in the new collaboration spaces. It was a lie from the moment the CEO approved it. Three weeks later, an engineer used ‘Radical Candor’ in a meeting to point out a significant, embarrassing flaw in Project 237. He was managed out of the company within a month. The message was clear: the words are for the wall, not for your mouth.
Understanding the Substrate
I was talking about this with my friend Rachel B. the other day. Her job is, quite literally, to erase unwanted words from walls. She’s a graffiti removal specialist. She doesn’t see words; she sees chemistry problems.
She’s right. The substrate. The wall itself. A bad culture is like a porous brick wall that has absorbed the spray paint. You can scrub the surface, but the stain has seeped deep into the material. The corporate equivalent is the performance review system, the budget allocation process, the unspoken rules of who gets promoted. That’s the substrate. A values poster is just a coat of cheap paint, and it fools no one. In fact, it makes it worse.