I’m currently staring at a stack of 31 requests for romance novels, while still feeling the itchy residue of guilt from this morning. A tourist stopped me near the gates, looking for the county records office, and I told him to turn left at the rusted water tower. There hasn’t been a water tower there since 1991. He’s probably still driving in circles, trusting a map that I drew in the air with a lying finger. It’s a lot like being a CEO, I suppose. You point toward a horizon that doesn’t exist and hope everyone is too busy driving to realize you’re lost.

I just watched a digital ghost flutter into the inboxes of 101 employees at a mid-sized logistics firm across town-I keep tabs on the outside world through the discarded journals and business rags that end up in the bin here. The email was titled ‘Vision 2025: Our North Star.’ It contained an 81-slide PDF, meticulously crafted over 6 months by 11 high-priced consultants and a leadership team that hasn’t spoken to a customer in 201 days. The document is beautiful. It has gradients that look like a summer sunset in the Maldives. It has icons of lightbulbs and interconnected gears. And by 9:01 AM tomorrow, it will be buried under 411 unread emails about broken coffee machines and missed shipping deadlines. It is a masterpiece of irrelevance.

The Theatrical Performance

This is the great secret of the corporate world: the strategic plan is not a plan. It is a theatrical performance. It’s a ritual meant to appease the Board of Directors and the investors, a way of saying, ‘Look, we have a leather-bound binder, therefore we are in control.’ But in the trenches, where the actual work happens, no one cares about Slide 51’s ‘Synergistic Value Proposition.’ They care about whether the printer works and if they can go home at 5:01 PM without being yelled at. The disconnect is so vast you could hide a mountain range in it.

Then, I go back to finding a copy of Louis L’Amour for a guy who hasn’t seen a horse in 11 years. That’s the real strategy. The real work is always smaller, dirtier, and more immediate than the PDF suggests.

The deck provides the illusion of progress without the mess of execution. It’s a shared fiction. The executives pretend to lead, and the employees pretend to follow, and everyone agrees to ignore the 131 errors in the underlying data.

I remember one particular plan from a tech firm that ended up in my hands. They had spent $150,001 on a rebranding strategy. They changed their primary color from Navy Blue to ‘Oceanic Depth.’ They spent 81 pages explaining how this new blue reflected their commitment to the ‘deep needs of the stakeholder ecosystem.’ Meanwhile, their software was crashing 21 times a day. They were so focused on the shade of the paint that they didn’t notice the house was on fire. It’s the same mistake I made with the tourist. I gave him a landmark that was a memory, not a reality. I gave him a ‘Vision’ of a water tower, and now he’s lost in the woods.

In my world, that means knowing which books are actually being read and which ones are just used to hide contraband. In the business world, it’s about the tangible, the physical, and the practical. This is where companies like Bathroom Remodel actually find their footing. It’s an operational reality that refuses to be sidelined by abstract ‘North Stars.’

There is a peculiar kind of arrogance in the 6-month planning cycle. It assumes the world will hold still for you. It assumes that the 41 competitors you identified in January will still be your only threats in July. But the world is chaotic. It’s a jagged, unpredictable mess. A real plan should be no longer than a postcard. It should say: ‘We are here. We want to be there. Here are the 3 things we are going to do today to close the gap.’ Anything more is just creative writing.

The Strategy of Tuesday

I’ve spent 11 years watching people try to plan their way out of a life they’ve already built. Inmates do it every day. They have ‘Strategic Life Plans’ for when they get out-elaborate schemes involving real estate empires and non-profit foundations. They talk about these plans with a fervor that is almost religious. But the ones who actually make it, the ones who don’t come back to my library in 11 months, are the ones who focus on the immediate. They find a job. They show up. They don’t worry about ‘Vision 2025.’ They worry about Tuesday.

The Real Planning Horizon

Why do we keep doing it? Why do we keep paying consultants $2,001 a day to tell us things we already know in a language we don’t speak? Because it’s comfortable. It’s a security blanket made of PowerPoint slides. If we have a plan, we don’t have to admit that we’re just making it up as we go along. We don’t have to admit that we’re all just tourists looking for a water tower that was torn down 31 years ago.

The Final Honesty

I think back to that tourist. If I had just been honest and said, ‘I’m not sure, let me check the real map,’ he’d be where he needs to be. But my ego wanted to be the guy with the answers. Management is the same. They want to be the ones with the ‘Vision.’ They’d rather give you wrong directions with confidence than admit they’re as confused as you are.

Eventually, the ‘Vision 2025’ PDF will be deleted to make room for ‘Vision 2031.’ The cycle will repeat. The fonts will get sleeker. The icons will become 3D. The consultants will buy new yachts. And the people on the ground will keep doing what they’ve always done: ignoring the map and following the path they’ve worn into the dirt with their own two feet.

I have to go now. There’s a guy at the desk who wants a book on ‘How to Start a Business.’ I’m going to give him a copy of ‘The Old Man and the Sea.’ It’s a better guide to strategy than any deck I’ve ever seen. It’s about a guy, a boat, a fish, and the relentless reality of the ocean. No slides. No pillars. Just the struggle. And maybe, if I see that tourist again, I’ll tell him the truth. The water tower is gone. You’re going to have to find your own way home.