In earlier eras, executives looked to markets, customers, or experience. In late-stage managerial culture, they look to KPIs. Numbers have become oracular - impersonal, unquestionable, immune to context. Analysts interpret their movements like priests reading smoke. When numbers replace judgment, organisations no longer steer. They drift.
We observe modern management performing a new ritual: the belief that enough tools will summon competence. It is the SaaS-age cargo cult - runway lights made of enterprise software. In the modern organization, everything orbits around an expanding constellation of platforms: A travel system, an HR suite, a canonical CRM, a unified support desk, a project-delivery platform, a customer-success engine, a financial-planning tool, a security-training module, a rotating cast of AI assistants. ...
Terms that once had precise meanings — strategy, impact, innovation, culture — gradually dilute through repeated ceremonial use. They shift from tools of communication to signals of alignment. This semantic bleaching appears to perform a stabilising function: Ambiguity invites agreement. Agreement creates cohesion. Cohesion allows the system to continue. We catalogue language drift as an adaptive feature of managerial mythology.
Across multiple organisations, we observe a consistent pattern: routines that appear procedural often function primarily as ritual. Meetings, reporting cycles, and approval paths form a ceremonial structure that stabilises uncertainty through repetition. The function is not the agenda; the function is the ritual itself. We record these as evidence of symbolic coherence mechanisms in late-stage managerial systems.