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.
Each arrives with ceremony - training sessions, launch emails, change-management theatre - and each carries the same quiet promise:
This one will finally make us coherent.
But tools do not create vision. Integrations do not confer identity. And no stack - no matter how alphabet-soup the acronyms - can replace actually understanding the business you are in.
This is the managerial illusion:
If we mimic the behaviours of high-performance organizations closely enough, the results will follow.
And so the rituals continue:
Committees form. Migrations are scheduled. “Alignment” is declared. Another system rolls out with quiet desperation disguised as enthusiasm.
But the thing missing is the one thing no vendor can sell: a shared purpose.
Platforms can standardize workflow, but they cannot summon a future.
You can run an entire company on the finest stack ever procured and still never answer the only question that matters:
What are we building that did not exist before?
The Cargo Cult of Platforms is the superstition of the modern age - a belief that software is a strategy, that systems are a story, and that process is a substitute for competence.
The runway lights glow in the dark. No plane comes.