This topic is neither bleeding edge data, nor particularly edgy material, but it grinds the gears of those who prefer neat excel sheets and pom poms. It relates to globalization and how outsourcing core functions hollows out the soul of companies. It is very closely related to IoT project failure, because it addresses endemic corporate failure. A massive percentage of IoT projects fail. The piece should really be titled: The Rise of “Soft-Skill Gatekeepers” …and the exile of people who actually get it done.
Outsourcing creates not a power vacuum, but a powerlessness continuum.
Learned helplessness: When companies outsource recruitment, lead gen, marketing, engineering, or even strategy & research, they remove the doing from the building. What remains inside? Project managers, stakeholders, brand guardians,“alignment people” Smooth-talkers who survive by saying the same things at the same time. The people who enthusiastically embrace every new buzzword with “passion.” In the absence of real output, control of language becomes power. You know why they’re all on board? Because they’re always on board.
You cannot spin a weld. You cannot bullshit a circuit board. You cannot politic your way into making a working container tracking device. But you can politic your way into owning a project, being the liaison, framing narrative, deciding who gets blamed, what got termed a “success” Where measurement is fuzzy, manipulators win, not the work.
Why don’t companies fix it?
Because the system benefits the people you need to dismantle it. Internal operators control narrative, gatekeep access, deflect blame to vendors, but claim victories from their work. They appear indispensable because they control reporting. They are antifragile; the more chaos, the safer they are. CEOs are the conductors of farce.
- A hollow organization takes weeks to finalize a trivial change
- Project managers manage other project managers
- “Loyalty” has more value than competence (Pom Poms)
- “Pilots” never scale
- Silo walls are load-bearing
- The mission is rewritten in scrabble pieces
- The people who made the company what it was are long gone
Hard skills and political skills do not mix well. Doers want clarity, talkers want ambiguity. Doers solve, talkers position. The doers collaborate, talkers triangulate. The doers build product, talkers build leverage. Ultimately, in an outsourced model, talkers win, because the only thing the company truly retains internally is its politics.
You’re observing the bureaucratization of a knowledge economy, competence is outsourced, control rests with positional gatekeepers; a performance of work, not work itself, a “bland,” not a Brand.
Signs of a hollow organization
- 🟧Decision making moves upward, accountability moves downward.
- 🟧Meetings replace prototypes
- 🟧“Success metrics” are semantic, not operational
- 🟧Vendor dependence is a crutch, not a tactic
- 🟧Employees are optimized for explaining work, not doing work.
