Insights
The Reality of Corporate Productivity Theatre
I spent 8 hours last week watching someone build a deck.
Not researching. Not strategizing. Not thinking. Building. A. Deck.
Choosing fonts. Aligning boxes. Arguing over whether the accent color should be “ocean blue” or “midnight teal.”
The presentation was for an internal meeting. Twelve people showed up. Three paid attention. Nobody made a decision.
Productivity Theatre At Its Finest
This is Productivity Theatre at its finest.
A GfK study found the average professional spends 20 hours a month on PowerPoint — and 40% of that time is pure formatting. Not insights. Not strategy. Formatting.
That’s 100+ hours per year wrestling with slides that exist so someone can say “we presented our findings.”
Here’s the ugly truth nobody wants to admit:
The Ugly Truth Nobody Wants To Admit
Most reports exist to prove work happened. Most decks exist to justify the meeting they’re presented in. Most templates exist so nobody has to think from scratch.
We’ve built an entire corporate ecosystem around the performance of output — not the output itself.
The Performance Of Output
And then AI shows up.
Suddenly a deck takes 10 minutes. A report writes itself. A template auto-populates.
And the people who spent their careers perfecting the performance? They’re terrified. Not because AI took their job — but because the job was never real work to begin with.
The real question isn’t “How do we make better decks?”
It’s “Did we ever need the deck at all?”