“You were hired for your potential. Please reach it before lunch.”
🪪 Chapter 1: Welcome, You’re In Charge Now
Congratulations, new recruit! Despite having no relevant experience and possibly thinking Agile is a yoga class, you’ve been chosen to help drive strategic outcomes. No pressure.
Objective: Fake it, make it, or look busy until someone forgets what you were hired to do.
🔍 Pro Tip: Familiarize yourself with the company vision. You won’t be executing it, but it makes great small talk.
🧵 Chapter 2: Learning the Ropes (That Are on Fire)
You’ll be mentored by someone who calls the printer “old reliable” and hasn’t updated their resume since Windows Vista.
Your training materials include:
- A 400-page PDF called “Introduction to Workflow Synergy”
- A YouTube video from 2012 with 14 views
- Oral traditions passed down via hallway whispers
Objective: Identify which tasks are mission-critical and which are ceremonial offerings to the gods of bureaucracy.
🔗 Chapter 3: The “Big Picture” Delusion
Management will encourage you to think strategically, holistically, synergistically, and metaphysically. Meanwhile, your daily task will involve copy-pasting data into a spreadsheet that six other people are also editing.
When in doubt, say things like:
- “Let’s take a step back.”
- “How does this ladder up to our OKRs?”
- “Are we solving the right problem, or just the loudest one?”
🧠 Mindset Shift: Stop asking “What is my role?” and start asking “How can I look indispensable in a screenshot?”
🔁 Chapter 4: Feedback Loops of Despair
You’ll be evaluated with vague performance criteria:
- “Impactful presence”
- “Team-minded but self-starter energy”
- “Reads between the lines (and occasionally the Slack threads)”
Feedback is delivered quarterly via interpretive sighs and “quick syncs.”
🛡️ Chapter 5: Staying Afloat Without Drowning Anyone
To avoid being overwhelmed:
- Ask “clarifying questions,” then mute your mic.
- Use templates. When in doubt, just bold something and move on.
- Develop your own acronyms and make people think they missed a memo.
🍩 Survival Tip: Never pass up a meeting with free snacks. That’s where the real onboarding happens.
🎓 Graduation: From Rookie to Roamer
Eventually, you’ll be called a “veteran,” which means you now train others using the same sacred knowledge (read: confusion) passed down to you.
Your final form: vaguely competent, weirdly influential, and fluent in Corporate.
Mission Complete. No one knows exactly what you do—but they assume it’s important.
About the Author
Daniel L 
Kelly 