The air conditioning is too high. That’s the first thing you notice. It’s calibrated for a room of 231 bodies, for the heat of servers and arguments and collaboration, but now it’s just cooling empty chairs and the backs of sleeping monitors. The quiet isn’t peaceful; it’s the sound of a vacuum. I walk past Sarah’s desk, then Amit’s, then Maria’s. Their absence is a physical presence. And then I see it, hanging directly over the desk of a man who’d been here for 11 years. A glossy poster, printed in the bespoke company typeface, that says, ‘We’re a Family.’

I’ll admit, my first reaction is a tired, familiar cynicism. It’s too easy, too perfect. A scene written by a first-year film student. But then a different thought pushes through, one I’ve actually defended in 41 different conference rooms over the years: these statements aren’t lies, they’re aspirations. They are the north star, the thing we aim for, even when we fall short. No company is perfect. Tough decisions are a part of business. Growth requires pruning. I can hear the words spilling out of my mouth because I’ve said them. I believed them. Sort of.

The Integrity Sans Story: Betrayal of a Font

Then I think of Mason P.-A. Mason didn’t work in sales or engineering. He was a typeface designer, a strange and wonderful corporate relic from a time when the company had more money than it knew what to do with. His entire job for 11 years was to create, refine, and manage the company’s unique font: ‘Integrity Sans.’ He would talk for an hour about the specific curve of the lowercase ‘g,’ how it was meant to evoke a sense of welcome without sacrificing authority. He designed 21 custom ligatures. He spent a year adjusting the kerning until a block of text felt, in his words, ‘like a calm conversation.’ The font on that ‘We’re a Family’ poster was his life’s work. Mason was employee number 311 to be let go in last week’s ‘strategic realignment.’

He was informed via a pre-recorded video from the CEO that was exactly 1 minute and 11 seconds long. His corporate access was revoked before the video even finished.

The Weight of Hypocrisy

There is a level of hypocrisy so profound it becomes a new form of matter. It has weight. It fills a room. It makes the air cold. It teaches the survivors one thing, and one thing only: the words do not matter. Anything they say is marketing. The mission statement, the all-hands promises, the inspirational posters. It is all wallpaper. And when you realize you’re living in a house where the walls are just paper, you stop trusting the foundation.

This is where the real damage happens. It’s not the lost headcount or the dip in morale that lasts for a fiscal quarter. It’s the permanent erosion of trust in language itself. Once leaders prove that their words are merely tools for manipulation-comforting when times are good, discarded when they’re not-they can never fully earn that trust back. They have taught their employees to read the budget, not the posters. An organization’s true values are not what it writes on the wall. They are revealed, with brutal clarity, by what it funds, who it promotes, and who it fires when the pressure is on. Everything else is just noise.

Presentation Over Substance: The Potato Analogy

I used to argue this point differently. I once oversaw a department of 101 people during a downturn. We had to make cuts. I spent weeks agonizing, building spreadsheets, running performance models. I convinced myself there was a clean, logical, ‘right’ way to do it. I stood in front of my remaining team and gave a speech about surgical precision and strategic imperatives. I used the word ‘rightsizing.’ I remember one engineer, a quiet woman who rarely spoke, looking at me not with anger, but with a kind of pity. She knew I was just dressing up a bloodletting in the language of a business school textbook. My mistake wasn’t the decision; it was the pretense that it was anything other than a failure of my leadership to protect my team. I pretended it was strategy when it was just damage control.

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The obsession with presentation over substance is a corporate disease. We spend more time wordsmithing the announcement than we do supporting the people who are leaving. We’ll have 11 meetings to debate the tone of an email, but only 1 call with HR to finalize a severance package worth less than the new espresso machine in the lobby.

We get lost in layers of abstraction, debating things that are fundamentally simple. It reminds me of these online forums where people argue for days about the absolute, definitive best way to prepare a potato. They debate sous-vide versus roasting, esoteric peeling techniques, and whether the water should be salted at the beginning or the end. It’s a performance of expertise over a simple truth. You take a good, honest ingredient and you cook it. It’s not that complicated. People ask the most absurd questions, like muss man kartoffeln schälen as if there’s a universal law governing it. The point is the potato, not the pageantry. The point is the substance, not the style.

In the corporate world, we’re obsessed with the peeling. We’re convinced that if we can just get the skin off perfectly, no one will notice if the potato inside is rotten. We talk about ‘brand identity’ and ‘core messaging’ as if they are tangible assets. Mason gave us a tangible asset. He gave us a font, a voice. ‘Integrity Sans’ was designed to be clear, honest, and reliable. It was built on the tradition of classic serifs, but with a modern, humane touch. He poured 11 years of his life into creating a visual language of trust for the company. And the company used it to tell him he was redundant.

Cognitive Dissonance: Mason’s Ghost

That’s the part that sticks with me. The sheer, unthinking cruelty of it. Every email the survivors now receive from leadership, every new mission statement, every cheerful announcement about the bright future ahead, is written in Mason’s font. His ghost is in every memo. His life’s work is now the delivery mechanism for the very culture that discarded him. His integrity is the mask for theirs.

This creates a specific kind of cognitive dissonance that is exhausting to live with. You have to simultaneously believe in the work you are doing and not believe in the people you are doing it for. You have to pour your creativity and energy into projects for an entity you know, with absolute certainty, would email you a pre-recorded video tomorrow if a spreadsheet told it to. You learn to compartmentalize. You learn to do good work in a bad system. Or you just learn to do the work. The ‘good’ part fades away.

Maybe I’m being too harsh. I just updated three pieces of software on my laptop that I haven’t opened in 21 weeks, all because of an automated IT ticket. It was a pointless, performative act of compliance. So much of this is. Perhaps the CEO who recorded that video felt terrible. Perhaps he lost sleep. But what does his private feeling matter? The action is the message. The budget cut is the value statement. The empty chair is the culture.

The Message is Clear

The rest of us are still here, walking through the quiet, air-conditioned aisles. We see the posters. We read the emails typed in ‘Integrity Sans.’ And we understand. The message is perfectly clear. It’s kerned for maximum impact. We are not a family. We are just a collection of assets, to be realigned as needed.