The projector fan whirred-that dry, mechanical sound that signals the beginning of inevitable disappointment. He was standing on the stage, the CEO, wearing the same aggressively tailored vest he wore last quarter, promising the same level of revolutionary focus. The slide said: The New North Star: Growth Vector 46.

I glanced at Sarah, three seats down. We didn’t need to speak. We knew the drill. It was January 6th, and the 6-month cycle of strategic purgatory had begun again. The fervor in his voice was genuine, I’ll give him that, but the content felt like a remix of the content from the previous six cycles, only with a different buzzword slapped on the front. Two quarters ago, the North Star was ‘Engagement Density.’ Last quarter, it was ‘Operationalizing Disruption.’ Now, it’s a ‘Growth Vector,’ which sounds suspiciously like the last two things we completely abandoned right before the holiday break.

We talk about the psychological cost of burnout, but rarely do we talk about the structural demoralization inherent in perpetual pivoting. Why should anyone, especially an engineer or a product manager who deals in tangible outcomes, invest 46 weeks of deep effort into a system or a feature when they know, with 96% certainty, that the entire initiative will be quietly strangled in Q3? You teach your people that long-term investment is foolish. You teach them that the only thing that matters is the performative enthusiasm for the current shiny object, because the actual implementation will never reach maturity. They learn to build prototypes, not foundations. They learn not to commit.

The Antithesis: Rachel K.L. and the Clockmaker’s Trust

This is where I often think of Rachel K.L. She restores grandfather clocks. She works with permanence, with the heavy, intricate reality of brass and steel, designed to keep time for 106 years or more. I met her a while back when I was dealing with a family heirloom-a clock that hadn’t ticked properly since 1996.

Rachel doesn’t pivot. If she decided halfway through repairing the escapement mechanism that, actually, she should focus on integrating a digital display because the market is trending toward smart homes, she wouldn’t have a clock; she’d have a very expensive pile of junk. Her strategy is fixed: return the mechanism to its intended, original function. It takes time. She told me the last complex movement she tackled required exactly 236 dedicated hours of work. She doesn’t rush. She identifies the specific problem-the worn pin, the dried oil-and works with surgical precision to fix that. She never confuses the urgent need to get it ticking with the strategic requirement for it to tick accurately for the next 66 years.

Her process is predictable, repeatable, and fundamentally built on trust in foundational mechanics. That is the true antithesis of strategic chaos. When you’re building physical structures, whether it’s a clock mechanism or a housing solution, consistency matters more than flash.

This concept of repeatable, high-trust execution is essential in fields where the deliverable is tangible and the stakes are high. You need a process that minimizes error and maximizes efficiency, not one that requires you to tear down the framing every three months to chase a different aesthetic or material trend. This predictability is critical, especially when you are delivering high-value, high-trust assets, much like the systematic, precision-engineered process employed by Modular Home Ireland. They understand that the foundation must be solid, and that chaotic redirection undermines the very premise of delivering a consistent, quality product that must last for 46 years or longer.

The Cost of Destroying Prerequisites

I was working on a project 6 years ago, and we were tasked with building a complex customer data platform. It was huge, intimidating, and promised revenue generation of $676 million by 2026. The scope was enormous, but we had a 126-week plan. We were 56 weeks into the build-the hardest, foundational work was done, the architectural decisions solidified. Then, the new leadership came in. They didn’t even look at the platform; they just saw the budget spent and the lack of immediate results (because foundations don’t produce immediate results). They declared, “The market has moved. AI is the new priority. We must pivot 96 degrees and focus on generative models.” The CDP project was starved of resources, effectively killed.

And here is the beautiful contradiction: To build the generative models they wanted, we needed clean, organized data-exactly what the CDP was designed to provide. They destroyed the prerequisite for their new priority. They criticized the project for being too slow, only to pivot to a strategy that required even more fundamental groundwork they had just obliterated. I saw this happen three times in three different forms on that specific project. We chased 6 things and achieved zero. This is the definition of waste.

The Real Agility

We need to stop using the word “pivot” as a shield for lack of foresight. When management doesn’t have the courage to commit to a long, hard course-or worse, when they don’t possess the intellectual rigor to design a coherent path in the first place-they wrap their indecision in the language of agility. They turn their internal chaos into an external competitive advantage narrative. Look at us, so flexible!

The real agility is having a strategy so robust, so focused on solving the core problem, that minor market fluctuations are merely noise.

True strategic thinking accepts that the first 16 months of building the foundation will look unproductive to anyone focused only on superficial metrics. It understands that you must endure the dip, not detour around it. It recognizes that sometimes, the only way forward is relentless, boring, specific commitment to the thing you promised 36 months ago.

If everything is a priority, then nothing is. If the strategy changes every 6 months, then the only consistent strategy is inconsistency, which is a guarantee of perpetual mediocrity, regardless of how smart the people doing the execution are. They will never trust the framework enough to truly build the cathedral; they will only ever build temporary tents.

So, the next time the slide deck flips and announces Growth Vector 56 or whatever number ends in a six comes next, ask yourself: Is this a calculated adjustment, or is this simply the latest excuse to avoid completing the tough work we started 6 months ago? What foundational piece are we destroying this time? And if the strategy keeps changing, what exactly is the point of the company beyond the performance of change itself?