Slumping further into the ergonomic leather chair that feels like it cost $888 dollars more than its actual utility, I closed my eyes and let my breathing go shallow. I pretended to be asleep during the 48th minute of the Q3 digital strategy post-mortem.
It is a trick I learned while investigating a complex disability claim in Omaha; people speak differently when they think the only witness is unconscious. They stop performing. They start leaking the truth through the cracks of their corporate jargon.
The air in the room was 78 degrees, thick with the smell of expensive roast coffee and the frantic energy of three people trying to own the same piece of sky.
On the far wall, the org chart was projected like a digital tombstone. At the top sat the CEO, a man who had spent trying to “pivot to video” before realizing the audience had already moved to 8-second vertical clips.
The Anatomy of Expansion
Below him, the sprawl began. There was Sarah, the Chief Product Officer, who had been trying to fix the 8-year-old legacy CMS since her first day. Then there was Marcus, the newly minted Chief Innovation Officer, hired because the board felt Sarah was “too tactical.”
And finally, leaning against the glass wall with a look of practiced urgency, was Julian, the Chief Transformation Officer, brought in ago because Sarah and Marcus could no longer agree on who was responsible for the mobile app’s roadmap.
I watched them through my eyelashes. Sarah was pointing at a spreadsheet. Marcus was sketching a cloud on a whiteboard. Julian was checking his 188-dollar smartwatch.
In my line of work-insurance fraud-we look for “indicators of instability.” Usually, it’s a warehouse that burns down three days after the policy limit is increased. In publishing, the fire is different. It’s the proliferation of C-titles.
When a company starts adding “Chief” to every second-tier strategy role, they aren’t scaling for growth; they are compensating for a vacuum. They are hiring for the illusion of progress because the reality of execution has become too heavy to lift.
Sarah’s frustration was palpable. As CPO, her remit was supposed to be the end-to-end user experience. But Marcus, the Innovation guy, had just secured a budget of $588,000 to explore “Web3 integrations” that Sarah knew the current tech stack couldn’t support. Julian, the Transformation lead, was now suggesting a “alignment sprint” to resolve the conflict.
The tax on decision speed was no longer a hidden cost; it was the primary product of the leadership team.
In my of looking into people who lie for a living, I’ve found that complexity is almost always a shield. If you can’t solve the problem, you make the problem so complicated that no one can blame you for failing to solve it.
These publishers aren’t reorganizing; they are inflating. They are adding layers of insulation between the decision and the consequence. Each new Chief is a new gatekeeper, a new signature required on a Jira ticket, a new voice in the Zoom room that now requires a 48-person capacity license just to accommodate the “leadership” and their various chiefs of staff.
I remember a case involving a small-town mill that claimed 88 different pieces of machinery were destroyed in a flood. When I got there, I realized they only had 8 machines. They had just renamed the parts to make the loss look bigger.
That is exactly what is happening in the legacy media world. They take the “Product” function, slice it into three parts-Product, Innovation, and Transformation-and then wonder why the gears have stopped turning.
The most successful turnarounds I’ve documented in my peripheral research aren’t the ones that added more seats to the table. They are the ones that removed the table entirely and replaced it with a workbench.
You see this in the editorial coverage of places like
where the focus is on consolidated executive authority and operational speed rather than the performance art of C-suite expansion. When one person is actually empowered to make a decision, the 18-minute argument about “who owns the roadmap” disappears.
“If Marcus is innovating the frontend, and Julian is transforming the workflow, what exactly am I building?”
– Sarah, Chief Product Officer
Sarah eventually slammed her laptop shut. The sound was like a gunshot in the quiet room. Neither man looked at her. Marcus started talking about “synergistic overlaps,” a phrase that means absolutely nothing but sounds expensive. Julian suggested a subcommittee.
The Decider-to-Doer Divergence
1998: 3 Chiefs
Today: 18+ Chiefs
I “woke up” then, stretching my arms and offering a groggy apology. They didn’t care. To them, I was just a consultant looking at their liability insurance. They didn’t realize I was actually measuring the depth of their grave.
The CFO, a man who had been with the company for and looked like he had survived several atmospheric re-entries, caught my eye. He knew. He was the only one who remembered when the company had 888 employees and only three C-titles.
Now they had 488 employees and 18 C-titles. The ratio of “deciders” to “doers” was approaching 1:1. We walked out of the room together. The hallway was lined with posters from the “Golden Age” of the magazine.
“How does it look, Ella?” he asked, his voice low.
“It looks like a house with 8 front doors and no hallway. Everyone wants to be the one to welcome the guests, but nobody knows where the kitchen is.”
He sighed, a long, rattling sound that ended in a cough. “Julian wants to hire a Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer for the product team specifically. Not for the company. Just for Marcus and Sarah’s departments.”
“That will make 19,” I noted. “A prime number. At least it’s mathematically interesting.”
The core frustration of the modern publisher is the belief that a new title can fix a broken culture. Innovation isn’t a job title; it’s a byproduct of having a product that actually works and a team that isn’t afraid to fail.
The price of consensus is usually the death of the very idea being debated.
When you separate “Innovation” from “Product,” you tell the Product team that their job is to be boring and the Innovation team that their job is to be impractical. You create a structural divorce before the marriage has even been consummated.
The Layering Pattern
I spent the next 8 hours in the archives, looking at the payroll history. The bloat followed a predictable pattern. It started with a dip in ad revenue. Instead of cutting costs or improving the ad tech, the board hired a Chief Revenue Officer.
When revenue stayed flat, they hired a Chief Growth Officer to “support” the CRO. When growth stalled, they added the Chief Innovation Officer to “find new buckets.” It’s a classic shell game.
In insurance, we call it “layering.” You hide the original risk under so many policies and riders that the adjuster gives up and just writes the check. But in business, the market doesn’t write a check. The market just moves on to a platform that only has 8 employees and a single, clear vision.
By the time I left the building, the sun was setting over the skyline, casting long, distorted shadows of the 18-story headquarters. I thought about Sarah, who actually knew how to build things, and how she was being suffocated by the “Transformation” happening around her.
If you want to know if a company is dying, don’t look at their balance sheet. Look at their business cards. If they have more than 8 people with “Chief” in their title for a mid-sized operation, the end isn’t just near; it’s already happened.
They are just waiting for the insurance investigator to finish the report and the CFO to turn out the lights. I got into my car and checked my notes one last time. 18 Chiefs. 488 staffers. 888 dollars for a chair. And not a single person in that room could tell me what they were planning to publish tomorrow.
They weren’t a media company anymore. They were a management consultancy that happened to have a printing press in the basement. As I drove away, I realized I hadn’t even pretended to be asleep for the last part of the meeting.
It’s just that when the conversation is that loud and says that little, it’s hard to tell the difference between a strategy session and a lullaby.
The true innovation would have been to fire 8 of them and give Sarah the keys to the building. But that would require a Chief Bravery Officer, and those are much harder to find on LinkedIn.