A Rolling Stone
Gathers No Moss
The Slow Rot
Most corruption doesn’t start with a villain; it starts with a group of humans who’ve been together a little too long. Leave any team, department, or leadership pod in the same configuration for years and something subtle happens. Lines blur. Favors accumulate. People stop noticing where the rules end and relationships begin. The shift isn’t dramatic. It’s gradual, like fruit softening on the counter. One day it’s fine. The next day, it’s a science experiment.
We like to pretend this only happens in politics or in other companies, but it’s a human pattern, not an industry flaw. Familiarity dulls judgment. Small allowances stack quietly — a perk here, a preferential contract there — until the distinction between what’s acceptable and what’s convenient becomes hard to see. Over time, everyone learns the choreography: don’t ask too many questions, don’t rock the boat, and definitely don’t open the container in the back of the fridge that’s been there since the last reorg.
That’s why some organizations rotate people on purpose. Not because change is energizing, but because it interrupts comfort before comfort turns into entitlement. It’s organizational cleansing — a way to reset the room before we work here drifts into we own this place. From the inside, it rarely feels like corruption. It feels like trust. Loyalty. The way things get done. By the time anyone names it, the shoreline has already moved.
The Little Exception
Which brings me to something as stupidly small as a parking spot. Every morning I circle the lot like a responsible citizen of corporate hell, even though the visitor space is right there — and every executive before me took it without hesitation. I feel the temptation anyway, dressed up as something harmless: one tiny exception, one just-this-once convenience — the kind of thing too boring to ever appear in an ethics training.
That’s the moment. Not the headline scandal or the dramatic fall from grace, but the small decision no one would notice — the one where you either reinforce the culture or quietly rewrite it for yourself, one convenience at a time. Bitches, we talk endlessly about disruption, innovation, and agility, but we rarely talk about the organizational equivalent of changing the sheets. Sometimes the problem isn’t strategy. Sometimes the rot comes from familiarity itself, from people settling so deeply into the furniture that they forget it belongs to the company, not them.
Reorganizations aren’t always a sign of chaos. Sometimes they’re hygiene — a reminder that the place is bigger than any one person’s comfort zone, including mine, circling the lot like a saint while the visitor spot winks at me. Because left unchecked, humans don’t just get comfortable. We get creative.