Post by Michael Klemmer

I got on LinkedIn because someone told me it was the professional thing to do after retirement. Big mistake. This place is a digital motor pool full of self-appointed visionaries doing donuts in the mud, yelling about scaling, optimizing, and disrupting, while actively failing to comprehend anything larger than their own reflection in a ring light. Every day I open this app and it’s someone bragging about how they “fired their entire team at 6:45 a.m. to protect the culture” and then went on a ten-mile gratitude walk before raising $4 million from investors who apparently also hate due diligence. You people are feral. You’re not leading a company. You’re cosplaying a personality disorder and calling it leadership. Every post reads like a man with a Bluetooth headset screamed into a word cloud and hit publish. “I was boarding a plane when I saw a janitor smiling. That janitor was my first employee. I gave him equity. That janitor is now our COO. Never forget to believe in people.” What in the fever dream did I just read? Nobody’s humble anymore. They just say “Humbled to announce” right before delivering a victory lap and tagging 19 people who haven’t talked to them since the Bush administration. I’ve seen better self-control in a barracks full of privates with an unlocked liquor cabinet. And don’t get me started on the war metaphors. Everything’s a battle. A war. A fight. Building a sales deck is not combat, Jeremy. You don’t need a “battle rhythm” to send a calendar invite. The only hostile fire you’ve taken is pushback from your procurement team because you overspent on branded water bottles again. Everyone here’s either launching a startup, scaling a team, pivoting to fractional strategy alignment, or breaking generational trauma through content strategy. Meanwhile, I’m just trying to remember what country we’re in and why nobody seems concerned that most of our public discourse is being conducted by people who would fail an EIB land nav course with GPS and a Sherpa. I didn’t spend three decades enforcing standards, writing war plans, and preparing for peer conflict so I could retire into a timeline where “being intentional” is a business strategy and grown men celebrate “Inbox Zero” like they earned a CIB. You want to lead? Learn to make a hard call and take the heat. You want to coach? Start by knowing what the hell you’re talking about. You want to build something meaningful? Try shutting up for five minutes and listening to someone who’s been there. But you won’t. Because that wouldn’t be “authentic,” and it might not get likes. So I’ll be here. Watching. Drinking black coffee. And quietly prepping a terrain model for when the real fight starts, and all your personal branding slideshows get deleted in the first 30 seconds of a comms blackout. LinkedIn calls it thought leadership. I call it intellectual looting, grifters digging through the corpse of competence for likes. - William Callahan