I pulled the handle and the plastic snapped. It was a cheap lever on the side of my office chair. I looked at the gray piece in my hand and I felt the weight of the day. It was 3:14 in the morning. I had changed the smoke detector battery an hour ago and I could not sleep.

The detector had chirped with a sharp sound and I had climbed the ladder in the dark. The battery was cold and it was dead. I replaced it and I waited for the silence. The silence came but sleep did not stay. Now the chair was stuck in a deep recline and I was looking at the ceiling.

I sat in the broken chair and I thought about the meeting. We are choosing a new Director of Infrastructure. There are two people in the running. There is Aris and there is Sarah.

Aris is a man who loves a large room. He manages four hundred and twelve servers. He has a team of eighty people and his budget is fourteen million dollars. His domain is a sprawling map of old hardware and new cloud instances. It is a messy operation. There is always a fire and Aris is always there with a hose.

He looks tired and he speaks with a heavy voice. The leadership looks at him and they see a man who carries a great burden. They see the size of his budget and they think he is important. They see the number of his licenses and they think he is powerful.

The Technician vs. The Leader

Sarah is different. Her domain is small and it is clean. She has forty-two servers and a team of four people. Her budget is one million dollars. Her systems do not break. She does not have fires. She spends her time looking at the code and she talks to her users.

The leadership looks at her and they see a technician. They do not see a leader. They see her small budget and they think her work is easy. They see her small team and they think she lacks the vision for scale.

I know both of them. I have seen the way they work. Aris buys things because they are big. He buys licenses in bulk and he does not count the cost. He has thousands of seats that no one uses. He calls this “capacity planning” but it is just waste.

He builds a forest of trees and the forest is dry. It catches fire every week and the board gives him more money to buy more hoses. They think the fire is proof of the challenge. They think the size of the forest is proof of his merit.

Sarah uses the RDS CAL Store and she buys exactly what she needs. She counts the users and she counts the devices. She knows that a lean system is a fast system.

She does not want a forest. She wants a garden. But a garden does not look like an empire. A garden looks like a hobby to a man who wants to be a king.

IT is a testimony. It is a story of how the data moves and how the people work. Aris is the loudest man in the room. He uses words like orchestration and synergy. He talks about the complexity of his environment. He makes the board feel safe because they do not understand him.

They think that if a thing is complex then it must be good. They think that if a man manages a large budget then he must be a large man. But the complexity is a choice. Aris chooses the sprawl. He chooses the mess because the mess requires a leader.

If the systems worked then he would not be needed. He maintains the wreckage so he can maintain the command. This is the secret of the modern leader. They do not want to fix the problem. They want to own the problem. They want the problem to be so big that no one else can hold it.

I sat in the chair and I felt the tilt of the seat. The plastic was still in my hand. I thought about the servers in the basement. We have racks of machines that do nothing. They hum in the dark and they eat the power. We keep them because they make the inventory look large.

We have thousands of Remote Desktop licenses that sit on a shelf. We paid for them and we pay for the maintenance. We do not use them but we keep them on the books. They are the soldiers in the army of the sprawl.

When you buy from a place like the RDS CAL Store, you are making a choice about reality. You are saying that you know the number of your people. You are saying that you do not need the theater of the surplus. You buy twenty seats or you buy fifty seats. You buy what is real.

But the culture of the office does not like reality. It likes the promise of the infinite. It likes the leader who says he needs more.

The Headcount General

We measure a general by the number of his men. We do not ask if the men can shoot. We do not ask if the men have shoes. We only count the heads. In IT we measure the leader by the headcount and the license inventory.

We reward the man who builds a tall tower of waste. We ignore the woman who builds a short bridge that stays standing.

Aris will get the job. The board will look at his fourteen million dollar budget and they will feel a sense of scale. They will think that a man who can spend that much money is a man they can trust. They will not see that the money is the price of his failure.

They will not see that the fires are his creation. They will see the smoke and they will call it a breakthrough in visibility.

I am tired of the smoke. I am tired of the 2:00 am chirps. The smoke detector did its job because it was simple. It had one sensor and one battery and one purpose. It did not have a dashboard. It did not have a synergy strategy. It just watched the air. When the battery died it told me. I climbed the ladder and I fixed it. That is the work. The rest is just the theater of the command.

We have built a world where the size of the command is the only marker of success. If you manage a small team you are a manager. If you manage a large team you are an executive. It does not matter if the large team produces nothing. It does not matter if the large team is just a crowd of people waiting for instructions. The size is the status. The scale is the competence.

I think about the licenses again. There is a man in procurement named Harold. He likes the big contracts. He likes the meetings with the vendors. The vendors take him to lunch and they tell him he is a partner. They sell him a thousand seats of Windows Server 2022 and they tell him he is preparing for the future.

Harold does not know what the future is. He only knows that the lunch was good and the contract is large. He brings the contract to the board and he feels like a hero.

Sarah does not go to lunch. She stays in her office and she checks the logs. She finds the waste and she cuts it. She goes to the RDS CAL Store and she buys five more User CALs because five more people joined the team.

She saves the company ten thousand dollars a month. The board does not see the ten thousand dollars. They only see that her department is small. They think she is not a team player. They think she is not thinking big.

If you think big you do not have to worry about the details. You do not have to worry about the plastic lever on the chair. You do not have to worry about the dead battery in the ceiling. You just buy a new chair and you buy a new detector and you put it on the budget. You make the kingdom larger and you hope no one looks at the foundation.

The foundation is the work. The work is the thing that happens when the meetings are over. It is the data moving from one place to another. It is the user logging in and getting the file. It is the system staying up while the world sleeps. Sarah does the work. Aris does the command. We are choosing the command.

I threw the piece of plastic into the bin. It made a small sound. I stood up and I walked to the window. The sun was not up yet but the sky was turning gray. I could see the lights of the data center in the distance. They were bright and they were steady.

I knew that in one of those racks there was a server that did nothing. It was there because Aris needed it to be there. It was a monument to his importance. It was a very expensive monument.

We should reward the silence. We should reward the leader whose phone does not ring at 3:00 am. We should reward the person who buys only what they need and nothing more. But we do not. We reward the noise. We reward the sprawl. We reward the man who stands in the middle of the wreckage and asks for a larger budget to build a bigger wreck.

I will go to the meeting and I will speak for Sarah. I will tell them about the garden and the bridge. I will tell them that the size of the command is a lie. I will tell them that Aris is the loudest man in the room and he has lost the thread. They will listen to me and they will nod their heads. They will thank me for my input. And then they will hire Aris.

I know they will hire him because they are afraid. They are afraid of the silence. They are afraid of the small department because they do not know how to measure it. They only know how to count.

They count the heads and they count the zeros in the budget. They see the scale and they think they see the future. I see the scale and I see the broken plastic in the bin. I see the 2:00 am chirps. I see the cost of the dominion. It is a high cost and we are all paying it. But we will keep paying it as long as we believe that a king is measured by the size of his ruins.