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Author’s Note:

This week’s article deliberately steps a little outside the usual language of boardrooms, business schools, and technical architecture. The metaphor that follows comes instead from the fiction I read and the games I play.

That is intentional.

An idea’s origin tells us something about its context, but not necessarily its value; useful ways of seeing problems have never been confined to the disciplines responsible for creating them.

Sometimes changing the vocabulary is precisely what allows a familiar problem to become visible again.

~Dom

This week’s argument began, as many respectable theories of corporate governance presumably do, while I was playing a video game.

Abstract Foundations normally spends its time somewhere around technology, organizations, incentives, leadership, economics, and the endless collection of compromises through which modern institutions attempt to function. This week, the inspiration comes instead from the fiction I read and the games I play – specifically, the increasingly popular collection of stories built around cultivation and progression.

This should not be mistaken for an argument that ancient Chinese philosophers secretly anticipated quarterly earnings reports, or that the Tao Te Ching should be shelved beside the latest airport bookstore guide to organizational transformation. Modern cultivation fiction borrows, recombines, exaggerates, and occasionally cheerfully abuses ideas drawn from several philosophical, religious, literary, and martial traditions. It is, after all, fiction. Often spectacularly excessive fiction. Its protagonists meditate atop mountains, refine mystical pills, discover forbidden techniques, and occasionally spend a few thousand years in seclusion because they have encountered a particularly stubborn career-development problem.

So I was not expecting management advice. The problem is that once I noticed the resemblance, it became irritatingly difficult to unsee.

A cultivation practitioner spends their life gathering energy, refining it, strengthening the structures required to contain it, learning increasingly sophisticated techniques, encountering bottlenecks, surviving breakthroughs, and attempting to advance into progressively more powerful realms without destroying themselves in the process.

A corporation spends its life gathering revenue, refining it into profit and capital, strengthening the structures required to contain it, developing increasingly sophisticated capabilities, encountering bottlenecks, surviving periods of rapid growth, and attempting to advance into progressively larger markets without destroying itself in the process.

Apparently, the principal difference is that one calls the energy qi, while the other calls it revenue.

And, viewed from the right angle, quite a bit of modern business begins to look suspiciously like cultivation.

The Path to Immortality

The details vary enormously between stories, but cultivation usually begins with a deceptively simple premise. The practitioner accumulates some form of energy or understanding and uses it to improve themselves. They strengthen the body, refine internal energy, learn martial arts techniques, develop greater control, and eventually reach the limits of their current state.

Then things become difficult.

Progress in cultivation fiction is rarely a smooth line extending infinitely upward. A practitioner can become very good at operating within one realm and still remain completely incapable of entering the next. They encounter a bottleneck. Getting past it may require greater understanding, a different technique, some scarce resource, better preparation, or simply recognizing that what worked until now will not work forever.

Eventually, if everything aligns, the practitioner attempts a breakthrough. Success means entering a higher realm. Failure ranges from embarrassing to fatal, apparently depending upon how much the author dislikes the character.

This is important because cultivation is not just accumulation. Gathering enormous amounts of energy does not necessarily make someone strong. The practitioner must be capable of refining it, controlling it, and surviving the power they have accumulated. A weak foundation can make rapid advancement dangerous, poor technique can waste energy, and forcing a breakthrough before the practitioner is ready can damage the very system they are attempting to strengthen.

Power, in other words, is not measured exclusively by how much energy passes through you. What you can do with it matters.

Corporations might benefit from remembering the distinction.

Establishing the Foundation

Revenue is an attractive business metric because revenue feels wonderfully uncomplicated; more is generally considered better. For our purposes, it also makes a reasonable substitute for the spiritual energy being gathered by our fictional practitioner: customers exchange money for something the company provides, energy enters the system, and the organization attempts to use that energy to sustain and expand itself.

But revenue is not cultivation. It is only the raw material.

A corporation generating a billion dollars in revenue while consuming almost all of it to remain operational may be very large without being particularly strong. Another company may generate substantially less while possessing better margins, stronger reserves, valuable intellectual property, resilient systems, durable customer relationships, and the ability to absorb disruption without immediately entering existential crisis.

The first has gathered more energy. The second may have cultivated it better.

This distinction matters because modern business language often allows growth and development to become nearly synonymous. If revenue increased, market share expanded, headcount grew, or another company was acquired, the organization became larger, and the larger number is taken as evidence that advancement occurred.

Sometimes it did. Sometimes the practitioner simply swallowed another alchemical pill.

Cultivation stories are unusually suspicious of shortcuts that increase visible power without strengthening the foundation beneath it. A character can consume rare treasures, medicines, artifacts, or external sources of energy and rapidly advance beyond their natural pace. This generally looks impressive right up until something applies pressure.

Corporations can make the same mistake. A company can rapidly increase sales without developing the support capacity required to serve those customers. It can acquire businesses faster than it can integrate them. It can add employees without creating systems through which those employees can coordinate, and just as quickly expand internationally without developing the governance necessary to operate coherently across jurisdictions.

For a while, the numbers can look excellent. But becoming larger and becoming capable of being larger are different achievements. Cultivation has a useful word for the difference.

They call it the Foundation.

The Bottleneck

Eventually, almost every practitioner in these stories reaches the point where additional effort produces diminishing returns. This would probably be a less exciting genre if the solution were always another ten thousand push-ups.

Regardless, the practitioner has reached a bottleneck: the current method is no longer sufficient to create meaningful advancement. Businesses, too, encounter these constantly.

The founder who once approved every important decision eventually becomes the person preventing important decisions from being made. The spreadsheet that beautifully tracked fifty customers becomes a panic attack at fifty thousand. The informal conversation between three engineers becomes a development process involving hundreds. The finance system sufficient for one country becomes an obstacle across twenty.

Eventually, the same organizational structure that allowed a small company to move quickly begins producing confusion when the company becomes large enough that nobody can reasonably know what everyone else is doing.

None of these necessarily mean the previous approach was bad. Quite the opposite – usually the organization reached the bottleneck precisely because the technique worked.

That is what makes bottlenecks difficult. When something has failed repeatedly, abandoning it is relatively easy. When something has produced years of success, questioning it feels irrational.

We built the company this way. We have always done this. This process got us here.

Exactly. It got us here. The question is whether it can get us somewhere else.

This is one place where the logic of cultivation begins brushing against the logic traditionally associated with Daoism. Greater force is not necessarily greater effectiveness. There are circumstances in which pushing harder against the same constraint does not overcome it; it just wastes more energy against something that must be approached differently.

Organizations frequently respond to bottlenecks with additional pressure. More targets, reporting, meetings, scrutiny, and urgency. More people attempting to force additional productivity through the same organizational channel.

And sometimes that works. Other times, the channel itself is the problem.

A bottleneck is not always evidence that the organization needs to try harder. Sometimes it is evidence that the current technique has completed its useful work.

Breaking Through

Growth becomes particularly interesting when an organization begins crossing thresholds. A ten-person company and a ten-thousand-person company are not simply the same organism at different magnifications. Certain problems emerge only at scale: communication becomes coordination, trust becomes governance, individual knowledge becomes documentation, judgment becomes policy, and a technical shortcut used by three people grows into infrastructure depended upon by three thousand.

Every new realm introduces responsibilities that the previous realm could safely ignore.

In cultivation fiction, breakthroughs are therefore dangerous. The practitioner is not just collecting enough points to unlock the next level; they are attempting to become something capable of containing greater power.

The corporate equivalent should sound familiar. A rapidly growing organization discovers that systems which appeared perfectly healthy were merely operating below the load required to expose their weaknesses. The customer-service process works wonderfully until the customer base doubles and the support team does not. The supply chain works perfectly until demand triples in a region already near capacity. The informal approval process works efficiently until the person providing approval cannot physically review everything crossing their desk. The database works until everyone needs it at the same time each morning.

Success, then, is often the event that reveals the failure.

Cultivation fiction tends to dramatize this through tribulations. At important moments of advancement, the practitioner is subjected to some extraordinary trial – usually an extremely motivated lightning storm – a wonderfully efficient narrative device through which the universe examines whether they actually deserve the power they are attempting to claim.

Corporations rarely receive bolts from heaven. Instead, they have auditors, regulators, cybersecurity incidents, market corrections, and unexpectedly successful products. The principle is similar: an organization eventually encounters something capable of testing whether its apparent strength was ready for the next stage.

At lower levels of scale, weaknesses can remain theoretical. A poor access-control process matters considerably less when twelve people use the system, and a weak supply arrangement may be tolerable while demand remains modest. Undocumented institutional knowledge feels perfectly efficient while the person holding it remains employed. Then circumstances change, the organization attempts its breakthrough, and the tribulation discovers everything management had previously classified as technical debt, process debt, someday work, or somebody else’s problem.

I have built systems that were right for their moment and later became the thing in the way. Not through error; the constraints changed, and the structure did not.

This does not mean growth should be feared. It means growth and readiness are different variables.

Every organization wants the benefits associated with the next realm. Far fewer are enthusiastic about performing the cultivation required to survive there.

Secret Techniques

No cultivation story would be complete without techniques. Some are carefully guarded by ancient clans, while others are discovered in forgotten tombs, purchased at dramatic auctions, inherited from mysterious masters, or found in books whose previous owners appear to have suffered unfortunate accidents.

Corporate techniques usually arrive through consultants.

Otherwise, the principle remains surprisingly intact. Organizations accumulate methods for improving themselves: Lean, Agile, Six Sigma, OKRs, matrix management, centralized services, decentralization, process automation, outsourcing, insourcing, offshoring, nearshoring, digital transformation, artificial intelligence, and an endless procession of frameworks promising to convert organizational complexity into something manageable.

Most of these ideas are not foolish, and many became popular because they solved real problems. The danger appears when technique becomes doctrine.

A technique is useful because it responds to particular circumstances. Once separated from those circumstances, however, the organization can begin optimizing the application of the technique rather than the problem the technique originally existed to solve.

Meetings become more Agile. Processes become more Lean. Objectives acquire more key results. The organization develops increasingly sophisticated methods for demonstrating that it is following the method.

This is another familiar cultivation problem. A practitioner can spend decades perfecting a technique while failing to notice that the technique itself has become the limitation.

Mastery and progress are not identical.

There are times when advancement requires becoming better at what already works, and there are others when what already works has to be abandoned for something new. This is uncomfortable precisely because successful techniques become part of organizational identity.

By this time, though, they are not just processes anymore; they become evidence of why the organization believes it succeeded. The old technique becomes sacred heritage.

And eventually an organization can become extremely good at being the company it used to need to be.

The Rectification of Names

There is another useful idea sitting slightly outside cultivation fiction itself. Confucian thought has long concerned itself with the relationship between roles, obligations, social order, and what is sometimes translated as the rectification of names: the idea, simplified considerably, that disorder follows when the name of something and its reality cease to correspond.

Corporations, again, produce wonderful examples. The organization says it values innovation, while punishing unsuccessful experiments, or calls a person an owner while denying them authority. It identifies a function as strategic while funding it as an inconvenience, or announces quality as a priority while measuring primarily throughput.

It tells employees to collaborate while rewarding only individual performance. It describes a system as temporary for seven consecutive years.

The problem is not only hypocrisy. The deeper problem is that organizations eventually behave according to what their systems actually reward, regardless of what their vocabulary claims to value.

Cultivation fiction, similarly, regularly makes status visible through realms and ranks. Real organizations are messier: titles, responsibilities, authority, expectations, incentives, and actual influence can drift considerably apart.

Eventually the words stop describing the system, and instead begin concealing it.

An organization attempting to cultivate greater capability cannot afford too much distance between the names it gives things and the functions those things actually perform. If responsibility exists without authority, ownership becomes fiction. If innovation carries only downside risk, experimentation is likewise fictitious. If employees are told that long-term health matters while every meaningful incentive is quarterly, the time horizon, too, is false.

Before an organization can refine its technique, it occasionally has to describe itself accurately. This is more difficult than it sounds.

Accurate names have consequences.

Forbidden Methods

Of course, there is another path.

Cultivation fiction usually offers some version of forbidden (often called ‘demonic’) cultivation: methods through which a practitioner acquires power by bypassing the slower disciplines expected of everyone else. The precise method varies. Perhaps they steal another practitioner’s cultivation. Perhaps they drain life from others, consume forbidden resources, sacrifice something that should not be sacrificed, or employ a technique whose immediate effectiveness obscures the damage it creates.

These darker cultivation methods are attractive for the same reason most shortcuts are attractive. They work.

At least initially.

Corporate forbidden cultivation works too. A company can improve present earnings by deferring maintenance. It can improve margins by reducing staffing below sustainable levels and allowing employees to supply the missing capacity through longer hours. It can improve its environmental economics by allowing someone outside the company to absorb the environmental cost, and it can extract additional margin from suppliers whose negotiating position does not allow them to resist.

It can eliminate research, training, redundancy, quality controls, or other capabilities whose value exists primarily in futures the current accounting period does not yet recognize. Or it can acquire another organization, extract its customers or intellectual property, discard accumulated expertise, and record the useful portions of what remains as synergy.

None of these acts are automatically evil or bad merely because somebody loses something in the exchange. Competition necessarily creates winners and losers, efficiency sometimes requires eliminating genuinely unnecessary work, businesses occasionally have to shrink, and bad investments should not be preserved merely because someone once spent money on them.

The distinction is not that advancement creates a cost; almost all advancement does. The distinction is whether the organization creates additional capability or merely converts someone else’s loss into an increase on its own ledger.

This is what externalization looks like when translated into cultivation fiction. The practitioner appears stronger because the accounting boundary stops at their skin. The corporation appears healthier because the accounting boundary stops at the books. The exhausted employee exists outside the productivity metric, the polluted river exists outside the margin calculation, the supplier’s fragility exists outside procurement savings, the technical debt exists outside this quarter, and the lost institutional knowledge exists outside the restructuring benefit.

The future is particularly convenient because it does not attend earnings calls.

This type of cultivation is rarely portrayed as foolish because it produces no power. In fact, it is dangerous because it produces power without creating the foundation that legitimate advancement would have required.

The practitioner gets stronger while becoming less stable; the numbers improve while the organism weakens.

Eventually there is usually a price. Fiction simply has the courtesy to make the link between choice and consequence visible.

A Better Path to Immortality

I do not actually recommend reorganizing the modern corporation around the teachings of fictional immortals, no matter how entertaining the attempts may be.

There would be implementation challenges. Human Resources is already burdened enough without determining whether Senior Director corresponds to Golden Core or Nascent Soul realms, and Finance is unlikely to accept spirit stones as an alternative reporting currency. I also suspect Legal would have opinions about describing an acquisition strategy as devouring the cultivation of rival sects.

Still, the metaphor has survived considerably longer than I expected it to. Perhaps that is because businesses and cultivation stories are ultimately interested in a similar problem.

How does something become more powerful without destroying itself in the process?

Accumulation alone is insufficient. Resources must be refined. Growth must be supported by foundations capable of carrying it. Bottlenecks have to be recognized for what they are rather than attacked indefinitely with greater force. Techniques must remain tools rather than identities. Success must survive the tests that success itself creates. And advancement purchased by quietly consuming someone else’s future should not be confused with the creation of new strength.

None of this requires believing in qi, immortality, meridians, heavenly tribulations, or mysterious old men living inside jewelry. It barely even requires reading cultivation fiction. But fiction has always been useful partly because it exaggerates things until their shape becomes easier to see.

A cultivator sitting beneath a waterfall for three hundred years trying to force a breakthrough is absurd from the perspective of everyday life on Earth.

A corporation spending several years applying steadily increasing pressure to a process that has clearly reached its structural limit is… business as usual.

Perhaps the strangest thing about comparing modern corporations to fictional immortals is therefore not how ridiculous the comparison initially sounds.

It is how little translation the important parts require.