Get Off First

The meeting went well, Greg said.

For Greg, maybe. The rest of us sat there and knew better. We’d watched the corporate speak come across the table, and we knew exactly what it meant. This was not good.

This is the story of Jim’s bus.

Picture buying a ticket for one.

You show up, and it’s pristine. You walk around it, and the worry you carried all night starts to lift. The staff treats you well. You wait to board and imagine the people you’ll meet, the places you’ll go.

Your name is called. Seats are assigned — check your ticket, find yours.

You step inside, and something is off. The interior doesn’t match the exterior. Your seatmates are rude, uncooperative, and some of them just don’t agree with you. You give it a chance anyway. Once everyone’s aboard, you feel the bus tilt. The weight isn’t sitting right. It pulls out of the station anyway.

You wanted a smooth ride. You get potholes. The other passengers tell you the bus hasn’t been maintained in years. The shocks are shot.

Doesn’t matter. You’re committed now. You’ve had worse, and no one is taking your destination from you. So you decide to make the best of it.

Then the road climbs. The bus starts to swerve through the mountain pass. Pitch black outside, the mountain wall on one side, the drop on the other. The swerve gets worse — and you realize the driver fell asleep at the wheel. Before you can move, you’re going over the edge with everyone else.

All those plans, gone. Because you never saw what was in front of you.

Jim Collins put it simply: great companies figure out who belongs on the bus and who has to get off, then they put the right people in the right seats. That’s where most executives miss. They hire talent and seat it wrong. Or they hire brilliant people who never belonged in that culture in the first place.

But Collins is talking about the passengers.

The harder problem is the bus. Its condition. The driver. Most professionals never look up.

So how do you end up in that meeting — the one where you already know it’s going sideways, and leadership swears everything is fine? It happens when the people driving stop seeing the forest for the trees. They lose the road. Leadership becomes an absentee landlord, still collecting on a building it no longer walks through.

And you’re in your assigned seat, watching it. So you ask the questions that actually matter. Not the budget, not the pro forma, not the next offsite. What happens to the bus? What happens to the driver? What do you do with a team behind you?

Here’s the answer no one wants. You get off.

Being among the first to jump saves you the heartache. The derailment can take a while, but it comes. The people in power won’t correct course — most of the time, they can’t even see there’s a course to correct. In a centralized company, the odds are worse: no division ever feels the cost of a bad decision, so the culture just erodes quietly until the great organization you thought you had is a shell of itself.

The meeting ended. Greg logged off Teams, certain it had gone well. I looked at the CFO of the company. We stared at each other and knew the look — the look that said Greg had just unnecessarily fucked the organization. And us.

If the driver won’t give up the seat, you go out the door. The landing won’t be graceful. But it beats going down with the bus.