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Unemployable Elsewhere: How Tribalism Breeds A Parasitic Culture

There is a particular kind of organizational failure that accumulates in meetings that resolve nothing, in systems built without use cases, in team members that cannot self-manage because no one above them is managing either.

An Agile coach, brought in to assess team productivity, estimated approximately thirty minutes of productive work per week. That figure was a verdict, and it went unaddressed.

The meetings tell their own story. They go in circles. Topics are raised, discussed, and raised again. Nothing is decided. Nothing is solved. From months on end. Rinse and repeat.

The people who should be providing direction — who should be walking out of those rooms having given their teams clarity and purpose — have instead disengaged from meetings they find too circular to be worth their time. The circularity is real. But abdication is not a response to it. Direction is.

When a meeting is called with a specific agenda, a recognizable pattern emerges: the meeting is hijacked to a problem they own and have with someone else, then blame is redirected toward the person who called the meeting when they decline to address what isn’t theirs, and the original problem leaves the room unresolved.

This is a practiced deflection — a way of manufacturing noise around one’s own inane incompetence.

Business partners learned not to engage. When technological questions were routed to them, the response was consistently “that’s a tech question” — meaning, one for themselves to answer.

A team that cannot answer technological questions in its own domain, and has no one supervising them closely enough to notice, is not an asset.

Then there is the data lake. Data physically moved from where it rightfully resides — not called, not federated, not architected — into a structure whose use cases were retrofitted to justify a decision already made. The build came first. The rationale followed. That inversion is not a planning failure. It is a work style.

The purpose was a story about system ownership. To plant a flag. To build an empire from the appearance of infrastructure rather than its function.

This is what empire-building looks like when it is insulated from accountability. Not bold strategy. Not technical vision. A system no one said they needed, built by a team no one could direct, reported upward as progress.

And then there is a man who has passed from team to team within this organization — because no one has been willing or able to manage him. While others have made it to the exit list through successive rounds of layoffs, he has been recycled near monthly. The streak is astonishing. One might ask how every restructuring manages to route around a single individual — how the org design, applied to so many others, has somehow never applied to him.

Internally, the network that sustains this has a name — known inside the institution as the Indian Mafia. It describes a real dynamic of mutual protection among a cohort that conflates shared origin with shared interest, and leverages institutional inertia to insulate underperformance from consequence.

The MD who said “the fucking DART people will blow up the whole bank” said it in a meeting in the Rutherford NJ office, from a position of institutional superiority. His own team’s track record suggests he should look in the mirror.

None of these people, in these circumstances, performing at this level, would be employable elsewhere.

Leadership failure can be insidious. It can look like thirty minutes of productive work a week, and nobody ever asking why.