Keith Power

The well known story we tell about Midas usually stops at the punchline: he wished that everything he touched would turn to gold, and it did, and it was funny for about an hour. What we skip is the second half, which is the part of the story that really matters. By evening Midas is starving. The bread turns to metal between his fingers before it reaches his mouth. The wine solidifies on his tongue. And then, reaching out the way any father does without thinking, he touches his daughter, and...

The new organisational chart went up on a Tuesday. Twenty-three boxes, cleaner reporting lines, three fewer layers between the shop floor and the board. The CFO had modelled it for six weeks. The logic was airtight; cost synergies, faster decision-making, a structure built for where the business was going rather than where it had been. By Thursday, the best engineer on the team had updated her CV. Nobody had done anything wrong, exactly. The structure made sense. The targets were rational....

I've stood on both sides of the bed. The one where I redrew someone's role and called it evolution, and watched them hear it along with everyone else. And years before, the one where my own role got redrawn two floors above me, in a meeting at a hotel I found out about from a calendar invite sent at 4.58pm for 9am the next morning. Both times, the bed was already built. The measuring came after. There's an old Greek story about a man called Procrustes who kept an inn on the road to Athens. He...