Confucius spent years watching officials confuse busyness with governance — and he had a specific diagnosis for it. In the Analects, he argued that the first task of any leader is 'zhengming': rectifying names. Not as a semantic game, but as a claim that when the words we use drift from the realities they describe, our actions follow them into confusion. Product teams do this constantly — calling a workaround a 'feature,' a constraint a 'strategic choice,' a backlog a 'roadmap.' The linguistic drift isn't just cosmetic. Alfred Korzybski, founder of general semantics, showed that the maps we carry in language actively shape what we're capable of perceiving; we stop noticing what our words can't hold. Together, Confucius and Korzybski suggest a discipline: before your next planning cycle, audit the actual words your team uses most. Not to police language — but to ask which ones are hiding something real.

Pick one term your team repeats constantly — 'alignment,' 'north star,' 'MVP,' whatever it is. What would you have to admit if you replaced it with a blunter, more literal phrase?

Drawing from Confucianism synthesized with General Semantics — Confucius (Analects, ~5th century BCE) synthesized with Alfred Korzybski (Science and Sanity, 1933)