Confucius spent years trying to reform broken governments by advising rulers — and kept failing. What made him effective eventually wasn't better arguments or sharper strategy. It was what he called zhengming — 'rectifying names,' the practice of making sure the words you use actually match the reality they describe. A product called a 'platform' that serves one client isn't a platform. A roadmap that never changes isn't a roadmap. A metric called 'engagement' that measures clicks isn't engagement. The gap between what we name things and what they actually are quietly corrupts every decision downstream. This week, pick one term your team uses constantly and ask whether it still points to the real thing — or whether it's become a comfortable fiction everyone stopped questioning.

Name one term your team uses daily — 'user,' 'done,' 'strategy,' 'signal' — and define it precisely. Does everyone on your team mean the same thing by it?

Drawing from Confucianism — Confucius (Analects, Book 13)