Confucius spent years advising rulers who ignored him, traveling from state to state, watching capable governance fail not because the plans were wrong but because the language used to describe them was. His diagnosis: zhengming — rectifying names — the discipline of ensuring that the words a group uses actually match the reality they're pointing at. When 'done' means different things to engineering and product, when 'aligned' means 'I nodded in the meeting,' when 'launch' means shipping to 5% of users, the team isn't misaligned on strategy — they're speaking different dialects of the same words. Confucius argued that bad governance begins here, upstream of any decision, in the quiet corruption of shared vocabulary. The practical move isn't a glossary document. It's stopping the next planning conversation and asking, out loud: what do we each picture when we say that word? The answers will surprise you.

Name the last decision your team made where a key word — 'ready,' 'success,' 'committed' — was never actually defined. What did each person in the room probably hear?

Drawing from Confucianism — Confucius (Analects, Book XIII)