The Recovery Plan Was Missing a Road

The strategist asked the junior analyst to prepare a ROAD TO RECOVERY. She put the firm's celebrated valuation at the far right, then marked today's figure with YOU ARE HERE. The two labels covered each other. The strategist asked her to zoom out. She zoomed out until the labels were the size of sesame seeds. They still covered each other. “Try a wider time horizon.” She added another year. It gave the chart a longer horizontal line but no distance between the firm and its target. He suggested drawing the route as a curve. She drew one. It began and ended on the same point. Someone at the back of the room said the map was technically complete. The strategist asked whether it looked complete. It did, and that was the problem. They tried changing the color of the marker. Then they changed the font of the target. For one promising minute, the words no longer overlapped, but a colleague pointed out that the arrow between them was now pointing backward. The strategist said the arrow could be fixed. The junior offered to remove it. He declined. A recovery plan, he explained, needed somewhere to recover from. She asked where the firm was. He reached across the table, lifted YOU ARE HERE from the present figure and pressed it six inches to the left. The room could now see a road. He asked the junior to add milestones along it. She labeled the first one “return to current valuation.” The strategist crossed out “current.” The team approved the map. The valuation stayed where it was. The marker had moved. The recovery was ready to begin. --- **Source note:** This office, firm, strategist, valuation, slides, dialogue and map are fictional satire. [CBS News reported a November 5, 2026 U.S. market selloff](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/stocks-midterm-elections-tech-companies-ai-data-centers/) and concerns about AI data-center buildout. That report is context, not evidence for this invented meeting. Real prices can change for substantive reasons.