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By:

Rahul Kulkarni

30 March 2025 at 3:32:54 pm

The Boundary Collapse

When kindness becomes micromanagement It started with a simple leave request.   “Hey, can I take Friday off? Need a personal day,” Meera messaged Rohit. Rohit replied instantly:   “Of course. All good. Just stay reachable if anything urgent comes up.”   He meant it as reassurance. But the team didn’t hear reassurance. They heard a rule.   By noon, two things had shifted inside The Workshop:   Meera felt guilty for even asking. Everyone else quietly updated their mental handbook: Leave is...

The Boundary Collapse

When kindness becomes micromanagement It started with a simple leave request.   “Hey, can I take Friday off? Need a personal day,” Meera messaged Rohit. Rohit replied instantly:   “Of course. All good. Just stay reachable if anything urgent comes up.”   He meant it as reassurance. But the team didn’t hear reassurance. They heard a rule.   By noon, two things had shifted inside The Workshop:   Meera felt guilty for even asking. Everyone else quietly updated their mental handbook: Leave is allowed… but not really. This is boundary collapse… when a leader’s good intentions unintentionally blur the limits that protect autonomy and rest. When care quietly turns into control Founders rarely intend to micromanage.   What looks like control from the outside often starts as care from the inside. “Let me help before something breaks.” “Let me stay involved so we don’t lose time.” “Loop me in… I don’t want you stressed.” Supportive tone.   Good intentions.   But one invisible truth defines workplace psychology: When power says “optional,” it never feels optional.
So when a client requested a revision, Rohit gently pinged:   “If you’re free, could you take a look?” Of course she logged in.   Of course she handled it.   And by Monday, the cultural shift was complete: Leave = location change, not a boundary.   A founder’s instinct had quietly become a system. Pattern 1: The Generous Micromanager Modern micromanagement rarely looks aggressive. It looks thoughtful :   “Let me refine this so you’re not stuck.” “I’ll review it quickly.”   “Share drafts so we stay aligned.”   Leaders believe they’re being helpful. Teams hear:   “You don’t fully trust me.” “I should check with you before finishing anything.”   “My decisions aren’t final.” Gentle micromanagement shrinks ownership faster than harsh micromanagement ever did because people can’t challenge kindness. Pattern 2: Cultural conditioning around availability In many Indian workplaces, “time off” has an unspoken footnote: Be reachable. Just in case. No one says it directly.   No one pushes back openly.   The expectation survives through habit: Leave… but monitor messages. Rest… but don’t disconnect. Recover… but stay alert. Contrast this with a global team we worked with: A designer wrote,   “I’ll be off Friday, but available if needed.” Her manager replied:   “If you’re working on your off-day, we mismanaged the workload… not the boundary.”   One conversation.   Two cultural philosophies.   Two completely different emotional outcomes.   Pattern 3: The override reflex Every founder has a version of this reflex.   Whenever Rohit sensed risk, real or imagined, he stepped in: Rewriting copy.   Adjusting a design.   Rescoping a task.   Reframing an email. Always fast.   Always polite.   Always “just helping.” But each override delivered one message:   “Your autonomy is conditional.” You own decisions…   until the founder feels uneasy.   You take initiative…   until instinct replaces delegation.   No confrontation.   No drama.   Just quiet erosion of confidence.   The family-business amplification Boundary collapse becomes extreme in family-managed companies.   We worked with one firm where four family members… founder, spouse, father, cousin… all had informal authority. Everyone cared.   Everyone meant well.   But for employees, decision-making became a maze: Strategy approved by the founder.   Aesthetics by the spouse.   Finance by the father. Tone by the cousin.   They didn’t need leadership.   They needed clarity.   Good intentions without boundaries create internal anarchy. The global contrast A European product team offered a striking counterexample.   There, the founder rarely intervened mid-stream… not because of distance, but because of design:   “If you own the decision, you own the consequences.” Decision rights were clear.   Escalation paths were explicit.   Authority didn’t shift with mood or urgency. No late-night edits.   No surprise rewrites.   No “quick checks.”   No emotional overrides. As one designer put it:   “If my boss wants to intervene, he has to call a decision review. That friction protects my autonomy.” The result:   Faster execution, higher ownership and zero emotional whiplash. Boundaries weren’t personal.   They were structural .   That difference changes everything. Why boundary collapse is so costly Its damage is not dramatic.   It’s cumulative.   People stop resting → you get presence, not energy.   People stop taking initiative → decisions freeze.   People stop trusting empowerment → autonomy becomes theatre.   People start anticipating the boss → performance becomes emotional labour.   People burn out silently → not from work, but from vigilance.   Boundary collapse doesn’t create chaos.   It creates hyper-alertness, the heaviest tax on any team. The real paradox Leaders think they’re being supportive. Teams experience supervision.   Leaders assume boundaries are obvious. Teams see boundaries as fluid. Leaders think autonomy is granted. Teams act as though autonomy can be revoked at any moment. This is the Boundary Collapse → a misunderstanding born not from intent, but from the invisible weight of power. Micromanagement today rarely looks like anger.   More often,   it looks like kindness without limits. (Rahul Kulkarni is Co-founder at PPS Consulting. He patterns the human mechanics of scaling where workplace behavior quietly shapes business outcomes. Views personal.)

Hell on Earth, Filmed on Earth: Revisiting ‘Sorcerer’

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By the mid-1970s, the audacious William Friedkin had already made two signature American films of the decade - The French Connection (1971) and The Exorcist (1973). The former pushed the envelope in the crime genre with its gritty urban realism, while the latter set a new standard for dread-etched occult menace.


With ‘Sorcerer’ (1977) Friedkin - a prominent knight of the ‘American New Wave’ of the 1970s (others included Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Hal Ashby) - pushed even further into the void. On its surface, ‘Sorcerer’ was a remake of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1953 classic ‘Le Salaire de la Peur’ (The Wages of Fear), itself an adaptation of Georges Arnaud’s novel.


But Friedkin’s version was to be rawer and more visceral, and a (criminally underrated) posthumous masterpiece in its own right. The film opens with four vignettes, detailing the violent underhand activities of the movie’s four ‘protagonists’ scattered across the globe - from Mexico to France to Jerusalem to New Jersey.


All four, who are on the lam from some outfit (police, government or mafia), end up marooned in a seedy and decrepit Latin American village, doomed to eternal damnation. It’s a globetrotting preamble worthy of Graham Greene.


When a nearby oil rig explodes, the American conglomerate that owns it needs to transport crates of nitroglycerine - unstable and ready to detonate at the slightest jolt - through 200 miles of treacherous jungle and perilous mountain roads. Our four desperate protagonists agree to take up this ultimate assignment from hell in order to secure the money with which they hope to escape their South American hellhole.


Beneath ‘Sorcerer’s’ blistering tension is an unflinching critique of capitalism’s cruelty. The film is saturated with the logic of exploitation as our anti-heroes are thrown into a jungle purgatory.


Friedkin, never a director to shy away from logistical madness, made sure the hell his protagonists endured, was real. There are action sequences in Sorcerer (filmed in the Dominican Republic) that defy logic and sanity. The most infamous involves the two trucks, named ‘Sorcerer’ and ‘Lazaro, crossing a rickety rope bridge in a torrential downpour.


In this jaw-dropping scene, the rusty trucks, weighed down with dynamite, sway perilously above the chasm, tires slipping on soaked wood as the wind lashes ropes and water crashes below. It is a scene of such excruciating tension that it borders on the surreal. No CGI, no safety net, no score - just rain, torque and the groan of collapsing faith.


Flushed with the success of his last two films, Friedkin had carte blanche on casting. Friedkin had hoped for Steve McQueen in the lead, alongside Marcello Mastroianni and Lino Ventura. When this dream cast collapsed, he finally cast Roy Scheider - the only big name in ‘Sorcerer.’


Fresh off the success of Jaws (1975), Scheider gives the most intense, haunted performance of his career in ‘Sorcerer.’ Tangerine Dream’s electronic score gives Sorcerer its otherworldly pulse, humming, throbbing, radiating dread. It lingers like a fever dream.


The most remarkable thing about ‘Sorcerer’ is how thoroughly it resists escapism. This is an adventure film where the adventure is a death march, where the destination is not salvation but obliteration. Even ‘Apocalypse Now’ (where Francis Ford Coppola nearly lost his sanity filming in the Philippines) with which Sorcerer shares a spiritual kinship, offers the catharsis of madness. Friedkin offers no such relief.


When ‘Sorcerer’ was finally released, it collided headfirst with ‘Star Wars.’ Audiences didn’t want grit. They wanted galaxies. Critics dismissed it. The title only added to the confusion. Was it a horror film? A fantasy?


The failure of Sorcerer at the box office sapped Friedkin creatively. Like Coppola, who barely survived the making of Apocalypse, Friedkin would never again scale the heights he reached in the 1970s.


But time has a way of rewarding the cursed. Today, Sorcerer is recognized as a criminally underrated masterpiece of the ‘American New Wave.’


For my money, it is Friedkin's finest work: a fevered portrait of men with no past and no future, grinding across a landscape that actively wants to kill them.


Watching it today feels like a message in a bottle from a vanished era of personal, risk-laden filmmaking. One where danger was not just part of the story - it was the story.

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