Somewhere over the Mediterranean, at 35,000 feet, my boss handed me a stack of paper.

We were on our way to Athens for a business review. Xbox had recently swapped its charismatic, slightly feral General Manager for a trusted numbers man from Seattle, and rigour had arrived like a health inspector at a student house party. His first act was to build himself an office inside our open-plan office. He rarely came out of it.

I flicked through the pages he'd given us. Columns feeding columns. Weightings. Dotted lines. Targets that clearly fed other targets nobody had mentioned to me.

"Hey," I whispered to my closest colleague, Harry. "Do you understand this? It looks like the fucking Matrix."

Harry gave me a fearful stare back.

I meant it as a joke about a spreadsheet. It turned out to be an unusually accurate description of the next twenty years of my working life.

I spent around thirty years inside corporate structures, most of it in the matrix. Great salary. Great title. A pension trajectory that looked after itself. I told myself that was the job, and that the job was the life.

It wasn't.

The title was the golden handcuffs, and the matrix was the place where purpose went to hide behind alignment meetings, dotted-line reporting and priorities that changed faster than anyone could deliver against them. I mistook busy for valuable. For years.

So before I climb on any sort of horse here, let me be clear that I'm not describing someone else. Financial constraints, life choices and plain old fear kept me sitting in roles long after I'd stopped growing in them. When redundancy eventually arrived - twice inside eight years - my first instinct wasn't to rethink anything. It was to go and find the same job again somewhere else. That's how strong the pull is.

Here's the trap. Nobody sends you a leaving date for your corporate career. There's no meeting, no letter, no small ceremony with warm white wine. It ends quietly, and then you carry on going to work for another three years without noticing.

Here's how you spot it. And more importantly, what you do about it.

Job titles inflate long after the influence behind them has drained away. You keep the seniority. You lose the decisions. They get made two layers above you, and you find out in the same all-hands email as everyone else.

The tell isn't how many people report to you. It's how many people genuinely need your sign-off to proceed. If the honest answer is "none, but they're polite about it", the title is doing ceremonial work.

Your move: Write down the last decision you made entirely on your own. Look at the date. That date tells you more about your role than your last three performance reviews.

Ask most senior people what they do and you'll get a job title, a company name and a description of the department. Ask what they can do and it gets much quieter.

Skills, judgement and relationships are portable. Titles are not; they belong to the structure that issued them. If your professional identity is mostly made of things the company owns, you're renting your sense of self from your employer and calling it a career.

Your move: Draft a one-line bio with no job title and no company name in it. If you can't fill the line, that's not a personal failing. It's a signal, and you've just caught it early.

The matrix is superb at consuming time and calling it collaboration. Fourteen stakeholders, nine pre-meetings and a workshop to align on the alignment. Meanwhile the actual output for the quarter would fit on a postcard, with room for the stamp.

I'm not against alignment. I'm against confusing it with progress. When the calendar fills and the output flatlines, the organisation isn't using your judgement any more; it's using your availability.

Your move: Track one week of meetings against what genuinely moved. Not what got discussed. What moved. Then decide whether that ratio is one you can live with for another five years.

This is the uncomfortable one, so let's be adults about it. Money matters. Mortgages are real, school fees are real, and anyone who tells you to follow your passion off a cliff has usually got someone else paying their bills.

The question isn't whether the salary is keeping you there. It's whether the salary is the only thing keeping you there, and whether you've ever said that out loud. Fear does its best work in silence, unexamined and undisturbed.

Your move: Name the fear specifically, to yourself or to someone you trust. Not "I'm worried about the future". Try "I'm afraid that without this title, people will discover I'm ordinary." Say the real one. It shrinks considerably in daylight.

When I finally started describing myself by what I knew how to do rather than where I sat on an org chart, two things happened. The description got shorter, and it got far more convincing.

You rebuild this by testing it, not by thinking about it. Talk to people who have no idea what your internal grading system means and can't be impressed by it. Watch which parts of your story survive contact with someone who doesn't care about your company's promotion framework.

Your move: Have one conversation this week with someone entirely outside your org chart. Notice how differently you're forced to describe yourself when the shorthand doesn't work.

The worst time to build an exit is when you urgently need one. Options built from strength look like ambition. Options built from resentment look like a scramble, and everyone in the room can tell the difference.

This doesn't mean resigning on Friday. It means having something real outside the badge: a network you've actually maintained, a skill you've kept sharp, a side project, a reputation that exists beyond your internal directory. Then you choose the timing, rather than letting a reorganisation choose it for you.

Your move: Set a date by which you'll make a decision, write it in your own calendar, and hold yourself to it the way you'd hold a stakeholder to theirs.

This week

Do the strip test and the conversation. One-line bio, no title, no company. One conversation outside your structure. Both take under an hour, and between them you'll learn more about your market value than a year of internal feedback will give you.

This month

Run the time audit for one full week, then write down the three things you're genuinely known for. Not responsible for. Known for. Ask two people you trust whether that list matches what they'd say about you. Expect a surprise or two.

This quarter

Build one piece of your exit while you don't need it. Rebuild the CV properly, restart the relationships you let lapse, take the coffee with the recruiter you've been ignoring. Then set your decision date. Not a resignation date. A decision date. The difference matters enormously.

I was right about the scorecard, in the end. It really was the Matrix. What I didn't understand on that flight was that the structure it described was never going to be mine. It was on loan, and the lender could change its mind at any point, usually during a reorganisation announced on a Tuesday.

What doesn't get taken back is what you actually know how to do, and the value you deliver with it. The day I finally separated the two was the day I understood my corporate career was already over, whatever my badge still said.

If you've read this far and felt a small, unwelcome flicker of recognition, that's not a bad sign. That's early warning, and early warning is worth an enormous amount. Most people get theirs in a meeting invite marked "confidential" at 4pm on a Thursday.

Be kind to yourself out there. Noticing this takes more courage than ignoring it, and you're further along than you think.

Keep on rockin'

Harvey.