Success Quote by Doug Coupland

Coupland’s marching-band metaphor flatters corporate bloat even as it skewers it. A marching band is designed to overwhelm: volume, repetition, and synchronized movement can turn a messy interior into a coherent exterior. That’s the joke and the indictment. In a big company, scale doesn’t just absorb mistakes; it aestheticizes them. Noise becomes “kind of like music” because the institution’s sheer momentum supplies a default rhythm that covers for off-key performance.

The line “concealment of failure is built into them” is the real knife. Coupland isn’t claiming individual incompetence so much as describing an architecture: layered management, compartmentalized work, and diffuse accountability create a system where errors can be routed around, rebranded, or diluted until they read as harmless variance. The marching band keeps moving; the audience hears the beat and assumes competence. Inside, half the players might be lost, but the formation carries them.

Contextually, this lands in Coupland’s long-running fixation on late-capitalist surfaces: branded narratives, corporate optimism, the curated vibe of “everything’s fine.” It’s workplace sociology rendered as pop observation, the kind that hits because it names something people feel but rarely articulate: big organizations don’t just tolerate failure, they metabolize it. They turn it into process, into plausible deniability, into a forward march where the point is not perfection but continuity.