The Homogenization Tax

No one wants to know how the sausage is made...unless they start noticing that every sausage tastes exactly the same.

A decade ago, the community college I worked for tried booking a popular author for an employee conference. It was someone with a viral TED talk and a New York Times bestseller under their belt. Their agent suggested that we book their assistant, someone who helped research the book instead, at a staggering price of $80,000.

Most people don’t know that there's an entire business built around manufacturing speakers according to a formula. Aspiring keynote presenters pay tens of thousands for training that teaches them to reformat their ideas into a standard template: introduction, three main points with supporting anecdotes, conclusion. Essentially, the standard high school five-paragraph essay reformatted into corporate presentations. They get filmed in empty hotel ballrooms to create promotional videos that suggest they're captivating packed audiences. They receive generic websites and some light coaching. Suddenly, they're commanding five or six figures per talk.

The formula works because it's been optimized. Event planners know what they're getting. Speakers’ agencies get their cut. HR departments can justify the expense. The talks are polished, safely inspiring, and utterly interchangeable.

And that's exactly the problem.

This isn't unique to corporate speaking. The pattern repeats across industries. Most bestselling business and self-help books rely on ghostwriters who know the formula: personal struggle, breakthrough insight, actionable framework, success stories. Hit songs increasingly sound alike because they're crafted by the same small group of producers using proven chord progressions and song structures. Even in tech and pharmaceuticals, companies will buy each other out in order to absorb new breakthroughs rather than investing into new inventions themselves. It prevents disruption.

The market logic is simple: formulas reduce risk. Why take a chance on an unconventional voice when you can hire someone who's been trained to deliver exactly what's expected?

But what we lose in return are the ideas that don't fit the template. The talk that makes you uncomfortable before it makes you think.

Creativity isn't just about having novel ideas. It's also about having the freedom to express them in ways that haven't been focus-grouped and optimized. When everything is built to industry specifications designed for maximum palatability and minimum risk, we don't get creativity. We get variations on a theme.

We pay for this standardization in ways that don't show up on an invoice. We sit through conferences where every speaker has the same cadence, the same three-act structure, the same reassuring message that change is possible if you just follow these steps. We read books that could have been articles because they've been stretched to fit the expected length. We listen to music engineered to trigger the same dopamine response in the most predictable way possible (yes, there is a formulaic length and emotional arc). These days, many Broadway musicals are simply remixes of existing pop music. And have you ever tried looking for something to do on New Year’s Eve that doesn’t revolve around an open bar and dancing to cover songs or bland DJ beats?

We also pay through the loss of diverse thoughts, approach, and expression. When there's one proven path to success, everyone walks it. The voices that don't fit the mold either adapt or don't get heard. The ideas that need more than three points or a different structure entirely get simplified into something more marketable.

The cruel irony is that audiences often know something is missing. We sense the sameness even if we can't articulate it. We scroll past the generic, hunger for something that feels real, and yet the system keeps producing more of what we’re told works.

Sometimes we don't want the mass-produced version. Sometimes we want something made with care by someone who actually has something to say, even if they don't say it perfectly. Someone who breaks the formula because their idea demands it. Someone who risks being too weird, too specific, too unconventional.

The question isn't whether professional development or polish has value (it does). The question is whether we've let the optimization of creativity become the death of it. Whether we've become so focused on replicating success that we've forgotten to make room for the genuinely new.

Maybe it's time to care less about how polished the sausage is and more about whether it actually tastes like anything at all.