There is a version of this conversation that happens at every conference. Someone on a panel says it. Someone in the audience writes it down. "Get a seat at the table." It is delivered like advice, but it functions more like a destination on a map with no road attached to it. Arrive here. Figure out the rest yourself.
What the phrase does not capture is that being in the room where decisions are made — the kind of room where someone pauses before a vote and says, "What does communications think?" — is not a moment you arrive at. It is something built slowly, maintained carefully, and sometimes lost for reasons that have nothing to do with how good you are at the job.
That is not a reason to stop working toward it.
