Infrastructure Management's emergency door opener, that require supervision, maintenance, and integration with everything else. It has twenty-four increasingly harried and sleep-deprived technical staff fighting to maintain digital life support to Zephyr's body, in between taking calls from senior executives who are sure they sent an e-mail to somebody last week but now the guy is saying he never got it. In this environment, less critical tasks, like simulating what would happen in the event of a PABX meltdown, have had to be postponed.
Less critical?
Less critical?
Senior Management hopes Information Technology is joking. The building shut down! What Senior Management wants to hear, right now, is that IT understands exactly what went wrong and can promise it will never happen again. You can say this for Senior Management: it knows how to articulate a goal. The strategy may be fuzzy, the execution nonexistent, but Senior Management knows what it wants.
IT does know what went wrong, down to the line number of the offending piece of code. It begins to explain several possible solutions. But these involve confusing phrases like “automatic fail-over switching,” and Senior Management gets irritable. It skips ahead to the logical conclusion: Information Technology is a bunch of idiots who locked the stairwells. They put the wheels in motion: IT will be outsourced by the end of the week.
Jones flips through
The Omega Management System
over a microwaved TV dinner. Jones lives in a four-floor walk-up with crumbling plaster walls and life-threatening wiring. Until quite recently, he did so with Tim and Emily, classmates from Washington U—Tim was an incredible cook and Emily incredible all over, as far as Jones was concerned. One night he confessed his feelings to her in the hallway outside the bathroom, and she said he was sweet and she liked him a lot but they couldn't; how unfair would that be to Tim? This was four months ago, and Jones began to focus, laser-like, on the end of his student days, which would likewise terminate their three-way living arrangement. The day of his final exam, he came home to find Tim and Emily waiting for him on the sofa, holding hands. “We didn't tell you sooner,” Tim said, “because we didn't think it would be fair on you.” Now Jones lives alone and eats microwaved dinners.
He flips to the section on retrenchment. A sacking, the book says, is one of the most harrowing and stressful events you may ever experience—Jones assumes “you” means the person being sacked until he realizes it's talking about the manager. According to the book, sackings can be highly destabilizing: workers stop thinking about doing their jobs and start thinking about whether they'll still have them. It then describes a range of strategies managers can use to harness that fear and uncertainty and jujitsu-throw it into a motivating factor.
What Jones doesn't find in the book—and he doesn't notice this at first; he has to flick back and forth—is any mention of the retrenched employees. How they might feel, for example, or what might happen to them afterward. It's kind of creepy. It's almost as if once they are sacked, they cease to exist.
Q3/3: SEPTEMBER
JONES ARRIVES to find Freddy loitering outside the glass lobby doors, smoking. “Hey, Freddy. How come no one smokes out here but you?”
Freddy shrugs. “I like it here. Most people go out the back, or the side. Sometimes I do, too.”
Jones peers in through the tinted glass. Neither Gretel nor Eve has arrived yet, but on Eve's desk is a towering stack of flowers. Jones looks at Freddy.
“What?”
“Are you sending the receptionist flowers?”
Freddy jumps. “Why do you say that?”
Jones snickers.
“What?”
“That's a yes. That's what guilty people say; they don't want to lie, so they say, ‘Why do you say that?'”
“I . . .” Freddy waits for a janitor, an older man with a shock of silver hair and blue overalls, to pass. Jones
Less critical?
Less critical?
Senior Management hopes Information Technology is joking. The building shut down! What Senior Management wants to hear, right now, is that IT understands exactly what went wrong and can promise it will never happen again. You can say this for Senior Management: it knows how to articulate a goal. The strategy may be fuzzy, the execution nonexistent, but Senior Management knows what it wants.
IT does know what went wrong, down to the line number of the offending piece of code. It begins to explain several possible solutions. But these involve confusing phrases like “automatic fail-over switching,” and Senior Management gets irritable. It skips ahead to the logical conclusion: Information Technology is a bunch of idiots who locked the stairwells. They put the wheels in motion: IT will be outsourced by the end of the week.
Jones flips through
The Omega Management System
over a microwaved TV dinner. Jones lives in a four-floor walk-up with crumbling plaster walls and life-threatening wiring. Until quite recently, he did so with Tim and Emily, classmates from Washington U—Tim was an incredible cook and Emily incredible all over, as far as Jones was concerned. One night he confessed his feelings to her in the hallway outside the bathroom, and she said he was sweet and she liked him a lot but they couldn't; how unfair would that be to Tim? This was four months ago, and Jones began to focus, laser-like, on the end of his student days, which would likewise terminate their three-way living arrangement. The day of his final exam, he came home to find Tim and Emily waiting for him on the sofa, holding hands. “We didn't tell you sooner,” Tim said, “because we didn't think it would be fair on you.” Now Jones lives alone and eats microwaved dinners.
He flips to the section on retrenchment. A sacking, the book says, is one of the most harrowing and stressful events you may ever experience—Jones assumes “you” means the person being sacked until he realizes it's talking about the manager. According to the book, sackings can be highly destabilizing: workers stop thinking about doing their jobs and start thinking about whether they'll still have them. It then describes a range of strategies managers can use to harness that fear and uncertainty and jujitsu-throw it into a motivating factor.
What Jones doesn't find in the book—and he doesn't notice this at first; he has to flick back and forth—is any mention of the retrenched employees. How they might feel, for example, or what might happen to them afterward. It's kind of creepy. It's almost as if once they are sacked, they cease to exist.
Q3/3: SEPTEMBER
JONES ARRIVES to find Freddy loitering outside the glass lobby doors, smoking. “Hey, Freddy. How come no one smokes out here but you?”
Freddy shrugs. “I like it here. Most people go out the back, or the side. Sometimes I do, too.”
Jones peers in through the tinted glass. Neither Gretel nor Eve has arrived yet, but on Eve's desk is a towering stack of flowers. Jones looks at Freddy.
“What?”
“Are you sending the receptionist flowers?”
Freddy jumps. “Why do you say that?”
Jones snickers.
“What?”
“That's a yes. That's what guilty people say; they don't want to lie, so they say, ‘Why do you say that?'”
“I . . .” Freddy waits for a janitor, an older man with a shock of silver hair and blue overalls, to pass. Jones
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