Company - Max Barry [74]
“Damn it.”
“Maybe you should just quit.”
“Then they'd hire somebody else to do my job. I need to find a way to force Alpha to make Zephyr better.”
“Well,” Penny says finally, “good luck with that.”
From the living room: “Do you two need any help in there?”
“No, Mom,” Jones calls. He scrapes off his dinner plate.
Penny says, “How much of this are we telling Mom and Dad?”
“Um,” Jones says. “Tell them I got some new suits.”
According to The Omega Management System, every corporate reorganization goes through three stages. Stage one is Planning: a giddy, euphoric state Senior Management enters as it contemplates how much stronger the company could be with a strategic realigning of its business units; also, by odd coincidence, how much more responsibility each member of Senior Management would gain. It's an exhilarating time, but only for Senior Management; for everyone else, it's often hard to see how the benefits promised by this reorganization are different from the benefits promised by the last reorganization, nine months ago.
Next comes Implementation, which is like musical chairs with exit interviews: chaos reigns and all anyone cares about is where they're going to sit. It is a mix of triumph and tragedy for the workers—triumph for the employee who has moved far away from a hated co-worker, tragedy for he whose computer screen is now visible to anyone entering the department—but a dark period of disillusionment for Senior Management, because now their pristine visions run aground on the rocks of reality. Their inverted paradigms tear open, spilling regular, right-way-up paradigms; their lateral thinking is longitudinalized and put back in the box. They dreamed of one cohesive superdepartment; now they have three ex-departments forced to sit together fighting a civil war. Why can't people just get along? Senior Management wonders. It is heartrending.
Last is what The Omega Management System officially calls Realignment but is privately referred to by Project Alpha agents as “Evacuation.” This is when all the employees who are unhappy with their new role polish their résumés and start trying to find a better job somewhere else. If they're successful, they leave; otherwise they stay, along with those who were close enough to Senior Management to be tossed a political scrap. In essence, the company is quickly reduced to the incompetent and the corrupt. But it will struggle forward, laboring for as long as possible under the illusion that it is suffering from mere teething issues and not a deep, systemic sodomy of the entire corporate structure, until that becomes impossible and Senior Management does the only thing it can: announce a reorganization.
Alpha dreams of a future without reorganizations. Not that it has anything against them per se: on the contrary, it recognizes that business conditions change and businesses must react. Alpha's objection is that they don't change every fourteen months, which is the Fortune 500 average time between restructures. The typical reorganization, Alpha has found, costs three weeks of productivity, and 82 percent deliver no measurable benefit. That is, rather than reorganizing, a company could give every employee a couple of weeks' bonus vacation and still come out ahead. Or, more to the point, it could not give employees an extra vacation, and make more money.
The chief problem, Alpha suspects, is that reorganizations are fun. For Senior Management, that is; obviously not for anybody else. Given the choice between investigating why half a percent of revenue is being lost to inefficient inventory control and sketching out a bold new vision of the company's future structure, Senior Management invariably plumps for the latter. If Senior Management captained a ship, it would take twice as long to reach its destination and have been completely rebuilt en route. Alpha has nothing against vision, but it wishes Senior Management would keep its hands on the helm and stop dicking around with the architecture.
Until that day arrives, though, Alpha aims