VELOCITY - DEE JACOB [6]
Within months B. Don was gone, retired. He and his wife, Daisy, soon booked a year-long world cruise and sailed off from Miami into the sunrise.
Taking B. Don’s place was a man said to be one of Winner’s up-and-comers, a man on the fast track to the top: Randal Tourandos, more colorfully known behind his back as Random Tornado. Indeed, he was a whirling dervish of managerial energy, often arriving at Hi-T’s downtown Highboro offices at four thirty in the morning to review in detail the metrics from the previous day, which had been prepared by his own dedicated IT squad – soon unofficially called the Microbursts – who worked in shifts to compile the latest data for him. Before long, it became common for Amy and everyone else to arrive at work to find as many as five or six emails demanding immediate attention to whatever the Tornado had happened to notice in the metrics that morning. Even worse was to walk in and find one of Randal’s outsize Post-it notes adhered to the seat of one’s chair, the messages almost unreadable in Randal’s speed-written scrawl. But if you got one, all other responsibilities had to be postponed until you had addressed the Tornado’s concerns – and correctly discerning what those were was often the biggest challenge.
Key to everything, as far as Randal was concerned, was WING3.2 – or Winner Information Network, Generation 3.2 – sometimes just called “WING.” This network was used throughout the corporation, and it had software designed to monitor every function in every business unit at a level of detail that was mind-boggling. Well, it was mind-boggling to many, but not to the Tornado, who was a computer whiz. In fact, as Randal himself was proud to tell everyone, he had been one of the software engineers on WING1.0, the first generation of the network. He had written some of the original code back in the day. And he still tinkered with it, adding or refining drill-down techniques and data-comparison features whenever the network was not doing something he thought it ought to do. He boasted that WING3.2 could tell you how many boxes of paper clips and pens were supposed to be in the supply closet at any location, based on purchases and estimated consumption rates. Future generations of WING, he claimed, would add what he termed “robust artificial intelligence” with queries and alerts to individual workers regarding what each one was supposed to be doing at any given moment. Amy Cieolara found it all to be rather Orwellian, but Randal was the boss and there was nothing she could do except go along.
Although full implementation of WING would take years, Randal and his IT techies, with the help of platoons of consultants, was able to get an essential implementation up and running in a matter of months. Almost as soon as it was in place, the Tornado began making his moves.
He started by mandating a 10 percent across-the-board staff cut in all functions, no exceptions. Amy almost lost Linda, who was one of the higher-paid assistants, but was able to save her in the end by firing two other assistants who were caught stealing laptops and toner cartridges. Even with such a legitimate excuse for termination, the whole process was exceedingly painful – for everyone.
Next, the Tornado closed and sold off what he called a “job shop” in northern Virginia that did small-lot and single-piece custom work, mostly for Hi-T’s Formulation & Design unit, which was based in Rockville, Maryland. He consolidated all production at the Oakton plant, located about twenty miles outside Highboro. He then introduced incentive pay at Oakton – over the protests of plant manager Murphy Maguire – in order to increase productivity. And there were a multitude of new policies and work rules, such as the directive that each and every function at Oakton would only process its work in the batch sizes that WING had calculated to be economically optimum.
Then there were the rather screwy and mean-spirited new policies upon which he insisted. For instance, he banned all coffeemakers from company offices and got rid of the little