A Case of Strange Alliances

It began in the mid-1980s; it was like the “invasion of the body snatchers.” They infiltrated the bureaucracies: city, state, and federal as well as private corporations, like Enron. Under the guise of people qualified to make organizations more efficient and effective, these acronym-spewing suits set about dismantling the infrastructure of our society. They used words like reengineering; they very slyly changed reward systems to force workers to comply with their agenda. The compliant ones were transformed into acronym-spewing robots. Those who resisted were considered to be “not a team player” and were sidelined, eventually to be removed from their positions. I was there; I watched and wondered what on earth these people were up to. I would tell them that certain procedures existed to ensure internal control. Redundancies, redundancies, the head would shout at me. Well, I would calmly say, don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. This novel was cooked in the cauldron of chaos that simmered, boiled, and burned during a twenty-year period in which our institutions were gutted. It is my imagination of what is possible under such conditions. When the bottom fell out of our economy in 2008, I expected it; I’d seen these people create an environment in which this could occur. I’m a certified organizational development specialist. I have the traditional training—BA in public administration, MS in human resource management—as well as the nontraditional training, landmark education.