The Social Animal

CHAPTER 14 THE GRAND NARRATIVE

AS ERICA’S CAREER GREW BRIGHTER, HER HOUSE GOT DARKER. She and Harold had started their consulting firm when they were both twenty-eight. For the next few years everything went great. They racked up clients. They hired new people—eighteen in all. They bought new phones and nice printers. Their time was consumed by consulting projects—during the day, at night, and on weekends. Occasionally they would carve out time for vacations, for friends and even dinner dates alone. But there was never time for chores around the house they bought. Everything began to fray at the edges. If a lightbulb burned out, it would stay in the socket for months while Erica and Harold learned to navigate their way in the dark. The cable went out in their downstairs TV, but neither had time to call the cable company and take care of it. Windows cracked. Gutters filled with leaves. Stains lodged in carpets. They adapted to each peripheral dysfunction, content to trade professional achievement for domestic decay.

After about four years, though, the company began to fall apart. A recession hit. Physically, nothing changed. The buildings and the people were all there. But the psychology was different. One moment everyone talked heroically about embracing risk, the next they were terrified. Consulting contracts, which had seemed essential for long-term growth, were now perceived as useless luxuries. Companies slashed them back.

Dozens of friends disappeared from Erica’s life. These were clients she’d played tennis with, gone on trips with, invited into her home. They worked at companies she advised, and the bonds of trust and camaraderie between them were real.

But when the contracts were cut, the relationships dissolved. Erica noticed her witty sarcastic e-mails no longer generated responses. Calls went unreturned. It wasn’t that people stopped liking her. They just didn’t want to hurt her. They were cutting off her contract, and they didn’t want to cause her pain by telling her, so they just withdrew. Erica began to recognize the dishonesty of niceness. The desire to not cause pain was just an unwillingness to have an unpleasant conversation. It was cowardice, not consideration.

The office grew quiet. It was hard in turn for Erica’s staff to see her helpless in this way. She couldn’t show fear, but they all felt it within her. “Nothing is over until it’s over,” she would tell them, calm and focused. But the money was not coming in. The banks were unhappy. Lines of credit dried up. She was paying employees off her credit card, and begging new clients for work.

Finally, the biggest contract disappeared. She called the CEO asking for a renewal. It was hard to hear her vulnerable like that, her life’s work resting on one call. And the CEO lied to her nicely like the others had. It was just a blip in the relationship, he said. They’d be back in a year or so, blah, blah, blah. She couldn’t tell him that, without his contract, her company wouldn’t last a week. It was the death sentence, and yet as she hung up the phone she found she wasn’t shaking. She wasn’t hyperventilating. “So this is what it feels like to fail,” she thought. The emotional impact came only an hour or so later. She retreated to the ladies’ room, heaving with sobs. She wanted to go home and crawl into bed.

At the end of the week, she gathered her staff. They sat around the conference room, trading gallows humor. Erica looked across at them, the individuals who would soon be unemployed. There was Tom, who carried a laptop at all times and typed every significant thing he heard into a file. There was Bing, who was so mentally hyperactive she could only get through half a sentence before she started on the next one. There was Elsie, who had no confidence in herself; Alison, who platonically shared a bed with her roommate to save money; and Emilio, who kept antacid pills in a row atop his computer. People were stranger than you could imagine.

In moments of crisis she became eerily calm. She announced that she had no choice but to close the firm. Gone. Belly-up. She told them the national economy had gone wrong and it was nobody’s fault, but then she spoke too long and her mind naturally started rehearsing things she might have done differently. There was something inside her that had trouble with the concept of “nobody’s fault.” It wanted to assign some concrete blame, justified or not. Then she started giving the old entrepreneur’s mantra that there is no such thing as failure. Failure is just a step in the process of learning. Nobody was comforted.

For a few weeks after that, there was still stuff to do. Sell the office supplies. Write letters. But then there was nothing. Erica was shocked at how disorienting this was. All her life she had worked. Suddenly she lived in a pathless universe.

She had thought she might actually like a little tranquility. But it was terrible. “There is no craving or demand of the human mind more constant and insatiable than that for exercise and employment,” the Scottish philosopher David Hume wrote, “and this desire seems the foundation of most of our passions and pursuits.”

Her thoughts began to disintegrate. After a few weeks, she had trouble organizing an argument or composing a memo. She was exhausted all the time, though she never actually did anything. She longed for some difficulty to overcome.

Eventually, she began to scaffold her days. She had long been a member of a gym, but barely went as she struggled to save her firm. Now she worked out feverishly. She dressed each morning and went to Starbucks, where she sat with her briefcase, phone, and laptop. Going out among the employed was tough—like being a sick person in the land of the healthy, an internal exile. She watched the great mass of coffee sippers trudging thoughtlessly back to their offices. They had obligations; she didn’t. She rotated between different Starbucks so it wouldn’t be so obvious she had no place else to go.

In an essay for The Atlantic, Don Peck summarized the research findings on the psychological costs of unemployment. People who suffer long-term bouts of unemployment are much more likely to suffer depression, even years later. For the rest of their lives, they cling more tightly to jobs, and become more risk averse. They are much more likely to become alcoholics and beat their spouses. Their physical health deteriorates. People who lose jobs at thirty have life spans a year and a half shorter than people who never lost a job. Long-term unemployment, some researchers have found, is the psychic equivalent to the death of a spouse.

Erica’s relationship with Harold suffered. Growing up as he had, Harold assumed that your worth depends on who you are. Erica assumed that your worth depends on what you do. Harold always had these random interests he was happy to throw himself into. He spent the first few weeks reading. Erica needed the upward climb, the mission. Harold was willing to take any job that seemed interesting, and before long he got a job as a program officer for a historical society. Erica needed a job that would set her once again on the path to dominance. She’d sit in Starbucks, calling her old contacts, looking for an opening at the vice-president level or above. The calls were almost never returned, and soon her expectations slipped. She began thinking about entrepreneurial opportunities. She could open a smoothie franchise, a Mongolian grill, a nanny agency, a spicy-pickle supplier. She could start a company of pet butlers. These were not exactly the career paths she had ever considered before.

After a few months, a friend told her that Intercom, the cable company, was looking for somebody to help with strategic planning. She had always hated that company. The service was awful, the repairmen were ill-trained, the customer support was slow, the CEO was famously narcissistic. Of course none of that mattered now. She applied.

The interviewer kept her waiting and then greeted her with a condescending amiability. “We have the smartest people on earth working here,” he told her. “It’s a pleasure coming to work each day. It’s like The Best and the Brightest.”

Erica wondered if this guy had missed the Vietnam parts of that book.

Of course he started talking about himself. “I owe it to myself to live up to the highest standards. I owe it to myself to provide legendary excellence.” This phrase was apparently a buzzword that had been circling around in the company propaganda. As the session went on, he turned into a little jargon machine. “At the end of the day, we try not to boil the ocean but just look for the best win-wins,” he told her. Apparently people at this company were always drilling down and disintermediating the dialogue. They were driving maximum functionality, with end-to-end mission-critical competence to incent high-level blue-ocean change.

Erica sat there with a smile pasted on her face. She appeared eager and supplicating. She debased herself. When he asked her what she wanted to do at the company, she slipped into the argot and threw it all back at him. She would save self-loathing for after she got the job.

He said he would call in a week, but it took two. She had her phone on vibrate the whole time, and every little tingle, real or imagined, sent her grabbing for the thing. The call finally came. Follow-up interviews were arranged and after another month or so she was an employee once again. She had a nice office. She began going to meetings and found herself surrounded by the lords of self-esteem.

Overconfidence

The human mind is an overconfidence machine. The conscious level gives itself credit for things it really didn’t do and confabulates tales to create the illusion it controls things it really doesn’t determine. Ninety percent of drivers believe they are above average behind the wheel. Ninety-four percent of college professors think they are above-average teachers. Ninety percent of entrepreneurs think that their new business will be a success. Ninety-eight percent of students who take the SAT say they have average or above-average leadership skills.

College students vastly overestimate their chances of getting a high-paying job, traveling abroad, and staying married when they reach adulthood. When shopping for clothes, middle-aged people generally choose clothes that are too tight on the grounds that they’re about to lose a few pounds, even though the vast majority of people in their age bracket get wider year by year. Golfers on the PGA tour estimate that 70 percent of their six-foot putts drop in the hole, when in reality 54 percent of the putts from that distance actually make it in.

This overconfidence comes in many varieties. People overestimate their ability to control their unconscious tendencies. They buy health-club memberships but then are unable to work up the willpower to go. People overestimate how well they understand themselves. Half of all students at Penn State said they would make a stink if somebody made a sexist comment in their presence. When researchers arranged for it to actually happen, only 16 percent actually said anything.

People overestimate what they know. Paul J. H. Schoemaker and J. Edward Russo gave executives questionnaires to measure how much they knew about their industries. Managers in the advertising industry gave answers that they were 90 percent confident were correct. In fact, their answers were wrong 61 percent of the time. People in the computer industry gave answers they thought had a 95 percent chance of being right; in fact, 80 percent of them were wrong. Russo and Schoemaker gave their tests to more than two thousand people and 99 percent overestimated their success.

People not only overestimate what they know, they overestimate what they can know. Certain spheres of life, like the stock market, are too complex and too random to be able to predict near-term events with any certainty. This seems to have no effect on actual behavior, as the entire stock-picking industry demonstrates. Brad Barber and Terrance Odean analyzed over sixty-six thousand trades from discount broker accounts. The traders who were the most confident did the most trades and underperformed the overall market.

People get intoxicated by their own good luck. Andrew Lo of MIT has demonstrated that when stock traders experience a series of good days, the dopamine released into their brains creates a surge of overconfidence. They believe they’ve achieved this good fortune themselves; they have figured out the market. They become blind to downside risk.

People overestimate their ability to understand why they are making certain decisions. They make up stories to explain their own actions, even when they have no clue about what is happening inside. After they’ve made a decision, they lie to themselves about why they made the decision and about whether it was the right one in the circumstances. Daniel Gilbert of Harvard argues that we have a psychological immune system that exaggerates information that confirms our good qualities and ignores information that casts doubt upon them. In one study, people who were told they had just performed poorly on an IQ test spent a lot more time reading newspaper articles on the shortcomings of IQ tests. People who had been given a glowing report from a supervisor developed an increased interest in reading reports about how smart and sagacious that supervisor was.

And the telling thing is that self-confidence has very little to do with actual competence. A great body of research finds that incompetent people exaggerate their own abilities more grossly than their better-performing peers. One study found that those who scored in the bottom quartile on tests of logic, grammar, and humor were especially likely to overestimate their abilities. Many people are not only incompetent, they are in denial about how incompetent they are.

So it is fair to say that human beings are generally overconfident. But Erica’s colleagues at Intercom not only rode the steed of arrogance, they took it out for a parade. The CEO, Blythe Taggert, never met an organization he didn’t want to transform. When he came to the company he declared war on entrenched bureaucracy and “old thinking.” The result was that his revolutionary fervor sometimes turned into a contempt for experienced managers and time-tested practices. He issued middle-of-the-night memos, often composed off the top of his head, which caused chaos in department after department. He was guided by aphorisms and rules that sounded good in speeches but often had nothing to do with real-life situations. He’d impatiently sit through presentations that had taken weeks to prepare, then he’d absentmindedly observe, “These ideas don’t really bite me in the ass,” and he’d stroll out while his acolytes laughed.

He was so eager to be seen as a heroic innovator, he led the company through a series of acquisitions into markets and niches nobody really understood. The company became too big to manage, and in his quest for the latest and most cutting-edge techniques, he tolerated accounting practices and organizational charts that were too complex to fathom.

He spoke first at every meeting. He had such definite views that few were willing to challenge or question him after he was done. The senior management team, meanwhile, encouraged this diversification into new sectors. The theory seemed to be that by spreading into many markets with many products it would be possible to diversify risks. The reality was that the more sectors they entered, the less they knew about any one of them. This strategy empowered executives who did deals and marginalized executives who had spent their lives in a specific market and had concrete knowledge of how it worked.

The company spent more time managing its structure than improving its products. Hoping to find a single measure that could be used to compare results across a wide variety of product lines, managers devised pseudo-objective success criteria. These success metrics had only tangential relationships to long-term growth. Managers spent more time trying to figure out how they could game the metrics than in actually producing sustainable results.

The finance and accounting departments, with the CEO’s approval, became enamored of arcane risk-management devices that seemed brilliant to the very few who claimed to understand them, but which muddied risk analysis in real life. Erica noticed that nobody colored in the future in the PowerPoint charts. At every other company, past data was shown on a white background and future projections were distinguished with a yellow background or a dotted line. These folks, the team of assholes, were so confident of their predictive abilities they didn’t bother. They were embedded in a macho culture in which admitting they didn’t know something was not an option.

The odd thing was that as the company got more diverse the executives became more conformist. There were people in many different sectors in offices spread throughout the world. You’d think this configuration would yield a range of viewpoints and expectations that would balance each other out. But time and time again, instant communications and instant judgments based on those communications created a herd mentality and an astonishing culture of intellectual homogeneity. Time and time again, people made the same one-way bets at the same time. Maybe this is what happens when a whole company (or a whole global economy) lives off its BlackBerries and makes decisions at the speed of electrons.

While all this was happening, the chairman and the CEO were making ever more lavish claims about the company’s success. During the conference calls, the sales meetings, and the self-congratulatory corporate retreats, there would be one grandiose boast after another—that this was the greatest corporation in America, that this was the most innovative company in the world.

The most frustrating thing of all was that, in meeting after meeting, Erica had nothing to add. It’s not that she didn’t see huge problems in the company. There were big hairy monsters everywhere you looked. It’s just that the mode of analysis was a closed language. Erica had her own way of looking at things and her own vocabulary, which emphasized culture, social life, and psychology. All of her new colleagues had a different way of seeing, based on amassing huge piles of data and then devising formulas and building systems. The two modes seemed non-overlapping.

Maybe it was in B-School, maybe it was somewhere else, but the team of assholes had been trained in certain methodologies. They had been trained to turn management into a science. They didn’t really grow up steeped in the features of a specific product. They were trained to study organizations. Some did Dynamic Systems Theory, some did Six Sigma Analysis, or the Taguchi Method or Su-Field Analysis (structural-substance field analysis). There was TRIZ, a Russian-made model-based technology for producing creativity. There was Business Process Reengineering. Erica looked this one up on Wikipedia. According to one of the management books quoted on the site, BPR “escalates the efforts of JIT [Just In Time] and TQM [Total Quality Management] to make process orientation a strategic tool and a core competence of the organization. BPR concentrates on core business processes, and uses specific techniques within the JIT and TQM ‘toolboxes’ as enablers, while broadening the process vision.”

Erica read sentences like that, or heard them at meetings, and she just had no clue how they applied to the problems at hand. The sounds just sort of bounced off her brain. The people who uttered them seemed to value precision and clarity. They sought to be scientific. But the jargon just seemed to float in the air.

The Rationalist Version

Of course these management whizzes did not come into being by accident. John Maynard Keynes famously wrote that “practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” The people Erica now worked with were the slaves of a long philosophic tradition. This tradition, rationalism, tells the story of human history as the story of the progress of the logical, conscious mind. It sees human history as a contest between reason, the highest human faculty, and passion and instinct, our animal natures. In the upbeat version of this story, reason gradually triumphs over emotion. Science gradually replaces myth. Logic wins out over passion.

This historical narrative usually begins in ancient Greece. Plato believed the soul was divided into three parts: reason, spirit, and appetite. Reason seeks truth and wants the best for the whole person. Spirit seeks recognition and glory. Appetite seeks base pleasures. For Plato, reason is like a charioteer who must master his two wild and ill-matched horses. “If the better elements of the mind which lead to order and philosophy prevail,” Plato wrote, “then we can lead a life here in happiness and harmony, masters of ourselves.”

In classical Greece and Rome, according to this narrative, the party of reason made great strides. But after the fall of Rome, the passions reasserted themselves. Europe fell into the Dark Ages. Education suffered, science lay dormant, superstition flourished. Things began to pick up again during the Renaissance with the developments in science and accounting. Then, during the seventeenth century, scientists and technologists created new forms of machinery and new ways to think about society. Great investigators began to dissect and understand their world. The metaphor, “the world is a machine,” began to replace the metaphor, “the world is a living organism.” Society was often seen as a clock with millions of moving pieces, and God was the Divine Clockmaker, the author of an exquisitely rational universe.

Great figures like Francis Bacon and René Descartes helped create a different way of thinking—the scientific method. Descartes aimed to begin human understanding anew. He would start from scratch and work logically and consciously through every proposition to see, step by step, what was true and certain. He would rebuild human understanding on a logical foundation. In this scientific age, the mind could not, Bacon urged, be “left to take its own course, but guided at every step.” What was needed was a “sure plan” and a new reliable methodology.

In this new mode of thought, the philosopher and scientist must begin by purging his mind of prejudice, habit, and prior belief. He must establish a cool, dispassionate distance from the subject of his inquiry. Problems must be broken down into their discrete parts. He must proceed consciously and methodically, beginning with the simplest element of the problem and then proceeding step by step toward the complex. He must develop a scientific language that will avoid the vagueness and confusion of ordinary language. The aim of the whole method is to arrive at certain lawlike generalizations about human behavior—to arrive at certainty and truth.

The scientific method brought rigor to where there had once been guesswork and intuition. In the realm of physics, chemistry, biology, and the other natural sciences, the results were awesome to behold.

Inevitably, rationalist techniques were applied to the science of organizing society, so that progress in the social realm could be as impressive as progress in the scientific one. The philosophies of the French Enlightenment compiled a great encyclopedia, trying to organize all human knowledge in one reference book. As Dumarsais declared in the encyclopedia, “Reason is to the philosopher what grace is to the Christian. Grace moves the Christian to act, reason moves the philosopher.”

As the centuries passed, social scientists tried to create a science of human nature. They worked to create models that would enable them to predict and mold human activity. Political scientists, international-relations professors, and others developed complex models. Management consultants conducted experiments to better understand the science of corporate leadership. Politics became organized around abstract ideologies, grand systems that connect everything into one logically consistent set of beliefs.

This rationalist mode of thought is omnipresent and seems natural and inevitable. The rationalist tradition proved seductive. It promised certainty, to relieve people of the anxiety caused by fuzziness and doubt. People’s perceptions about human nature seem to be influenced by the dominant technology of their time. In the mechanical and then the industrial age, it was easy to see people as mechanisms and the science of human understanding as something akin to engineering or physics.

Rationalism gained enormous prestige during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But it does contain certain limitations and biases. This mode of thought is reductionist; it breaks problems into discrete parts and is blind to emergent systems. This mode, as Guy Claxton observes in his book The Wayward Mind, values explanation over observation. More time is spent solving the problem than taking in the scene. It is purposeful rather than playful. It values the sort of knowledge that can be put into words and numbers over the sort of knowledge that cannot. It seeks rules and principles that can be applied across contexts, and undervalues the importance of specific contexts.

Moreover, the rationalist method was founded upon a series of assumptions. It assumes that social scientists can look at society objectively from the outside, purged of passions and unconscious biases.

It assumes that reasoning can be fully or at least mostly under conscious control.

It assumes that reason is more powerful than and separable from emotion and appetite.

It assumes that perception is a clear lens, giving the viewer a straightforward and reliable view of the world.

It assumes that human action conforms to laws that are akin to the laws of physics, if we can only understand what they are. A company, a society, a nation, a universe—these are all great machines, operated through immutable patterns of cause and effect. Natural sciences are the model that the behavioral sciences should replicate.

Eventually, rationalism produced its own form of extremism. The scientific revolution led to scientism. Irving Kristol defined scientism as the “elephantiasis of reason.” Scientism is taking the principles of rational inquiry, stretching them without limit, and excluding any factor that doesn’t fit the formulas.

Over the past centuries, many great errors and disasters have flowed from the excessive faith in pure reason. At the end of the eighteenth century, revolutionaries in France brutalized the society in the name of beginning the world anew on rational grounds. Social Darwinists imagined they had discovered the immutable laws of human evolution, which could be used to ensure the survival of the fittest. Corporate leaders under the influence of Frederick Taylor tried to turn factory workers into hyper-efficient cogs. In the twentieth century, communists tried to socially reengineer whole nations, attempting to create, for example, a New Soviet Man. In the West, Le Corbusier and a generation of urban planners sought to turn cities into rational machines—factories for traffic—by clearing away existing neighborhoods and replacing them with multilane highways and symmetrical housing projects cut off from the older city. Technocrats from affluent nations tried to plant large-scale development schemes across the developing world without much concern for the local context. Financial analysts at the big banks and the central banks thought they had mastered economic cycles and created a “Great Moderation.”

In short, the rationalism method has yielded many great discoveries, but when it is used to explain or organize the human world, it does have one core limitation. It highly values conscious cognition—what you might call Level 2 cognition—which it can see, quantify, formalize, and understand. But it is blind to the influence of unconscious—what you might call Level 1 cognition—which is cloudlike, nonlinear, hard to see, and impossible to formalize. Rationalists have a tendency to lop off or diminish all information that is not calculable according to their methodologies.

Lionel Trilling diagnosed the problem in The Liberal Imagination when he noted that so long as politics or commerce “moves toward organization, it tends to select the emotions and qualities that are most susceptible to organization. As it carries out its active and positive ends it unconsciously limits its view of the world to what it can deal with, and unconsciously tends to develop theories and principles, particularly in relation to the nature of the human mind, that justify its limitation.” As a result, “it drifts toward a denial of the emotions and the imagination. And in the very interest of affirming its confidence in the power of the mind, it inclines to constrict and make mechanical its conception of the mind.”

Rationalism looks at the conscious mind, and assumes that that is all there is. It cannot acknowledge the importance of unconscious processes, because once it dips its foot in that dark and bottomless current, all hope of regularity and predictability is gone. Rationalists gain prestige and authority because they have supposedly mastered the science of human behavior. Once the science goes, all their prestige goes with it.

This scientism has expressed itself most powerfully, over the last fifty years, in the field of economics. Economics did not start out as a purely rationalist enterprise. Adam Smith believed that human beings are driven by moral sentiments and their desire to seek and be worthy of the admiration of others. Thorstein Veblen, Joseph Schumpeter, and Friedrich Hayek expressed themselves through words not formulas. They stressed that economic activity was conducted amidst pervasive uncertainty. Actions are guided by imagination as well as reason. People can experience discontinuous paradigm shifts, suddenly seeing the same situation in radically different ways. John Maynard Keynes argued that economics is a moral science and reality could not be captured in universal laws calculable by mathematics. Economics, he wrote, “deals with introspection and with values… it deals with motives, expectations, psychological uncertainties. One had to be constantly on guard against treating the material as constant and homogenous.”

But over the course of the twentieth century, the rationalist spirit came to dominate economics. Physicists and other hard scientists were achieving great things, and social scientists sought to match their rigor and prestige. The influential economist Irving Fisher wrote his doctoral dissertation under the supervision of a physicist, and later helped build a machine with levers and pumps to illustrate how an economy works. Paul Samuelson applied the mathematical principles of thermodynamics to economics. On the finance side, Emanuel Derman was a physicist who became a financier and played a central role in developing the models for derivatives.

While valuable tools for understanding economic behavior, mathematical models were also like lenses that filtered out certain aspects of human nature. They depended on the notion that people are basically regular and predictable. They assume, as George A. Akerlof and Robert Shiller have written, “that variations in individual feelings, impressions and passions do not matter in the aggregate and that economic events are driven by inscrutable technical factors or erratic government action.”

Within a very short time economists were emphasizing monetary motivations to the exclusion of others. Homo Economicus was separated from Homo Sociologus, Homo Psychologicus, Homo Ethicus, and Homo Romanticus. You ended up with a stick figure view of human nature.

The Disaster

Taggert and his team didn’t study intellectual history. Rationalism was just around them in the air they breathed, shaping their assumptions and methods in ways they did not appreciate. The rationalist mentality was in the economics courses they took in college, the strategy courses they took in business school, and the management books they read every day. It was the mentality that narrowed useful information down to the sort of thing that could be captured on PowerPoint slides.

As the recession deepened and lingered, Erica watched them make a series of disastrous moves that threatened to destroy the company. Forced to cut costs, they first cut every single practice that might have fostered personal bonds. For example, they took the company phone number off the Web site so it was nearly impossible for a customer with a problem to call and talk to a human being. They eliminated all the company gatherings that used to build camaraderie. They cut office space. Some people who had worked for decades to get a real office now found themselves in ego-destroying cubicles. The floor plan had looked so efficient when the management team had presented it.

Jim Collins argues that institutional decline is like a staged disease. Companies can look fine on the outside but already be sick within, and once they get sick, there is a certain progression they follow on the way to their doom. If that’s true, then the cable company went through all of the phases all at once.

At first, the Intercom executives were thrilled by the economic slow-down. “In China, the word for ‘crisis’ also means ‘opportunity’!” they would tell one another. They saw sliding revenues as a call to enact all their experiments. The launched off on a hyperactive process of reorganization and restructuring. They relieved division heads, and put in new people. They put out a new long-term strategy called Leapfrog Growth. They were going to grow the company at all costs, pour money into sectors that promised 10 percent growth, and get rid of divisions that were just crawling along. “We no longer have the luxury of doing what we’ve always done,” Taggert would bark out at meetings. “We have to rip up the playbook. Think anew.”

Soon, there were even more acquisitions. Taggert, bored with running a cable company, bought a television network. Now he could hang around with the stars. He could go to dinner parties and talk about the prime-time lineup. He didn’t bother to think about whether a company providing a technical service could really mesh with a company providing artistic product.

There were other acquisitions—a biotech firm, an online appliance store. Erica watched her colleagues as they got swept up in the seduction of doing the deal. After each one, a triumphant memo would go around the executive suits. This deal allows us to “double our reach … transform our company…. In a single move we revolutionize the landscape…. This is an absolute gamechanger…. We now have a blockbuster product that will herald a new era…. Today we witness a new dawn and a new beginning.” Each deal was supposed to be the silver bullet that pulled the company out of its slide, but weeks and months later, the slide was still there, only with more debt.

As everything new was being polished, everything old was being squeezed. Old suppliers were squeezed, contractors were cut back, old employees were told to do more with less. A lifeboat mentality began to pervade the company—month by month, the weak were thrown overboard, and the survivors gripped the gunnels more tightly. Morale suffered. Customer engagement plunged. When bad news came in, there was a search for those responsible, but somehow responsibility could never be assigned. Each decision had been made by a layering of committees. When everyone was responsible, no one was.

Erica watched the debacle with grim disgust. She had withstood the death of her own company, which was more or less unavoidable. Now she was going to be part of one of the worst management fiascos in the history of capitalism. Who was going to hire her after that?

Month after month, the numbers got worse and worse. One day she was at a meeting when a new set of revenue numbers were announced. “You must have that wrong,” one of Taggert’s butt boys responded. Erica heard a spontaneous groan from the back of the room. No one else seemed to notice, but when propriety allowed, Erica swiveled her head over to see who had made the noise. It was a jowly older guy, with white hair, wearing a white short-sleeve shirt, and a red and blue rep tie. She’d seen this guy at many of the bigger meetings, but she had never heard him say anything. She stared at him. He had his eyes down, staring at his meaty hands. Then he looked up and their eyes locked. He smirked, and she turned away.

After the meeting she followed him down the hallway, and eventually pulled up alongside him. “What did you think?” she ventured. He just looked at her suspiciously.

“Pathetic,” she finally whispered.

“Fucking pathetic. Unbelievably fucking pathetic,” he replied.

And so Project Valkyrie was born.

The guy’s name was Raymond. He’d worked for the company for thirty-two years. They couldn’t get rid of him because no one else knew the technology, but they put him in a job far away from decision making where he ended up cleaning up other people’s messes. Through him, Erica learned there were others in the company just as disgusted as she was—a lot of them, actually. They set up a dissident underground. They had a samizdat network on their private e-mail accounts. At first they just bitched and moaned, and then they planned. Erica persuaded them this action was a matter of survival. If the company went down, they’d all be destroyed. If the company went down, then an institution they had spent their lives building would be gone. Surely they weren’t going to just sit there and await their fates. Surely something could be done.