by John Bruce

“Those who are offered positions with Digital Discipline Technologies,” answered the stern lady, “will be offered the same salaries they were earning with this company. There will, however, be certain reductions in medical and retirement benefits. . .” Which, of course, was the answer Bill had been expecting. He kept waving his hand in the air in hopes that the stern lady would let him ask a follow-up question, but she was much too smart for that, and once she’d outlined the oh-by-the-way cut in benefits, she moved right along to one of the other people.

“Well, Bill,” said Al Shultz the next day at lunch, “looks like you finally got what you wished for.”

“How?” Bill answered. “What I really wanted to ask was how come they’d just discovered the 80-20 rule? All of a sudden they’ve got it all figured out, 20 percent of the people do 80 percent of the work. But this is all brand new. Where have they been the last 15 years since I’ve been here? They’ve got 500 people in IS, and nobody in management’s got a clue about who’s doing the work and who isn’t. How’s this going to change in the next couple of months?”

“The CIO keeps his job, too,” said Al. “You’d think the first guy they could say hadn’t been doing his job was the guy who runs the IS Department, hiring all those people they didn’t need.”

“They’ll give him a big bonus for outsourcing us,” someone else said.

“I still want to know who gets all the money they save from laying everyone off,” said Bill. “I still think some of the rewards should go to the people who stay and wind up doing the work.”

“You’re looking in the wrong place,” said Al. “The CIO’s going to get a big bonus and a raise, and they’re looking to keep a bunch of the other managers on as company employees. They’ll be the interface with DDT. That’s where to look for who gets a reward.” This was partly scuttlebutt, but much of it had been explained by the human resources ladies in the previous day’s meeting.

Mike Garner was Bill’s boss, and he had a different perspective on the outsourcing. As Al pointed out, some of the IS managers wouldn’t even be outsourced in the deal – they’d get cushy jobs high up in the company where they’d get to give DDT orders. The best the underlings could hope for would be to keep the jobs they had, at the same salary but with lower benefits. Some of the managers would come out of the deal much better off. But not all of them, and that was Mike’s problem. Other managers might get straight-across offers from DDT, but some would be laid off. Mike was determined to be one of the guys who came out on top.

So Mike called a staff meeting of his own. His area, he’d decided, was going to show the rest of the IS department how this winnowing out of the non-performers was to be done. That way, in Mike’s thought processes, the higher-ups couldn’t help but see the outstanding job Mike was doing, and they’d certainly want to offer him one of those top jobs, where he wouldn’t even have to leave the company, and he’d get a raise – maybe even a fat bonus – to boot. Or, failing that, they’d absolutely – certainly, as he saw it – at least offer him one of the straight-across transfers to DDT. In the meantime, they’d have to see the light and put him in charge of sorting out who stayed and who left for the whole IS department.

So in the staff meeting, Mike announced that they were all going to vote on who should stay. At first, he said people should just vote for the one person they felt most deserved to stay, but a couple of people suggested that wouldn’t work, because people would just vote for themselves. So Mike said, “OK, we’ll vote for the top three”, but that idea had problems, too. People would still vote for themselves, but then they’d vote for their friends, which would throw things off, too.

“Wait a moment,” said Mike, “it’ll just be against the rules to vote for yourself. You have to vote for someone else.”

“How can you tell?” someone asked. “Isn’t it going to be a secret ballot?”

That threw Mike off his pace for a moment, but not for long. “Well, I’ll just throw out the top name. People will vote for themselves at the top of the list, and I’ll just ignore that name.”

“In that case,” Bill Imbler interjected, “people will just put their own names second or third.”

“Umm,” said Mike, “I hadn’t thought of that.” In any case, as far as Mike was concerned, Bill Imbler was at the top of his list to get laid off. The question Bill usually asked in Mike’s staff meetings, once the issues began to get really intricate and gnarly the way they were here, was “Mike, what problem are we trying to solve?” But this time Bill hadn’t asked that. Mike thought he probably knew exactly what the problem was and, for once, decided to keep his mouth shut.

So Mike adjourned that particular staff meeting. As he thought about the objections that came up to having people vote on who should go, he realized that the question Bill usually asked was good: what problem was he trying to solve? It was plain that the people who worked for him were never going to make it easy to lay them off by voting for someone else to stay. They’d just wrangle over the procedures for the balloting and delay it until someone else made the decisions, or even until the layoff plans changed somehow, and that wasn’t what Mike had in mind. He wanted to go to the higher-ups with a list all made up – an objective list, a scientific list! -- which would impress them and make them want to keep him – indeed, promote him.

And Bill Imbler was going to be on the top of that list. There were many reasons why Mike wanted to get rid of him – you could certainly count that Mike, like many other people in IS, knew about Bill’s views on who did the work and who didn’t. Bill had come into Mike’s area in a reorg, and he earned nearly as much as Mike did, which was another thing that was always on Mike’s mind. But the biggest thing Mike had against him was his interpretation of the casual dress code. When the CEO had approved the company’s move to casual, he’d clearly meant that people would then dress like they were on the golf course. He’d certainly set the example, and the more receptive employees followed it – the higher they were in the food chain, the more slavishly, in fact.