Senior Management may have been incompetent; it may have been corrupt; it was certainly full of assholes—but… — Max Barry

“What happened to sticking together? What happened to teamwork?” He gives Holly a dirty look.

“Hey,” Holly says. “You know what Roger told me? He said there’s no such thing as teamwork. It’s a con. The company doesn’t promote teams. If you want to get ahead you have to screw everybody else and look after yourself. Co-workers are competitors. Roger told me the truth: there’s no I in team, but there’s no U, either!”

Mona says bravely, “I can’t see how this will work. You can’t abolish Senior Management. Zephyr isn’t a democracy. It’s a corporation.”

“I believe,” Klausman says, “that Jones is advancing the theory that those two concepts are not mutually exclusive.”

He is looking for something called The Omega Management System, which is the latest management fad in a tradition stretching back through Six Sigma and Total Quality Management to the practice of bleeding sick patients and investing in tulips.