The new 'managerial support staff' system was phased in incrementally over four long weeks, starting the very first morning after Miss Planner's special sales presentation.
Logistics was the first department targeted for overhaul. As expected, there was a lot of pushback. The most experienced workers resented having to make changes, the least experienced were intimidated by the additional level of oversight, and the bosses feared they would be replaced. In time, the situation degenerated into a power struggle between Miss Planner's little helpers and the department’s existing senior management staff who were all too willing to use any strategy they could come up with to protect the defective status quo. But no matter how much anyone complained, cried, screamed, or banged on their desks, there wasn't a thing that anyone on the warehouse floor could do to stop the tiny blonde general manager's unstoppable advance.
Teams were broken up and rearranged, chopped and screwed and put back together in whatever configuration was most pleasing to Miss Planner's warped, whimsical mind. Demotions and reassignments and outright dismissals were all carried out with ruthless, impersonal intensity and immediacy until there was no one left with the will to fight. After all the smoke cleared and all the drama had run its course, the logistics department was split into two distinct groups: those who knew Miss Planner personally, loved her dearly, and worked as hard as possible in order to earn her favor; and those who completely gave up and despondently did the bare minimum to keep from being cut.
It was the kind of vicious divide-and-conquer scheme beloved by petty despots the world over. Of course, it worked beautifully. Even with a smaller budget, fewer workers, and a far more intense and unforgiving work environment than ever before, the newly restructed department outperformed its previous iteration in every metric. Late deliveries, lost shipments, and customer complaints fell to the lowest recorded numbers in Chosen history. And the whole process was done so quickly, so quietly, and so effortlessly that few people outside the distribution division even realized anything unusual was going on in the warehouse until long after the battle was over.
The blonde whirlwind struck the processing plants next. The line managers, fearful of being held responsible for the contaminated Nuke incident that resulted in the death of a small child, acquiesced to Miss Planner's demands without complaint and instructed their subordinates to do the same. But the acolytes, spoiled by years of easy work and lax oversight, fought the inevitable change with the ferocity of cornered animals. They staged walkouts, barricaded themselves in their labs, and sent e-mails to friends in high places. All for nothing. Miss Planner transferred all the troublemakers to the Grand Temple, a magical place in the middle of the Sage Desert where there was no Nuke to contaminate, no equipment to sabotage, and absolutely nowhere to run. They were the lucky ones.
The unfortunate souls who kept their heads down and went with the flow saw their comfortable little fiefdom transform before their very eyes into a hostile alien landscape of production quotas and surprise quality inspections. The work became more complicated, the deadlines tighter, and the stakes higher and more immediate, all with the added stress of constant, overbearing surveillance by Miss Planner's mysterious support staff. And the worst part was, the new system worked so effectively that there was no hope to be found anywhere at all that things would go back to the way they were before. Just as the logistics department's miserable band of couriers, dispatchers, and inventory managers before them, the production division's chemists, lab techs, and packagers suddenly found themselves at the bottom of a deep, dark chasm, unable to climb their way out.
With her long knives of change sharpened to perfection by the slow grind of trial and error, Miss Planner began carving up the Tower of the Chosen itself. The scandalized sales department's ‘hands-off’ management style was the first casualty. It was replaced by a more rigorous, formal, and modern 'process driven' approach, complete with a dedicated flow chart. There was no room in Miss Planner's perfect new organizational paradigm for arbitrary judgment calls, ad hoc adjustments, or exceptions to hard-and-fast rules made just this one time because the boss said so. In the Age of the Assistant, if something wasn't written in black and white on paper somewhere, it wasn't supposed to happen at all.
And so it went. With each successive round of organizational change, the Tower shrank in every dimension. Fewer and less talented employees, smaller budgets, less flexibility, less room for initiative, independence, and creativity. As layers were peeled away, the structure that remained grew leaner, stronger, more focused, more productive, and more profitable. The ruthless restructuring continued through departments and divisions and offices until Miss Planner was finally forced to turn her blade on her own personal playground: the research division, a little kingdom unto itself, a haven of creative, open, unstructured thinking and experimentation that thrived in the absence of the rigid bureaucracy, policies, and protocols that plagued the rest of the Tower. Without a moment’s hesitation, she expanded her humble support staff of five lowly fact-checkers into an oppressive force of twelve full-time management support specialists who, it was rumored, possessed psychic powers that allowed them to detect if someone was goofing off.
Her bloody work finished, Miss Planner held a meeting of the division heads where she officially declared an end to the quality control crisis, gloated a little, and thanked her colleagues for their cooperation. Everything had changed and everything would stay that way, for as far as the eye could see and forevermore. Her humiliated peers, in one final, grandiose act of symbolic surrender, stood and applauded the tiny blonde tyrant, who bowed modestly and waved goodbye. She went straight to the cafeteria where she promptly ordered a soda and a big, juicy steak with a side of fries. The waitstaff tried not to smile. She looked so pleased with herself!
