It was a winter's rainy day when the new Vice President for Design
Concepts (who had just been promoted from Senior Accountant because
he could calculate to the nearest nickel how much a new car would
cost to build) noticed that two of his employees, a young man and a
young woman, were not at their desks. Upon inquiring, he was told
that they had "gone to the loft to be creative." The Vice President
(who could remember the part number of every component he had ever
touched) calmly adjusted his bow tie, cleared his throat, checked to
see that his shoelaces were still tied, and then strode briskly down
the long corridor of the half-remodeled automobile factory. Soon he
was walking up the stairs to the loft, only to arrive at a door
marked, "Do Not Disturb."
Viewing the sign as an affront to his authority, he applied Chapter
Two of the assertiveness training book he had just finished and
quickly opened the door with determination and a scowl.
What he saw was not what he expected. Near the door was a boom box,
playing very lively but not overly loud classical music. Directly
in front of him across the room he saw the young woman, barefoot and
wearing, instead of her business attire, purple sweatpants and a
torn green sweatshirt. Worse than this, she was turning cartwheels
and saying what sounded to him like, "Put it in the lake, dip it,
water proof it, French dip it, soak it, drench it, pinch it, wrench
it." When she stopped to attend to his interruption, he noticed that
her hair was rubber banded into a vertical column on top of her head.
The young man was sitting off to one side, wearing jeans and a
T-shirt printed with the words, "None of the Above." Nearby was an
open ream of copier paper, many sheets of which he had evidently
wrinkled up into a ball and tossed at a trash can a few feet away,
with highly indifferent accuracy. A few of the sheets had been
written on with multicolored felt-tip pens and placed carelessly in
several piles.
"What's going on here?" demanded the Vice President.
"We work here," said the young man.
"Not any more you don't," said the Vice President sternly. "Just
what do you think you're doing, anyway?"
"We're working on the new Blister DLX," said the young woman.
"I don't see any work being done here," the Vice President
shot back.
"We're thinking," the young woman said.
"This doesn't look like thinking to me."
"Oh? And what does thinking look like to you?" asked the young man.
"Well, it certainly doesn't look like this. This is goofing
off--and stop wasting that paper. Who are you, anyway?"
"I'm Scott and this is Tina," the young man said. "We're creative
analysts. We're working on cost-cutting ideas."
"Cost cutting?" sneered the Vice President. "You don't even have a
calculator. And besides, we've got engineers and accountants to cut
costs, so even if you were doing that, you'd be either superfluous
or redundant. I want you out of the plant by this afternoon."
That afternoon Scott and Tina went to the Vice President's office.
As Scott stretched out on the floor and began to spread out a few
papers, Tina pushed aside many feet of adding machine tape and sat
in the Lotus position on one end of the Vice President's desk. The
Vice President was not quite so upset that he did not notice that
Tina was wearing earrings made from crumpled balls of paper hanging
from bent paper clips. "We'd like to ask you to reconsider your
firing us," said Tina. "We have some good ideas for the Blister."
"Get out," said the Vice President.
The next day all the executives met at a regularly scheduled
administrative meeting, where there seemed to be some confusion and
delay in getting started. Finally, the President of the company
spoke up. "I'm sorry for the delay," he said, "but we had scheduled
a report on cost saving ideas by two of our top creative analysts
and it now appears that some idiot fired them yesterday. However,
we are in the process of getting everything straightened out, and
they should be here soon."
"I hope it's Scott and Tina," one of the other executives said.
"They're really brilliant."
"If unconventional," noted another.
"Unconventional or not," said the Chief Operating Officer, "I'll
never forget how they saved us eighty-six million dollars on the
Dazzle II by helping us reduce the number of parts. And when their
expense account came through, all they'd bought were radio batteries
and a couple of reams of paper."
"I remember that," said the first executive. "No fancy research, no
costly experiments, just pure thought, just great ideas. They
actually know how to think."
"What kind of a jerk would fire people like that?" someone asked.
And so it was that the new Vice President for Design Concepts was
invited to take his skills to some other company, even though he
could recite the exact cost of every part of every car the
corporation made.