Paul Wight is the Head of R&D in Denver. Sales are slow, profitability is down and the management has stated that WE have to cut costs.

Paul oversees several development sites: in Brunswick, NJ, Vancouver BC, Québec City and Manchester UK.

Paul has been asked to close down one site as well as downsize his whole organization by 30%. Paul will convened all his site managers in Denver to execute this plan.

The biggest issue is which site to close. The head of the Manchester site is Chester Man.

Chester really mistrusts Paul to make the right decision; Chester believes Paul does not like the time zone difference, the late night and early morning Concalls as well as the management overhead of flying to Manchester once a quarter in coach class. Chester attributes to Paul a “hidden agenda”

which will lead to the closing of Manchester.

Denise Thibadeau  leads the Québec site. She believes Paul will close the Quebec site due to a hidden agenda stemming from communication difficulties

(accents) and costs which stem from the need to comply with language laws to protect the French language, albeit that development costs are subsidized by the provincial government via tax concessions.

Paul always shows lack of patience on calls when he cannot understand what people say “the first time around”.

Denise and Chester have been speaking informally as of late on how to “throw a block” at Paul’s attributed attempt to close one “of the remote sites”.

Denise and Chester have agreed to form a coalition. Despite the animosity between Denise and Chester, they will agree to cooperate and assume joint responsibility for continuous engineering of a profitable legacy product, and jointly commit to develop a new platform in record time and very low costs. They have agreed to lie about how long this will take and “clean up the mess” later on.  Denise and Chester will both build on their strengths of low turnover to make this happen, forcing this decision on Paul via Paul’s boss, who himself is a European.

Paul has asked his HR manager to prepare an activity to enable trust in this session. Ms Gloria Ramsbottom prepared a cooking class, followed by a webinar of a horse running faster and faster, albeit eating less.

Paul closed the Vancouver site. Denise and Chester grew their sites by 20%.

Denise will replace Paul who is “moving on to his next assignment” in March.