The Multiplier

Team AI Outreach — Book 4

Christopher Bender

The Multiplier

Team AI Outreach — Book 4

Copyright © 2026 Christopher Bender. All rights reserved.

A narrative about the leader who chose multiplication over subtraction — and built a team of ten into a force of a hundred.

This is a work of narrative non-fiction. Some names and details
have been changed to protect privacy.

Chapter 1: The Memo (The Countdown)

Dana Whitfield pulled into the Mercer Industrial Packaging parking lot at 6:14 AM on a Tuesday in March, one minute earlier than usual because she had hit every green light on K-7 and the Subaru had been feeling cooperative. The lot was half-empty at this hour — first shift didn't start until seven — but the lights were already on in the production bay, the night crew wrapping up their run of corrugated shipping containers for a restaurant supply chain out of Springfield.

She grabbed her travel mug, locked the Outback — the one with the "Lean In, Lean Out" bumper sticker she'd thought was hilarious at a continuous improvement conference in 2022 and now couldn't scrape off without taking the paint — and walked toward the side entrance, the one closest to the production floor. She didn't use the front door. Never had. The front door led to the lobby, the lobby led to the offices, and the offices led to email. The side door led to the floor, and the floor was where the real company lived.

The air hit her first — warm, slightly metallic, carrying the yeast-and-cardboard smell of corrugated board being scored and folded at speed. She knew this smell the way a baker knows dough. Fifteen years in manufacturing operations, starting as a production floor coordinator at a packaging plant in Topeka when she was twenty-six and still believed that a process engineering degree from K-State meant she understood how factories actually worked. She hadn't. She'd learned that on the floor, from people who had been running lines since before she'd finished high school.

She walked the floor the way she did every morning, nodding at the night crew, checking the boards, reading the shift output numbers scrawled in dry-erase marker on the whiteboard near Station 4. Her eyes went where they always went — to Hector Salinas's station. Hector wasn't there yet. He wouldn't be for another forty-five minutes. But his station told a story even in his absence: the die-cut press calibrated with a precision that the maintenance manual didn't describe, the material guides adjusted two millimeters off standard because Hector had figured out years ago that the manufacturer's spec didn't account for the humidity in a Kansas production bay. Small adjustments, accumulated over twenty-seven years, that lived entirely in Hector's hands and ears and instincts.

Dana stood there for a moment, coffee cooling in her mug, thinking about something she thought about often: how much of this company's capability existed in the heads of people who had never been asked to write it down.

[Chapter continues — approximately 2,500 words total]

Chapter 2: Forty-Two Names (The Human Audit)

Dana did not sleep well. She lay in bed replaying the memo's language — workforce optimization, headcount rationalization, AI-driven efficiency gains — and translating each phrase into what it actually meant. Workforce optimization meant firing people. Headcount rationalization meant deciding which people. AI-driven efficiency gains meant using software as the justification for both.

She got up at 5:30, skipped her usual twenty minutes with the crossword, and drove to Mercer in the dark. By the time the sun came up over the flat stretch of industrial park along 119th Street, she was already at her desk with the organizational chart pulled up on her screen and a yellow legal pad beside her keyboard.

The memo had said thirty percent. She did the math again, the way she had done it three times the night before, as if the number might change. One hundred and forty employees. Thirty percent. Forty-two.

She started with the roles the PE firm's analysis had flagged as "high automation potential." Customer service representatives. Data entry and order processing clerks. Production scheduling coordinators. Quality inspection technicians. Accounts receivable processors. Shipping documentation specialists. She highlighted each role on the org chart and watched the yellow marks accumulate like a rash spreading across the company.

Then she did something the memo hadn't suggested. She stopped looking at roles and started looking at names.

Teresa Molina, who had worked customer service for eleven years and knew every major client's ordering quirks by heart — the ones who always ordered in odd quantities, the ones whose purchase orders never matched their verbal requests, the one who had a procurement manager named Dale who refused to use email and called every Tuesday at 10:15 AM. Removing Teresa didn't just remove a customer service representative. It removed eleven years of relationship infrastructure that had never been documented because no one had ever thought to ask.

[Chapter continues — approximately 2,800 words total]

Chapter 3: The Consultant (The Scarcity Trap)

Will Easton arrived at Mercer Industrial Packaging on a Monday morning in late March, driving a rented Audi that looked aggressively out of place next to the row of pickups and mid-size sedans in the visitor lot. Dana watched him from her office window — slim-fit navy suit, leather portfolio, the kind of confident stride that comes from having done the same presentation at seven companies and never being told no.

She had Googled him over the weekend. Stanford MBA. Three years at McKinsey, two at a boutique PE advisory firm, now an independent "AI transformation consultant" whose LinkedIn headline read Helping Companies Unlock the Future of Work. His case studies were clean and numerical: 28% headcount reduction at a logistics firm in Dallas, 35% cost savings at a distribution center in Atlanta, an insurance company in Chicago that had replaced its entire claims processing team with an AI pipeline and a team of four supervisors. The numbers were impressive. The humans behind them were invisible.

Ray had scheduled the presentation for 9 AM in the main conference room — the one with the long table and the window overlooking the production floor, a detail Dana suspected was not accidental. Ray wanted Will to see the people he'd be talking about. Or maybe Dana was projecting.

The leadership team filed in: Dana, Tomo Inaba from IT, Frank Jessup from finance, Maria Orozco from HR, and two production managers. Ray sat at the head of the table with the tired look he'd been wearing since the PE firm had started applying pressure six months ago. Will connected his laptop, smiled the way consultants smile — warm enough to seem genuine, practiced enough to be efficient — and opened a forty-slide deck with the title Mercer Industrial: AI-Driven Operational Excellence.

Slide one was a quote: "The companies that survive the next decade will be the ones that automate fastest."

Dana wrote on her legal pad: Says who?

[Chapter continues — approximately 2,800 words total]

Chapter 4: The Skill Doc (The First Experiment)

Tomo Inaba's office was the smallest in the building, tucked between the server closet and the break room, which meant it smelled faintly of both ozone and microwaved leftovers. She had decorated it with a single poster — a picture of a tangled network cable with the caption "Have you tried turning it off and on again?" — and a whiteboard that was perpetually covered in diagrams that looked like circuit boards designed by someone having a fever dream. Dana liked this office. It was the one place at Mercer where nobody pretended to have everything figured out.

Dana sat in the folding chair across from Tomo's desk — Tomo didn't have a guest chair, so they'd stolen one from the break room months ago — and laid out the idea that had been forming in her head since the night she'd called Tomo from her kitchen.

"Here's what I keep coming back to," Dana said. "The memo treats people like cost lines. Will's framework treats them like task bundles. But what they actually are — what Hector is, what Teresa is, what Claire's team is — is knowledge systems. They're expert systems running on twenty years of pattern recognition, relationship memory, and judgment that nobody has ever bothered to extract."

Tomo leaned back in her chair, which creaked in a way that suggested it had not been rated for leaning. "So you want to extract it."

"I want to make it visible. Right now, all that knowledge is locked in people's heads. It walks in the door every morning and walks out every night. If somebody quits or retires or gets hit by a bus, it's gone. That's a fragility problem. But it's also an amplification opportunity."

"You're talking about a knowledge management project."

"I'm talking about something simpler than that. I want to take one person, sit them down with AI, and have them describe what they actually do — not their job description, not their title, but the real work. The judgment calls. The shortcuts. The things they know that they don't even realize they know. And I want AI to turn that into a document that captures it."

Tomo was quiet for a moment, her fingers drumming on the desk. Then she said, "You want to build a skill doc."

[Chapter continues — approximately 2,800 words total]

Chapter 5: The Matrix (The Map of Everything)

The whiteboard in Conference Room B was six feet wide, and by Wednesday afternoon, every inch of it was covered. Tomo stood at one end with a blue dry-erase marker, Dana at the other with red, and between them was a diagram that looked like it had been designed by someone trying to organize the entire company on a single surface. Which was, in fact, exactly what they were doing.

The Amplification Matrix had started as a simple idea — a 2x2 grid to categorize work. X-axis: how capable AI was at performing the task. Y-axis: how much human judgment, creativity, or relationship value the task required. Four quadrants, four strategies. Clean. Elegant. The kind of framework that fits on a napkin.

The problem was that Mercer Industrial Packaging did not fit on a napkin.

"Okay," Tomo said, uncapping a green marker for the third quadrant. "Customer relationship management. Where does that go?"

Dana thought about it. "It depends. The actual relationship — knowing that Dale at Midwest Restaurant Supply only calls on Tuesdays, knowing that the Hartfield account needs hand-holding during seasonal ramps — that's high human value. AI can't replicate twenty years of knowing someone's voice on the phone. But the communication itself — drafting order confirmations, generating status updates, producing quarterly business reviews — AI can do that at eighty percent quality in a tenth of the time."

"So the relationship is high-human, low-AI. The communication is high-human, high-AI."

"Exactly. One role, two quadrants."

Tomo wrote CRM-relationship in the upper-left quadrant — the one they'd labeled Protect — and CRM-communication in the upper-right — the one they'd labeled Multiply. She stepped back and looked at the board. "This is going to get messy."

"Everything worth doing at Mercer is messy," Dana said. "That's why consultants with clean spreadsheets get it wrong."

[Chapter continues — approximately 2,800 words total]

Chapter 6: The Director (Claire's Transformation)

Claire Nguyen had been watching the AI initiative from behind a wall of crossed arms and carefully neutral expressions for three weeks. She was twenty-nine, the youngest manager at Mercer, and she had not gotten here by being naive about corporate initiatives. She had seen two rounds of "operational improvements" at her previous company — a food distributor in Overland Park that had used phrases like right-sizing and strategic alignment the way other companies used phrases like good morning. Both rounds had ended with people carrying boxes to their cars.

So when Dana walked into the customer service bull pen on a Thursday morning and asked for a volunteer to pilot the AI multiplication program, Claire raised her hand. Not because she believed in it. Because she had learned from watching those layoffs that the people who volunteered for new initiatives were the last ones to be cut, and the people who resisted were the first. Volunteering was self-preservation dressed as enthusiasm. Claire was good at that.

"I want to be clear about what this is and what it isn't," Dana said, sitting across from Claire in the glass-walled meeting room that the customer service team used for escalation calls. "This isn't about replacing what your team does. It's about making what your team does go further."

Claire nodded. She had heard versions of this sentence before. She did not believe it yet.

"Tomo is going to work with you on something we're calling the Director Model," Dana continued. "The idea is simple: instead of your team using AI as a tool — like a fancy search engine or a writing assistant — we want your team directing AI the way a film director directs a production. You provide the vision, the context, the judgment, the quality standard. AI provides the speed and the scale."

"So we're not using AI," Claire said. "We're directing it."

"That's the distinction. Users follow menus. Directors provide vision."

Claire uncrossed her arms, which was as close to a concession as Dana was going to get. "Okay," she said. "Show me what that looks like."

[Chapter continues — approximately 2,500 words total]

Chapter 7: The Trust Gate (The Near Miss)

The call came at 6:47 AM on a Wednesday, thirteen minutes before Dana's alarm was set to go off. It was Hector, which was unusual — Hector was not a phone person. He communicated in nods, shrugs, and the occasional declarative sentence delivered with the finality of a judge handing down a verdict. If Hector was calling before seven in the morning, something was wrong.

"Dana." No greeting, no preamble. "You need to come in."

She was in the Subaru seven minutes later, hair still damp, travel mug sloshing coffee onto the center console as she took the turn onto K-7 faster than the Outback appreciated. She pulled into the lot at 7:12 and walked through the side entrance to find Hector standing at the scheduling board with his arms crossed and his jaw set at the angle that meant someone had done something stupid.

"Tell me," she said.

Hector pointed at the production schedule that had been generated overnight by the AI-augmented scheduling system — the one Tomo's team had deployed two weeks earlier as part of the TAO optimization layer. The schedule was clean, logical, and efficient. It had routed a food-grade packaging run for a chain of organic grocery stores through Line 3.

"Line 3 ran the Brentworth industrial chemical containers last Thursday," Hector said. "Full run. Solvent-grade corrugated. The line was cleaned per protocol on Friday, but protocol cleaning doesn't clear solvent residue from the scoring heads to food-safe levels. You need a full decontamination cycle. Takes a day and a half. Nobody ordered one because nobody was planning to run food-grade on Line 3."

Dana stared at the schedule. The AI had optimized for throughput and delivery timeline. It had looked at machine availability, order priority, and production capacity. It had generated a schedule that was, by every metric in its model, optimal. And it had nearly routed organic grocery store packaging through a line contaminated with industrial solvent residue.

"How close were we?" Dana asked.

"Thirty minutes. The night supervisor was about to start loading material when I got here."

[Chapter continues — approximately 2,800 words total]

Chapter 8: The Fear Barrier (Marcus's Choice)

Marcus Tillman sat in his truck in the Mercer parking lot for eleven minutes before his shift, which was not unusual. He always arrived early and sat for a few minutes, drinking gas station coffee and listening to the end of whatever podcast episode he'd started on the drive from his apartment in Spring Hill. What was unusual was that instead of listening to his podcast, he was staring at his phone, rereading a job listing for a material handler position at a warehouse in Lenexa that paid three dollars less per hour but had the advantage of not being at a company that was actively deploying the technology designed to replace him.

He had been at Mercer for nine years. He was thirty-four. He had a seven-year-old daughter named Alyssa who lived with him three weeks out of four and whose school was twelve minutes from the plant — a fact that had mattered more than the salary when he'd taken the job. He ran Line 2 on first shift, handling material feed, machine monitoring, and quality checks with the competence that comes from doing the same thing several thousand times. He was not the best operator on the floor — that was Hector, and everyone knew it — but he was reliable, consistent, and exactly the kind of mid-career worker whose name appeared on spreadsheets when consultants started talking about automation potential.

Marcus had not been in any of the pilot programs. He had not been asked to create a skill doc. He had not been invited to any of the meetings where Dana talked about multiplication and directors and frameworks with names he didn't recognize. What he had been was present in the break room, where the conversation had curdled over the past month into a rolling anxiety that expressed itself as dark humor, conspiracy theory, and the kind of resignation that sounds like toughness but is actually fear.

"They're going to keep the people who play ball with the AI thing and cut everyone else," said Randy, who worked Line 4 and had a theory about everything. "That's how it always works. They tell you it's not about layoffs, and then six months later, surprise."

Marcus didn't argue with Randy. He didn't argue with anyone. He just sat and listened and went home and updated his resume for the first time in nine years, which had felt like the most honest thing he could do.

[Chapter continues — approximately 3,000 words total]

Chapter 9: TAO (The Organizational Framework)

The conference room table was covered in paper. Not the clean, formatted paper of consultant presentations — the ragged, handwritten, sticky-note-covered paper of people who were building something they hadn't built before and didn't have a template for. Dana stood at one end of the table surveying the mess with the expression of a woman who had spent fifteen years in manufacturing operations and understood that the path from chaos to order always passed through a phase that looked like a yard sale.

"We have a problem," she said to the room — Tomo, Claire, Hector, Maria from HR, and two production managers who had been pulled in after their teams started asking questions that nobody could answer. "We have proof of concept. Hector's skill doc works. Claire's director model works. Marcus's workflow optimization works. But we have six pilot projects running in six different ways with six different definitions of success, and if we try to scale this across the company like this, it will collapse under its own weight."

Tomo, who was sitting cross-legged in her chair in a way that suggested she had never fully internalized the concept of office furniture, said, "You need a framework."

"I need a framework that people who run production lines can understand in five minutes and apply in a week."

"Then it needs to be three things or fewer. Manufacturing people think in threes. Quality, cost, delivery. Plan, do, check. Stop, look, listen."

Dana picked up a marker and went to the whiteboard. She had been turning this over in her head for two weeks, since the night she'd sat in her kitchen with a glass of wine and a legal pad and tried to categorize every type of work-change the pilot projects had produced. She had ended up with three categories that kept surviving every stress test she threw at them.

She wrote three words on the board:

Transform. Augment. Optimize.

"TAO," Tomo said, reading it. "You're naming your AI framework after a Chinese philosophy?"

"I'm naming it after whatever gets people to remember it," Dana said. "And it's an acronym, not a philosophy. Although if the shoe fits."

[Chapter continues — approximately 2,800 words total]

Chapter 10: Taste (The Quality Problem)

Six weeks into the full rollout, Dana noticed something she couldn't put into a spreadsheet. The numbers were good — throughput was up, cycle times were down, the TAO maps were generating efficiency gains across every department. But when she read the customer communications coming out of Claire's team, something was off. They were correct. They were professional. They were fast. And they had all the warmth of a terms-of-service agreement.

She pulled three emails from the previous week and laid them on her desk. Before the multiplication program, Claire's team had written emails that sounded like people — slightly informal, occasionally funny, always aware that the person on the other end was a human being who had problems and preferences and a name that deserved to be used correctly. Now the emails were clean, efficient, and utterly forgettable. They read like they had been written by someone who had studied the concept of customer service without ever having practiced it.

Dana walked down to the customer service area and sat on the edge of Claire's desk, which was a violation of Claire's personal space that Claire tolerated because Dana always brought a point when she did it.

"Your emails are too good," Dana said.

Claire looked up from her screen. "I'm going to need you to explain how that's a problem."

"They're technically perfect. Grammar's clean, information's accurate, tone is professional. But they don't sound like your team. They sound like a very polite robot that went to business school." Dana held up one of the printed emails. "This is a response to a client who's been with us for eight years and just had a shipping delay on a rush order. Your team used to handle this with a phone call and a personal note. This response is four paragraphs of AI-drafted apology that hits every customer service best practice and misses the only thing that matters: that Janet in receiving is going to be annoyed because she specifically asked for Thursday delivery so she could leave early on Friday."

Claire read the email. She was quiet for a moment. "It's efficient," she said, but the defense was already softening.

"It's adequate," Dana said. "And adequate is the enemy of everything we've built here."

[Chapter continues — approximately 2,500 words total]

Chapter 11: The Resistance (The Math Fight)

Will Easton had been watching from the edges for two months, and Dana had almost forgotten he was there. That was a mistake.

He appeared in Ray's office on a Monday morning with a new deck — shorter this time, twelve slides instead of forty, which meant he had learned something about manufacturing audiences even if he hadn't learned the thing Dana wished he had. She found out about the meeting twenty minutes after it ended, when Ray called her in and closed the door, which he never did unless the conversation was going to be uncomfortable.

"Will presented an updated model to me this morning," Ray said. He was sitting behind his desk with his reading glasses on, which meant he'd been studying numbers. "He's been tracking your program's progress. He acknowledges the operational improvements. He says the skill docs are impressive, the director model is working, the TAO framework is sound."

Dana waited. Compliments from consultants were the polite throat-clearing before the knife.

"But his point is this: your program hasn't reduced headcount. It hasn't reduced cost. You've increased capability, but capability isn't what the board asked for. The board asked for savings. His model shows $4.2 million in annual savings through a 30% headcount reduction. Your model shows — and I'm quoting him here — 'interesting operational improvements with no measurable impact on the P&L.'"

Dana felt her jaw tighten. She had been so focused on proving that multiplication worked — on the skill docs, on Claire's transformation, on Marcus's turnaround, on the TAO rollout — that she had forgotten to translate the results into the language that boards speak. She had been building a case in operational terms while Will had been sharpening his case in financial ones. That was a failure of strategy, and it was hers.

"He wants a decision by end of month," Ray said. "The PE firm wants a decision by end of month. I've been holding them off, Dana, but I need something I can take to the board. Something with numbers."

"You'll have it," Dana said. She stood up, walked to the door, and paused. "Ray. How many of those forty-two people do you know by name?"

Ray looked at her over his glasses. "All of them," he said quietly.

[Chapter continues — approximately 2,800 words total]

Chapter 12: The Unbreakable Organization (Stress Test)

The call from Pinnacle Paper came on a Thursday at 2:15 PM, and it was the kind of call that used to ruin Dana's month. Mike Schaefer, Pinnacle's account manager, delivered the news with the apologetic efficiency of someone who had already made the decision and was now performing the courtesy of informing the affected parties: Pinnacle's main production facility in Missouri had experienced a fire in their corrugating line. No injuries, but significant equipment damage. They would be unable to fulfill orders for a minimum of three weeks, possibly four.

Pinnacle supplied forty percent of Mercer's raw corrugated board.

Dana stood in her office doorway and processed the information the way she had been trained to — calmly, systematically, and with the awareness that the next three decisions she made would determine whether this was a disruption or a disaster. In the old Mercer — the Mercer of six months ago — she would have spent the rest of Thursday and all of Friday on the phone, manually reworking schedules, calling secondary suppliers, negotiating rush orders, and relying on the production managers' institutional knowledge of which orders could be delayed and which clients would tolerate it.

The old Mercer would have lost three weeks. Maybe more, because the institutional knowledge required to reroute production lived in a handful of people's heads, and those people would have been overwhelmed, exhausted, and making decisions under pressure with incomplete information.

Dana walked to the production floor and found Hector at his station. "Pinnacle's down for three weeks," she said. "Forty percent of our board supply."

Hector nodded slowly, the way he always did when absorbing bad news — giving the information time to settle before responding. "We have secondary suppliers. But they can't match Pinnacle's spec on the die-cut grades. Not without adjustments."

"Those adjustments — are they in the skill docs?"

Hector allowed himself the smallest possible smile. "I updated them last month. Every material variation, every calibration offset, every quality threshold. Line 1 through Line 4."

[Chapter continues — approximately 2,800 words total]

Chapter 13: One Hundred and Forty (The Results)

One year to the day after the PE firm's memo had landed on Ray Callahan's desk, Dana Whitfield walked the production floor at 6:14 AM. Same time. Same side entrance. Same smell of warm corrugated board and machine oil. Same Subaru in the lot with the same bumper sticker she still couldn't scrape off. But the floor was different now, and so was she.

She stopped at Hector's station, the way she always did. He was there this morning — he was always there, would be for another eighteen months before the retirement he'd announced with a calm that had surprised no one more than himself. He was standing with Kenji Watanabe, a junior operator who had been at Mercer for eleven months, showing him a calibration technique on the die-cut press. But showing wasn't quite the right word. Kenji had Hector's skill doc open on the workstation tablet, and he was following the decision tree for humidity-adjusted calibration while Hector watched, corrected, and occasionally grunted in a way that Kenji had learned to interpret as approval.

Eleven months. Kenji was performing calibrations that used to require five years of floor experience. Not because Kenji was exceptional — though he was good — but because Hector's twenty-seven years of knowledge were no longer locked in Hector's head. They were documented, structured, searchable, and embedded in a system that any competent operator could follow. Hector wasn't being replaced. He was being multiplied. His knowledge was working shifts he wasn't on, training people he hadn't met, and solving problems that hadn't happened yet.

Dana watched them for a moment and felt something she hadn't expected when this all started: pride that was bigger than the accomplishment. Not pride in the numbers, though the numbers were good. Pride in the fact that she had looked at a memo that proposed cutting forty-two people and had found a way to make all one hundred and forty more valuable instead.

The numbers were good, though. She had the one-year report on her desk, printed and bound, ready for the board meeting at ten.

Revenue: $28.5 million, up from $21 million. Same one hundred and forty people.

[Chapter continues — approximately 2,800 words total]

Chapter 14: The Ripple (Beyond Mercer)

The phone call came from Ray on a Friday afternoon, which was unusual because Ray did not make phone calls on Friday afternoons. Friday afternoons at Mercer were for closing out the week — final quality checks, shipping confirmations, and the informal tradition of someone bringing donuts to the break room from the Lamar's on Santa Fe that had been open since before the industrial park existed.

"I need you to drive to Wichita next Tuesday," Ray said. "There's someone I want you to meet."

The someone was Connie Huang, CEO of Prairieview Manufacturing, a 200-person operation that made precision metal components for agricultural equipment. Ray and Connie had known each other for twenty years — Midwest manufacturing was a small world, and the people who ran mid-size operations in Kansas tended to find each other at the same trade shows, the same industry dinners, the same KU basketball watch parties at restaurants along the Turnpike.

Connie was facing the same pressure Ray had faced a year ago. Different PE firm, same playbook: AI-driven headcount reduction, projected savings in the millions, a consultant with a clean deck and a confident handshake. Connie had been resisting, but she was running out of arguments that didn't sound like nostalgia dressed as strategy.

Ray had told her about Mercer. Connie had said, "Send me your VP of Operations."

Dana drove to Wichita on Tuesday morning, three hours on the Turnpike with the windows cracked and a podcast she wasn't listening to because she was rehearsing what she was going to say. She had never presented the multiplication model to anyone outside Mercer. Inside the company, she could point to the floor, to the people, to the results that everyone had lived through. Outside, she had to tell a story — and the story had to be compelling enough to change a mind that was already being pushed in the other direction.

She pulled into Prairieview's parking lot, a flat stretch of concrete next to a building that looked like a sibling of Mercer's — same industrial architecture, same loading docks, same row of pickups in the employee lot. Manufacturing in Kansas had an aesthetic, and it was function over everything.

[Chapter continues — approximately 2,800 words total]

Chapter 15: The Other Memo (What This Was Really About)

Dana sat at her desk on a Saturday morning in April, the plant quiet around her, and opened a blank document. The building had the particular stillness of an industrial space at rest — machines off, lights dimmed to the emergency strips along the floor, the corrugator cold and motionless like a sleeping animal. She could hear the HVAC system cycling and the faint ticking of the building settling in the spring warmth, and nothing else. This was her favorite version of Mercer — the version where the systems hummed in the background and the human energy that made the place alive was temporarily stored in apartments and houses across Johnson County, recharging for Monday.

She had come in to write something that had been forming in her mind for weeks, assembling itself from the accumulated weight of the past year — from the morning she'd read the PE firm's memo to the afternoon she'd stood in Connie Huang's conference room in Wichita and watched a room full of skeptical manufacturing leaders start nodding. It was not a report. It was not a presentation. It was a memo, written to no one in particular and everyone in general — to the leader sitting somewhere right now, staring at a headcount reduction proposal, feeling the weight of names attached to numbers, and wondering if there is another way.

She typed the heading: A Note on Multiplication.

Then she deleted it and typed: For the Leader Who Thinks There Might Be a Better Way.

She started writing.

A year ago, someone put a memo on my desk that proposed cutting forty-two people from our company using artificial intelligence. The math was clean. The logic was sound. The savings were real. And every name on that list belonged to a person who carried knowledge that no spreadsheet had ever captured and no AI model had ever seen.

I did not fight the memo. I did not argue against AI. I asked a different question: what if AI could make those forty-two people more valuable instead of more expendable?

This is what I learned.

[Chapter continues — approximately 3,000 words total]