The facilities manager walks through the gleaming corporate headquarters, past conference rooms where executives huddle around whiteboards mapping out their "systems optimisation initiative." The buzzwords drift through glass walls like expensive cologne: synergies, efficiencies, digital transformation. Meanwhile, Tom, who keeps the building running, already knows why productivity has dropped 15% over the past month.
The HVAC system is dying. Temperature swings between 68 and 76 degrees throughout the day. People are uncomfortable, distracted, irritable. A failing damper motor, $300 to replace, maybe an afternoon of work. But nobody asks the janitor about systems thinking.
The executives will spend six weeks in committee analysing workflow optimisation. Tom could fix the actual problem before lunch. This is not a story of class or education. This is a story of how we've built a world where the people who understand problems least are the ones paid most to solve them.
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