Black Holes, Inc., was a start-up company that targeted travelers by providing maps and directions to the least known and visited places, or “black holes.” Unfortunately, the company did not meet annual revenue expectations. . (The initial orders that looked so promising for investors were submitted by the company VP of marketing during his research work in the competing territory of the Bahamas.)

The board of directors took some measures to change the situation. It was decided to cut 75% of the development team staff (there used to be four of them), and introduce incentives to correlate each employee’s paycheck to his or her actual work. The hourly workers’ paychecks would depend on the number of hours worked. All the managers would continue to receive their salaries, but would get no bonuses while the company operated in the red. It was confirmed once again that the holes were extremely hard to sell. Therefore, the salespeople would be paid an hourly wage plus commission to stimulate hard work. Three new positions were opened to support the project: an IT director to improve the communication of management decisions over the network; a VP of travel arrangements to focus the development team on two new tasks: searching for “black holes” and optimizing travel routes; and an order administrator to support Web client registration and privileged access.

Of course, the changes had a serious impact on the “chess match” between the management and development groups (Fig. 1.4). It was over. Ben, who represented what was left of the development team, did not play chess. He took silver (a trip to one of the “black holes”) while the management team was awarded the gold.