Before we begin
In September 1945, a farmer in Fruita, Colorado took an axe to a young Wyandotte rooster and missed the jugular. The bird survived. Not for a few minutes, not in some diminished twilight state, but for eighteen months. Mike, as he came to be known, ate, drank (via eyedropper into his exposed oesophagus), and moved around with enough vigour that his owner eventually took him on tour. Scientists came to look, and crowds paid to see him. He became, in his headless way, famous.
The reason Mike kept going was that the axe had left his brainstem intact. Breathing, circulation, basic reflexes; all of it continued. What was gone was everything above that. The parts of the brain that process sensation, that register experience, that build any kind of picture of the world. Mike was not suffering. He was not afraid. He was not anything, in the sense that matters. He was a body performing the functions of life with nobody inside performing them.
I have worked in and around large organisations for most of my adult life. I have sat in rooms where the same conversation was happening for the third year running. I have watched strategies get launched with energy and gradually thin into procedure. I have seen the moment when an organisation loses whatever it was that made it capable of learning, and then kept going anyway, kept meeting, kept reporting, kept producing the appearance of forward motion, for years after the thing that would have let it know what was happening to it had stopped working.
Mike lived for eighteen months. Some organisations manage considerably longer. I’d like to think that in a small way, my legacy will be in this publication as I look at my options for work as someone in his 60s.
