YOU SAY POTATO...

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Tomorrow morning you go to work at Amalgamated Potato and find an envelope on your desk with the CEO's name in the upper-left corner, and you sit down and draw a deep breath. After 22 years working your way up through the Skin Division, you are about to become road kill, one more confused raccoon smeared across the corporate highway.

Amalgamated has been downsizing like crazy for two years now. Everyone works 60 hours a week and goes home with a briefcase as big as a garment bag. You have languished at your present salary, in the mid five digits, for quite some time, and the new management team, guys in their mid-30s, who came here from pasta, and are trying to bring pasta-type glamour and growth to the humble potato so that Amalgamated can turn a humongous profit and be sold and make top management dizzyingly rich, is cutting costs by decimating the drones, and now it's your turn to walk the plank.

But you open the envelope, and it isn't your final notice. It is a memo announcing that Amalgamated Potato is about to transform itself through Total Quality Organization, a team-oriented leadership process in which power flows holistically, and you will spend three days next week at a seminar being empowered.

So you report to the seminar center, a big white concrete-origami structure with skylights and indoor trees and maple floors and modular furniture in primary colors, and you sit in a circle of potato employees with loose-leaf notebooks on their laps (Tools for Transformation), listening to a young facilitator named Terri explain how TQO works. She is friendly in a robotic way, as if she had taken one of those personal-development courses where they train you to look the other person in the eye when you speak to him and always say his name.

"Our business isn't potatoes; it's helping people live and work to their full potential," she says. "This is a team process; management does not 'make decisions'; management empowers the team-leadership process."

Oh, you think. I see.

The words holistic, leadership, process, quality and commitment crop up everywhere--sentences like "The commitment to quality is a holistic value structure throughout the leadership process that is accessed dynamically through all functions of the organization from the bottom up." Sentences that, the moment you hear them, they're gone, like gas.

It dawns on you that nobody at Amalgamated will ever utter a simple declarative sentence again.

This might be a good time to quit your job and head for Alaska and open a fishing camp, you think.

You blame liberals for this at first: something about the term facilitator makes you think of liberals and their schoolmarm view of the world ("No running, please, no pushing, no bad talk") that leads them to eliminate sharp edges and outlaw flirtation between strangers and rearrange the playing field so that the sidelines are the goals. Liberals are in charge of the schools, and they rewrite the tests to keep the scores from dropping. Liberals run the churches, and nobody talks about sin lest it tend to make folks feel marginalized.

But TQO isn't the work of liberals. Liberalism is dead, so dead that Democrats have all become moderate Republicans, and the heavy hand of Big Government is now limp and damp and trembly. TQO is the heavy hand of Big Business. You want to see a big mitt, this is it.