"This is your new office, Graham. I think it suits your position."The room sat in the basement—no windows, wedged between the old storage cage and the loading dock. Somebody near the credenza laughed into his coffee. Graham picked up the key and walked out without a word.Three weeks later, Victoria stepped off the basement elevator and found a line of people waiting outside that door. What stopped her was not the crowd; it was the man standing at the end of it.Victoria had been chief executive of Weatherington Business Solutions for nine weeks when she announced the Unified Response Initiative.The company managed facilities, maintenance contracts, and vendor coordination for corporate clients across the Midwest, and from the 28th floor of the Chicago headquarters, its problems looked like math: margins had slipped for six straight quarters; three of the largest service agreements came up for renewal within the year; her father, who still chaired the board, had a habit of asking questions in a soft voice that made the answers sound inadequate before anyone gave them.The initiative was supposed to fold the incident desk—a group of 11 people who did nothing but chase cross-department problems—into a single online ticketing platform.Graham Hensley read the implementation deck twice: he read it the first time at his desk on the 14th floor, and the second time at his kitchen table after his daughter went upstairs with a permission slip for a swim meet held to the refrigerator by a magnet shaped like a lighthouse.He was 43 years old and had been at the company for 14 of those years, which was long enough to know that the deck was not wrong about anything it described; it was wrong about what it left out. Every example in it involved one department fixing one thing. Nothing in it explained who would own a problem that belonged to three departments at once, which was the only kind of problem the incident desk had ever handled.He raised it in the operations review on a Tuesday morning in a room with a view of the lake and a long table that seated 18. He did not make a speech. He said that in March, a client had waited 19 days for a repair that cost $4,200—not because the repair was difficult, but because engineering, procurement, and contract control each believed one of the other two had authority to approve it. He said the platform would route that same request faster and still leave nobody at the end of it.Then he sat down.Blair Whitcomb, the chief strategy officer, answered before Victoria could: she said the example was anecdotal, that the new platform had escalation logic built in, and that the data did not support a structural concern.Graham said the data came out of the same system that marked the request closed on day 11 while the client was still calling.