Hone

Chapter 5Wiring the Nervous System

 

Steve has been waiting to write this chapter for about a decade. He's been accused (perhaps by Geoff, definitely by others) of being mildly obsessed with the design of management systems and beams with pride in meetings when other Deloitte executives mention them by name. It's impossible to know exactly where the obsession started, but it might have been sparked by an experience his wife, Michelle, had at the DMV over 25 years ago.

Here's the story. Michelle walked into the local DMV, passport and Canadian driver's license in hand, ready to make a simple exchange. She had just moved with Steve to the United States from Canada and needed to swap her Canadian driver's license for an American one. We aren't sure if it is still this simple, but at the time you only needed to prove you were the person in the driver's license and you could make the swap. Straightforward enough, right?

But as she handed over her documents, the agent behind the counter frowned. “This passport,” he said, tapping the booklet, “it's fraudulent.” Michelle was taken aback. How could her passport, the one she had used to enter and exit the country numerous times, suddenly be deemed fake?

The issue the agent cited was on Michelle's work visa, stapled inside the passport. When Michelle filled in the visa on entry, she accidentally put her first name in the last name section and last name in the first name section. A simple mistake, so she put a line through it and placed ...