Page 13 - TruthAboutLyingFinalAmazon17

Nicholas Boothman
The conference room at Cerulean Dynamics was too
quiet. It smelled of expensive upholstery and the kind of
sweat that doesn't wash off. Henry sat at the long table, his
leather portfolio open, waiting for the silence to break.
Across from him sat three executives who looked like they
hadn't slept in days.
"Gentlemen," Henry began, "I understand you're facing a
challenging situation."
"It was a cooling system failure in the Ohio plant," the
CFO, Logan Edwards, said. "Forty-seven confirmed dead.
The internal audits show we flagged the risk eight months
ago. We just didn't want to spend the eighty million to fix it."
Henry didn't flinch. He just opened his tablet. "Eighty
million is a line item," he said. "Forty-seven deaths is a
statistic. My job isn't to make the truth disappear, it’s to
make it a distraction. By the time I’m done, the public won't
be talking about your cooling system. They'll be talking
about your new 'Safety First' initiative."
"Can you make them forget?" Logan asked.
"I don't need them to forget," Henry said. "I just need
them to be looking at something else."
He spent the next hour laying out the strategy. It was
elegant, really. A masterpiece of misdirection.
The Villain Swap: Identify a mid-level manager who'd
already been planning to retire. Make him the scapegoat.
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