Last updated on January 19, 2023
In the summer of 2018, one of the world’s largest chip manufacturers, located in heart of Silicon Valley, contacted us for a consultation. Their biggest fear was that fear was not spreading fast enough and they were not losing share to their competition as quickly as the board had projected. We deduced that since Giant computing was a company with a large number of type-A personalities, fear was not naturally spreading on its own. So, we introduced them to a secret weapon that we have found to work 100% of the time on 100% of all companies. It is known as the fearmonger.
These harbors of the half-truth are not to be chosen lightly. During our recruiting process, we started by giving different rumors to each of the potential recruits. Then we monitored and graded them based on which rumor got back to us first, factoring in the creativity of the spin, the speed of the spread and the plausible deniability. Once we identified our person, we welcomed them into Giant computing leadership’s inner circle. The more access they have to executives, the more believable their hearsay became.
It didn’t take long for the leaders to realize that the most valuable people they could surround themselves with are those who take great pride in sniffing out disinformation about others and spreading it like mono at summer camp. This is because the best and brightest of this craft sees fear-mongering as more than just a job but instead, a calling. The great ones commit endless hours to amassing a robust and complex internal filing system of information on all levels of employees. And no scrap of data is ever deemed too small. The Giant computing leadership commented that while they rarely saw their fearmonger, they always seemed to be present. The head of innovation, William Giant, said he was most impressed by the fearmonger’s discipline to go months after acquiring a juicy morsel of information before surgically dropping it at the precise moment when it would cause the most damage. Making sure every unfounded rumor became an opportunity to create a speculation of doom. Capable of taking the smallest crumb of gossip and forming it into a dagger, then perfectly inserting it between rib 4 and 5 and slowly twisting. After just 3 months of having the fearmonger in the hallways, we ran a survey where one of the questions asked the employees to describe the tone of the office in one word. We are proud to say the top five answers were, paranoia, chaos, overwhelmed, and anxious, with uncertainty and isolation tied for fifth.
FEAR Incorporated continues to work directly with the ever-changing leadership at Giant computing. Their board of directors credits us with helping them fall behind in R&D, recruitment of top talent and, most importantly, sales. We are currently working on a case study with a professor of business at Prestigious University, in Boston Massachusetts that will soon be at the center of one of their required MBA classes.
If you would like help identifying or recruiting a fearmonger for your company, please reach out to our recruitment office at fear@fear-incorporated.com
(Names of companies and employees have been redacted due to legal article 420-28a and article 129-11b)