What we have here is a failure to communicate. And anticipate.

There are a pair of terms we've come to use in our company, terms my partners and I arrived at after seeing management and employee, company and consumer get at ridiculous cross-purposes to each other: Insulated Deciders. Isolated Deliverers.

Salon: [get the day-pass, it's free.]

"The biggest fear people have isn't terrorists," says Don Pellow, a full-bearded, burly former president of the main United Auto Workers union local at the Electrolux plant. "The terror is that they won't have medical care, not getting blown up in a taxi by an Iraqi."

It's not just their own fates at stake, either. If there are no jobs or only Wal-Mart jobs, says union president Carl Hoag, "there won't be any money to run the government .... How you gonna fix the state deficit if people aren't working?" And the impact will ripple further into the community. A local doctor, for example, will soon be forced to move by his health-plan employer. In all, local estimates say, the Electrolux shutdown will cost the economy here 8,000 jobs.

But the reaction of 74-year-old Mayor Walker to his failed effort to save the plant is a little more surprising. "It's a tough time for me," he said, reflecting on his experience in the cozy parlor of his home. "I've been a lifelong Republican. I have never voted for a Democratic president or a Democratic governor, but I think I'm going to change this year. I think NAFTA -- and I supported that -- is just killing the industrial strength of this country. Michigan is being hit especially hard."

(emphasis mine)

With the exception of extremely deep-pocketed organizations, we are seeing in the people who come to us for suggestions on how to get out of the ditch, an unusual, and deeply dispirited, alignment of those insulated deciders and isolated deliverers--management and employee.

While many influentials have focused on "anger" as the emotion du jour, the press, as per usual obsesses on the wrapping paper and not the present inside: Fear. 9-11 brought fear, but time eased the tension, despite overseas adventures and transatlanic distemper. This fear is different. It reminds me of an odd parallel, involving, of all things, cancer patients....

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