“Sure,” I say. “But what’s a Lifeboat Exercise?”

It is as grotesque as it sounds: a meeting where management ranks all the employees in order of whom we’d keep on the aforementioned lifeboat in a dire, business-threatening situation and whom we’d throw overboard first.3 When the day comes, the twenty-odd managers in Chuck’s org gather in a conference room that reeks of onions from some pizza a previous group left behind. It’s windowless except for a panel by the door that HR has covered with blank paper. Handwritten signs reading DO NOT ENTER!!!!!! ORGANIZATIONAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW IN PROGRESS are posted on both doors. By 6:00 p.m., we’re an hour over the scheduled end time and are only halfway through the alphabet. The doughnuts Chuck’s assistant brought have been sitting untouched in the middle of the table—doughnuts don’t really sync with onion fumes—but now people are starting to pick at them, sensing dinner could be a long way off. I wish someone would at least call for a ten-minute break, but it’s not going to be me. If I’ve learned anything this year, it’s that the kinds of people who openly admit to needing food or pee breaks are also the kinds of people who get hurled off lifeboats around here.