Knowledge Transfer

Ravi Menon is good at his job. That turns out to be the problem.

Arbor is four hundred people in Palo Alto making workflow software for hospitals. Unglamorous, and it matters. When the company decides it needs an assistant called Ora, Ravi is tapped to help train it: fifty minutes a week, every Tuesday, explaining out loud the things he has spent four years learning to do without thinking.

It is the dullest assignment of his career, and he is surprisingly bad at it.

Then Ora gets good. Then it gets good at being him.

Over four quarters Ravi sits through a snack audit, a self-review, an offsite with a ropes course, a calibration call he should not be on, and a promotion that goes to someone else. There is no villain anywhere in it. His manager means it when he says he has his back. The CEO has a board. The twenty-four-year-old promoted over him is genuinely likeable, which is worse.

And then there are sixty days, and a clock that starts the morning after, and the one question nobody at Arbor is ever asked to answer: if nobody did anything wrong, who did this?

Knowledge Transfer is told in the artefacts of working life - the calendar invitations, the Slack threads, the all-company emails, the posts nobody wanted to write. Fifty-eight chapters, each one opening as a meeting you cannot get out of.