I, Shen Du, was an HR manager at a major internet company. The night I laid off three hundred people, I dropped dead from overwork.
When I opened my eyes again, I was in the underworld. My position: King of Reincarnation. My predecessor had been dismissed. I was the fourth, and final, replacement. If I messed things up again, the Underworld Bureau would be shut down.
Here was the mess I inherited:
Eighty percent of the ghost officers had quit, and the reincarnation queue was eight hundred years long.
The Soup Granny had been watering down her soup for three thousand years.
The Eighteen Levels of Hell each did their own thing, and everything below was in chaos.
The Heavenly Court held performance reviews once every three thousand years. Fail, and your position was cut.
On my first day, I looked through the ledgers and found 23,600 ghost officers on the books. The number actually receiving their salaries? Zero.
I'd spent fourteen years in HR. I'd seen terrible companies, but nothing this bad. Right then and there, I announced: anyone who didn't return to work within seven days would be struck from the rolls. More than two thousand came back by the second week. In the third week, I slapped the new review forms down in front of the auditor sent by the Heavenly Court's Finance Bureau.
They called me a hotheaded upstart parachuted in from nowhere. They said the Underworld Bureau had been this way for thirty thousand years, and asked who I thought I was.
They said I could never pull the blade from the chief of the Eighteenth Level of Hell.
Three months later, the Underworld Bureau's first report landed on the Heavenly Court's desk.
Three years later, the reincarnation queue had gone from eight hundred years to three hundred.
Thirty years later, the Underworld Bureau became the first organization in the Three Realms to earn “Organizational Efficiency Certification.”
Everyone in the Three Realms wanted to know: “What the hell did you do to the Underworld Bureau?”
I said, “Nothing much. We just started using KPIs.”
