The Corporate Shuffle (That Could've Been an Email!) Hardcover – April 2, 2026

The Corporate Shuffle is the concluding chapter of the That Could've Been an Email! trilogy — a deadpan, unsentimental look at what happens when private equity arrives with a modernization mandate and a very specific definition of alignment. Set over four months, the novel follows the technology organization at ASYS through the quiet machinery of a post-acquisition restructuring: the workforce reductions that never get called a RIF, the leadership changes framed as strategic realignment, and the slow recalibration of who is still in the room and why.Thad Reynolds, the company's CTO, is watching all of it with the careful attention of someone who already knows how the math works out. So is his team, professionals who have spent months delivering through conditions that made delivery unreasonable, and who understand, without it being said, that institutional knowledge and transaction value are not the same thing.The new ownership is not incompetent. The incoming CIO is not a villain. The consulting firm has a methodology. Every decision is individually defensible.That's the point.The Corporate Shuffle doesn't traffic in catastrophe. It finds the humor — dry, specific, and occasionally brutal — in the ordinary mechanics of organizational change: the 4:47 p.m. calendar invite with no agenda, the performance improvement plan as attrition strategy, the press release that describes everything accurately and explains nothing.For anyone who has survived a restructuring, absorbed a reorg, or watched institutional memory walk out the door with a severance package — this one is for you.Your resilience has been noted.Unfortunately, your position has been eliminated. Read more