Interview with RT Talasek - Author of Alice in Corporate Wonderland

R.T. (Tom) Talasek has spent the last 25 years in various technical, sales, and general management roles in the semiconductor industry for various companies, extending from multibillion dollar international conglomerates to small start-ups. Talasek received his Ph.D. in 1993 from the University of North Texas. While he has published extensively in technology, Alice in Corporate Wonderland represents his first business effort, a product of many years of experiencing Wonderland first-hand. While he has lived almost everywhere someone makes computer chips in the US, Talasek is a proud native Texan, and happy to be home again in the Texas hill country where he participates in various business interests outside the semiconductor industry.

Recently, Mr. Talasek took the time to sit down and answer a few questions about Alice, business school, and corporate culture in general. Enjoy!


Your book, Alice in Corporate Wonderland, provides an amusing, but accurate look at modern day corporate culture. What inspired you to write this book?

I’ve slept since then, so the details are little fuzzy. At any rate, the initial thought came to me during a very short period of time. The initial event involved receiving significant praise and recognition for a task that made me feel ten feet tall. Not an hour passed before my supervisor was royally reaming me out for something that was, in my mind, pretty trivial. Of course, by the time he was through, I felt like I had shrunk to nothing. The growth and destruction of my self image reminded me of the size changes in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland. In Alice in Corporate Wonderland, our Alice has the same issues with size, only it’s the size of her self confidence, a problem we all suffer every day. Of course her size isn’t affected by eating mushrooms like the original story, since Wonderland is a drug-free work place. Shortly after that realization, I begin to notice other things that reminded me of the original story and my sick little mind was off and running.

Alice’s story addresses some of the most common problems in corporate America. Of all of these problems, which do you feel are the most serious?

As you watch Alice in her experiences at Wonderland she learns that people respond to motivation, be it financial or simple praise. The trick is to make sure that you are motivating people to do what you really want them to do. There have been a lot of “motivated” senior executives in the news lately, many of them in handcuffs. Unfortunately, in my opinion, their compensation plans motivated them to do exactly what they tried to do, drive up stock price any way that they could. While misguided motivation may not be as visible within an organization and most often doesn’t result in breaking the law, people still respond to it. Incentives, especially financially related ones, must be crafted carefully.

The management at Wonderland Inc was out of touch and somewhat outlandish, but were true-to-life characters. What advice can you offer to employees who encounter similar characters in their workplace?

“Run away!” comes to mind, but there’s a more practical suggestion that also comes to mind. It’s important to remember that somewhere in an organization there are people that have a clear vision of where the corporation should be headed, and how to get there. You can’t ignore your management chain, but if you seek out those with the vision, you may find that what you hear from your direct management may make more sense. At any rate, you can share the vision, and support it when opportunities arise.

Interview Continued on Page 2