Foreword
The world of business is a highly competitive world, a fast moving, mind dazzling, wickedly played game where the players make their own rules to survive and get ahead. It's a self-centered, unsympathetic world where arm twisting, blackmail and violence often take precedence over managerial ability and sound economic principles. A man has to fight tooth and nail in order to stay in the game, but if he wants to win, if he wants to climb up the corporate ladder, it takes more than fighting ability; it takes cunning, charisma, ruthlessness and a capacity for manipulating other people's lives.
The Company Doctor is the story of a man with just such qualifications and the innocent, young girl who has risen within the giant superstructure of his corporation in record time. But his success has been due more than anything else to his ability to satisfy the wives of important customers. Fred isn't content, however, with the executive position he now finds himself in. His ambitions reach all the way to the top - the board of directors - and Stella Swanson, his efficient and unsuspecting secretary, is the person he has singled out to get him one move closer to his goal.
In the story of Stella Swanson and Fred Rodgers we see one of the many examples of how subtle the working rules of the business world can be and how the most modern psychological treatments are used by big companies to their advantage. Our readers will be able to witness and appreciate the pressures put on men and women by trained doctors and psychologists to change their innermost mental structure and even their moral code. Here, under the guise of medical treatment, of relaxation and group therapy, doctors hired by a large corporation manipulate employees' minds for the ultimate goals and pleasures of the corporation executives.
This is a story that reveals some of the psychological horror of our modern, impersonal, computer world and the men and women who, because of ambition, innocence, or weakness, fall prey to it. Possibly its most striking feature is the character development - or deterioration - of the young girl who falls unwittingly into the strangle hold of the corporate establishment. Her only salvation rests in the reader's ability to understand and forgive.
Stella Swanson's story is one of an innocent's descent into hell, a story made even more bone-chilling by the fact that it and other seemingly fantastic tales lurk menacingly, just below the surface of the commercial world. We, The Publishers, are proud to present such a fine expose to our discerning public.
The Publishers Sausalito, California October, 1972