The picture it painted of the future was anything but rosy. Written by Frank Schirrmacher, an editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper, the book chronicled the demographic transformation occurring in Germany and seemed to be the hot topic of conversation everywhere Heberer went. While the executive team might not have been reading many demographic studies, he trusted they’d heard of the wildly popular bestseller Das Methusalem-Komplott (The Methuselah Conspiracy). Heberer had timed his proposal carefully. “Granted, that’s a long way off,” he thought, “but what could be a bigger priority than a disaster you clearly see coming?” He flipped open his report to look once again at the shocking statistic: Without immigration, the country’s population would fall from 82 million to 24 million by 2100. The average age of the German population was steadily rising, and that had real implications for the midsize pharmaceutical company’s personnel. He’d done all the research, and everything he’d read pointed to a rocky road ahead. For the past six months, this had been his pet project. Noting the crispness of the binder, Heberer doubted that anyone had read beyond his cover sheet. On the title page was affixed a yellow Post-it, with the words “Not a priority” penned in the ornate handwriting of Erwin Baum, the vice president of HR. It outlined the long-term human resources strategy he believed Medignostics needed to adopt in order to remain competitive in the next 20 years. The internal-mail envelope he’d just torn open with great expectations contained the report he’d labored over for months. Human resources manager Frank Heberer frowned.