It was a sharp winter's day, with the sun shining crisp and clean against the steel and glass towers that mark out London's financial centre. In the offices of Mackel Stell, the American investment bank, the blinds had snapped shut early that morning when the light sensors detected the first rays of the sun. On the sixth floor, the occupants of meeting room seven sat in the gloom, idly doodling while watching the poorly produced PowerPoint presentation on the screen in front them.

The management consultant stood next to the screen and looked smug. The bar charts, 3D pies, spider diagrams and aggressively animated organograms of his presentation showed just how right he had been. Now phase two had launched; things were getting interesting.

Jon Harley's advice, after years of study, was that the bank's research team should adopt the organisational approaches of the anti-globalisation movement. In his MBA, he had written paper after paper arguing that the organisational structures adopted by the anti-capitalists should be copied by industry. They were more flexible and more committed than the any area of industry, and he could not hide his enjoyment at the delicious irony of stealing the protesters' methods to advance capitalism.

At Mackel Stell's equity research unit, out went top-down hierarchical structures and in came random allocation of power. The role of managing director now changed hands every day, moving from employee to employee at the whim of a computer program's randomising algorithm.

Spurred on by the success of his programme's initial steps, the research team began to embrace fully the rainbow colours of radical politics, which included installing a "Pace" flag nicked from an Italian during an anti-war march and hung over the entrance to the gents' toilets. Next to the little kitchen in the corner of the office was a pile of Socialist Worker newspapers, giving employees the chance to understand how, amongst other things, "the tsunami tragedy has shown the consequences of capitalist globalisation".

It was not long before the team had splintered into different factions. The key division grew up between the situationists, who distained talk and preferred action, and the politicos, who loved to talk and never seemed to do anything other than loudly accuse the United States of war crimes.

The situationists had the upper hand that week, and had decreed that all reports published that day would be in an Indian dialect spoken only by a few thousand people, thus illustrating "the yawning gap between the North and the South". Furthermore, one report – "Currency Derivatives in South Africa: A Risk-based Analysis" – would be sung by a choir of local schoolchildren in the bank's entrance hall, though only if they could master an appropriately sardonic tone of voice.

Following their performance, all the children would then hold a symbolic, and Mackel Stell-branded, 'die in' at an as yet unannounced location in the City to protest the violence implicit in the world of financial risk.

* * *

On their way home, the passing City crowds watched a small group of immaculately dressed schoolchildren mock dying, with great theatricality, outside Myers & Stonecraven, the long-established shirt-seller, near London Wall – The choice of Myers & Stonecraven reflected the situationists' desire to "move away from mass-corporate protests, such as demonstrating outside McDonalds, towards a boutique model of consumer/retailer antagonism". Behind them was a large screen, reading "Mackel Stell: Banking on the Future", though someone – inevitably – had replaced the B of "Banking" with a W.

As the eight-year-olds lay on the pavement, dressed in three-piece suits liberally splattered with red paint, and with signs around their necks with slogans such as "Fancy Some Risky Business?" and "How Many Risks Have You Taken Today?", the bank's employees paced up and down the pavement with studied slowness intoning the latest swap yields on ten-year US treasury bonds. The occasional wail could be heard from those participants fully engaged with the seriousness of their task.

After half an hour, the whole group left the scene, satisfied at their afternoon's work, leaving only a mass of leaflets scattered liberally on the pavement, and a mixture of bemused and rather upset shop staff, some of whom may have been made to think twice about their own role in the "steaming mass of corporate putridescence".

* * *

The following week, the anarchists/politicos took charge. The situationists had lost control of the group following a heated argument amongst themselves about the appropriate form of female underwear their Tony Blair mannequin should be dressed in before they burned it in a south London cemetery to "remind Tony Bliar and his cronies of the importance of Iraqi women's rights".

As was usual, the politicos' week was one of confusion, internal splits, heady idealism and a profusion of badly printed leaflets attracting staff members to a plethora of workshops, committees, debates, 'actions' and meetings. Unfortunately for the efficacy of the company's operations that week, these variously titled events all ended up being the same: a row of committed individuals in various states of bad dress extemporising at length at how all the world's problems were the net result of the inadequacies and injustices inherent in the capitalist system.

All problems within the company and beyond, they agreed, could be solved through the overthrow of capitalism by the proletariat – who they had yet to meet, but were sure they would like. Injustices could be resolved if people like themselves, working for companies like their own, spontaneously agreed to all go home and take up woodworking on a hand-powered lathe.

Putting such challenges aside, they decided upon a new 'affirmative action' scale for their research reports. All Cuban companies would be rated "buy" or "support", on the grounds that the island is run by a rather elderly gentleman who has been able to stick it to the capitalist pig-dogs of America for more than four decades. As could be expected, the ratings of the US, and anything to do with the US, or sounded like it could have anything to do with US, would be rated "junk", "a rather ironically appropriate name, given the amount of junk that has spewed out of this imperialist war-mongering hate nation for its entire existence and beyond."

* * *
Jon Harley was tempted to frame the performance charts contained in his latest report to Mackel Stell's top brass. The output of the research team was up, profits were at record levels and staff members were volunteering for huge amounts of unpaid overtime. The only fly in the ointment was when someone in the team launched a protest against themselves, which often led to a messy scene.

The experiment seemed to be working, but would the bank's management take on his latest idea? The bank's IT team was ripe for restructuring, and the bank was keen to continue the experiment, but how could he persuade them that the organisation of the Countryside Alliance provided a workable model for IT procurement and support?