MBA Page 2

  Ben pocketed the speech notes and continued, ‘As Dean Gyro told you, Alex Bakhtin is so sorry that he cannot be here in person. As his chief of staff I know how deeply he had been looking forward to today, not only to meeting all of you but also to remembering his very dear Julia. But there is one task that Alex insists on handling personally, wherever in the company it may have to take place, even if there are other commitments that he has made. That task is downsizing. It is true – this year Bakhtin Enterprises will grow 27 percent. But the task of pruning for market fitness is never complete. He wants to be here, but the task of selfless leadership is sadly elsewhere tonight.’

  There was a gratifying body to the applause that welled up around the room. The applause grew, listened to itself and decided what it wanted to do next. For a moment it waited respectfully. For the fallen, for the downsized, for the however many in whichever country with whom Alex Bakhtin had gone to be, this outpost of capitalism dipped its flag. But then glasses of champagne and canapé plates were downed, to enable the hands that had held them to come together more vigorously. Three million pounds of endowment were in the college coffers. And Ben had spoken well.

  Gyro came forward and with the dean’s help Ben unveiled the glass faux-Louis XIV chair – ‘something to remind us of transparency in business, and a fitting accompaniment to the new tower’. Ben read out the engraving: ‘Dedicated to selfless leaders by Alex Bakhtin’.

  Delight surged around the room. It was a good night for Hampton – more money from a top business name – and a good night for Ben.

  ‘I was told you could use this,’ someone whispered in his ear. A glass of champagne was thrust into his hand. ‘I’m the deputy dean, Dorothy Lines.’

  Ben took a grateful gulp. ‘Ben Stillman. A pleasure to meet you, Professor Lines. I guess getting an actual chair is a bit unusual?’

  ‘Unusual and very witty, but what personally fascinates me is the legal aspect. Forgive me, my field is law.’

  ‘Someone’s got to do it,’ Ben grinned.

  ‘Very good of you to see it that way. The Julia Bakhtin Chair in Selfless Leadership will be the first endowed chair on either side of the Atlantic where the name will automatically change if our benefactor remarries.’

  ‘How very practical.’

  ‘Indeed. Now – my instructions were quite strict; everyone wants to meet our hero so you must circulate. But it’s very nice to have a Hampton alumnus back in such distinguished circumstances.’

  A woman stepped forward into Ben’s path: half-Chinese, perhaps in her late thirties. ‘May I?’

  ‘Of course!’ beamed the deputy dean. ‘Connie Yung is the top student on the MSc programme we run for managers in the NHS. In fact, she’s just agreed to join our board of governors. We wanted someone grown-up with recent student experience.’

  Connie ignored Ben’s offered hand. Her gaze ran up and down him like an airport scanner. She was wearing a light scent, something reminiscent of orchids and revenge. ‘A bit of a slip, eh? The board of governors got me when they could have had you, Mr Hero.’

  ‘Ah. We MBAs fail the grown-up part of the test.’

  ‘Please tell your boss I’m gutted he couldn’t make it, because I came to throw this drink over him. I’d been looking forward to it all day. He screwed a business I was in. Lots of my friends lost their jobs.’

  Dorothy Lines’ brow creased.

  Ben’s stomach jumped. ‘Look, I’m sorry about that. Maybe there’s another side to that story? Really I’m just a back-room boy. I wouldn’t know.’ Actually, her perfume was quite enticing, not cloying or insipid. ‘Since you’re joining the board of a business school, how about we call it quits and put it down to market forces?’

  Connie smiled briefly. ‘Oh, there was definitely an invisible hand, but it was your boss’s.’

  Ben wanted to say more, but Connie had turned away. Dorothy took his arm.

  ‘So Connie’s a doctor in the NHS?’ In front of the deputy dean Ben wasn’t going to fall into the trap of asking if she was a nurse.

  ‘No, she’s an HR director.’

  He unsuccessfully tried to stifle a grimace. His only experience in human resources had suggested to him that HR was glorified paper-shuffling.

  A large, square-cut emerald ring with diamond acolytes surged into his view. The ring was attached to a left hand. The right hand brought a young man of Ben’s age in tow, and a voice like a cello entered Ben between two of his lumbar vertebrae.

  ‘Bravissimo, Mr Stillman! So I might have guessed; you are also an expert on our health system.’ This time the warrior queen Dianne introduced herself. She was a psychologist as well as the dean’s wife. Her younger male companion was Ed Lens, who worked in the Prime Minister’s office. Ben gathered from Dianne that Ed was the mastermind behind Britain’s world-leading health reforms. ‘I am aghast,’ Dianne continued, ‘despite every effort, to have missed the first part of your talk. Although as a cheap shot in mitigation, I was there for more of it than Mr Bakhtin. Is it impertinent to ask whether any of those Bakhtin folk tales are true? We academics are impossible, I know – that unstoppable quest for facts.’

  ‘All of it,’ Ben replied, ‘as far as I know. I’ve never met Alex’s parents, but he does keep two dogs, Shareholder and Value. They salivate all over you, and then bite. They think it’s a sign of affection.’

  ‘Has Mr Bakhtin been to Number Ten?’ inquired Lens. He had a climber’s physique, though given his place of work his skill was probably climbing over bodies rather than rocks.

  Ben tried to recall the photographs on Alex’s wall. There was one at Number Ten, but with whom? Alex was not old enough for it to have been Thatcher, and Major had no glamour. So probably it was the one who departed 12 months ago to spend more time with his international bank accounts, in which case best nothing mentioned. ‘I don’t think Mr Bakhtin has had the pleasure of meeting the Prime Minister. I’m sure he would consider the opportunity a great honour. The Prime Minister’s recent book struck him very forcibly.’ Well, it would strike him once Ben had written him a half-pager on it.

  ‘Consider it done,’ declared Dianne. Her hand settled on Ben’s arm as if drawing a DNA sample for her personal database through his jacket and shirt. The two of them watched Lens depart. ‘Ed has the most enormous influence. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the Prime Minister visited Hampton in the near future. So when were you a Hampton graduate? It must have been before our time. I couldn’t have forgotten you if you had come to one of our student soirées.’

  ‘I did the MBA three years back, part-time.’

  ‘Were you working with Alex then?’

  ‘No. After my first degree it was pretty tough to get a job, but I got in as a management trainee with the local water utility. It was dull as ditchwater …’

  ‘Exquisitely appropriate!’

  ‘… but they let me go down to four days a week and self-fund an MBA. Believe me, I had a stack of debt to pay off by the time I finished here.’

  ‘Then Bakhtin Enterprises spotted you and you haven’t looked back.’

  ‘I guess.’ For the past few minutes Ben felt that something inside him had been melting under Dianne’s attention. He thought of the heat shield of a spacecraft being drawn into an atmosphere by a planet’s gravity. Although guests twice Ben’s age scampered around Dianne’s periphery like mice, she had no eyes for them. ‘An MBA is all very well but I had to prove myself first, running a real business – one of Bakhtin’s smaller ones. But it must have gone OK because 10 months ago I became his chief of staff.’

  ---

  With a start, Ben saw the time – 9.55pm. He made apologies. A text from Alex said ‘Call’, but the mobile’s battery was dead. Free alcohol was still exerting its pull but the ranks of staff and guests had shrunk. Ben searched for a friendly face and was delighted to see Frank Jones, the only lecturer who could
make the finance part of the MBA clear and funny. Frank’s office was around the corner and yes, Ben could use his landline. The call clarity was excellent although, so far as Ben could quickly calculate, Alex was airborne over India.

  The event had gone well and Ben said so. The glass chair had been much admired. There might be an invitation from Number Ten. There was every reason for Alex to be happy, but Ben’s hormones had learned to put themselves into neutral until his boss’s emotional state had been confirmed.

  Things were fine. Alex had already received a gushingly complimentary text about both speech and chair. Dean Gyro knew how to gush fast, in six words or less.

  ‘Ben, Ben, please no bullshit! You did it better than me! You read my mind perfectly!’ Alex exclaimed. ‘When I need you to be me, Ben, you never let me down.’ There was a pause. Mind-reader or not, Ben had no clue as to where the conversation was headed. This was nothing new: part of the job description of genius was ‘mystery’. In the background a cuckoo clock sounded the hour. A cuckoo clock in a private jet?

  A meaningless question from Alex about whether it was now too late (when had that ever mattered in the Bakhtin empire?) led to a request. Could Ben ‘be Alex’ one more time that evening? This would be a very important time – much more important than three million pounds and some kilos of glass. Staff reductions were so tricky, and this one especially so. It was not news that would keep well. Would Ben do it? Would he promise? Did he understand? Or would he rather wait until Alex was back in three days to do it personally?

  When Ben did grasp what Alex intended, having for two long minutes mustered every atom of reflex and memory accumulated over the past year to help him decode his boss’s messages, he replied slowly that, yes, he would do it, that he did promise, that he understood, and that he would rather not wait.

  Bakhtin had asked Ben to downsize himself. Which was how Frank came to be dragged out of the party with no explanation, ordered to bring two (no, three) glasses of champagne and marched to his office, where he sat at his square meeting table like a Wimbledon umpire. Ben fired up Frank’s computer and printer, downloaded two copies of a document from Bakhtin Enterprises’ intranet, and took one of the empty seats.

  ‘Ben,’ Ben began, looking at the empty chair facing him across the table. In truth what Ben was about to do, namely give himself a farewell speech, he would do better than Alex, who would have forgotten half of what Ben had done for the company. Forgotten as if he had never known. And (Alex’s point), hadn’t Ben earned the right for his contribution to the corporate cause to be remembered properly, and to be thanked for it to the best of Bakhtin Enterprises’ ability to do it? And without doubt, the person who could do the best job was Ben.

  So, Ben continued, this could be no easy conversation. Ben’s record was beyond reproach. Ben had joined Bakhtin Enterprises from Hampton on an accelerated management traineeship, first in personnel (torture!) and then in marketing. In his second year he had progressed to his first role in general management, within the EFI division.

  What a debut! He had taken a dull manufacturing business with an ageing plant, few advantages and no ambition, and he had stuffed the competition. Permanently stuffed them. Doubled EFI’s market share. Quintupled profits – which continue to this day. Sustained profits. That was commercial promise for you, without a doubt. When 10 months ago the role of chief of staff to Alex himself had become vacant, Ben had been the obvious choice for it.

  Here, at the centre of the group, how greatly he had contributed. How fully he had exemplified selflessness. How much he would be missed not only by Alex, but by so many executives around the world for whom he had been Alex (or better than Alex) when the demands of selfless leadership made his boss unavailable. As they did now.

  To these hundreds of daily encounters, from six (or sometimes five or even four) in the morning till gone midnight, Ben had brought so much more than the diligence of a good-tempered amanuensis. Or even a clairvoyant one. Ben had brought – he pressed these points because he very much wanted Ben to hear them and to take them in – a gentle kindness and a renewing optimism which were not in Alex’s gift. Often Ben had demonstrated that kindness could not be separated from attention to detail; details that could be overlooked so easily in a leader’s sweeping focus on the big picture.

  Such details needed to be dispatched here. At this point Ben put crosses in a few boxes on the documents he had printed. They were neither more nor less than the crosses that Alex would have put, had someone like Ben prompted Alex to think of them. Four months’ pay in lieu of notice instead of three (selfless workers must eat their fill). Continued benefits, car, retirement contribution and health plan for that time. Access to the group’s outplacement assistance within the limits set out in the schedule.

  And how helpful of the annex to recall in English rather than legalese the restrictions on confidentiality and working for competitors which would continue for rather more than six months. Had writing them comprehensibly (while keeping the lawyers calm) not been one of Ben’s first projects on joining the group? Ben recalled that it had.

  Frank was impressed. Bemused, but certainly impressed.

  And then with the benefit of much practice from many other goodbyes, the finely honed managerial sentiments leapt from caterpillar to butterfly, from dutiful appreciation of the past to excitement about the future (‘your hopes, your dreams’). Ben scrawled his name, original and copy, in the two places provided for the corporation’s signature, and swallowed a mouthful of champagne. He then moved to the other side of the table and scrawled the same name twice more in the places provided for the exiting executive. Swallowing a larger mouthful of champagne, he passed both documents to Frank to witness.

  A few minutes later the two of them were pacing outside in the dark. Frank’s cigarette, now glowing, now quiescent, moved like a lapping wave along the front of the main building. In all his 45 years, said Frank, he had never seen anything like what he had just witnessed. Ben said, well that was business for you. In removing Ben, Alex was in effect taking out a layer of management. The commercial reasons to do so were not pressing, but that was Alex’s business genius – he was always ahead of the game, reading economies and markets before they moved. Ben didn’t doubt that within six months, chopping Ben’s job would seem prescient.

  ‘How do you feel?’ asked Frank.

  Ben was not sure how he felt. ‘Stunned, I guess. Numb.’

  ‘But why you, his right-hand man and one of his best?’ pressed Frank, still mystified by the turn and pace of events. You could build a cathedral (including getting planning permission for an underground car park) in the time it took to get rid of an academic in a university.

  ‘Selfless leadership. Sharing the pain. A bad mistake if he had left his own team untouched.’ Ben paused, reflecting. ‘And he’s right.’

  ‘What about tomorrow?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. I was meant to have been meeting some bankers in Paris, but right now I’m on gardening leave.’

  ‘Someone waiting for you at home?’

  ‘No, I’ve been living on planes since I left here. So any ideas for tomorrow would be welcome …’ Ben broke off and pointed as they turned the corner of the administration building. ‘What is that?’

  The scaffolding-clad new tower had vanished and reappeared. Red construction lights hung in a giant circle in the sky four floors above them, like the marks of a laser pointer. Ben’s eyes adjusted. He could make out the rim of a darkened flying saucer, perched on top of a column of scaffolding like a ball on a golf tee.

  But Frank wasn’t there. He was off, running with surprising agility back to the fading embers of the drinks party. The continued presence of alcohol meant that Dean Gyro had not yet exhausted his enthusiasm for the beauty of the college’s new all-glass chair. ‘Come on!’ Frank called to Ben, pointing to the flying saucer. ‘That has given me an idea.’

  MONDAY
11 JUNE (NIGHT)

  The imam and the two others went upstairs. They entered the imam’s office and all three complied with their religion’s demands concerning shoes. The imam wore hand-stitched calf leather, polished brown brogues and the 30-year-old wore scuffed black Oxfords but both pairs cost over £300. Yet the mass-production slip-ons of the third member of the group were no less revealing. The capitalist religion requires consumption to be conspicuous and to demarcate wealth or salary. The imam had wealth; until minutes before the 30-year-old had had a six-figure salary; while the senior lecturer was – well, what need one say? A senior lecturer in a second-rate business school.

  While Frank and Gyro huddled, Ben had a few minutes to look around. The dean’s office had moved since his time as a student. He recalled two meetings involving cheap sherry, faded armchairs and a matching sofa. The sofa had been half-covered in research questionnaires and had been in the dean’s house. In his first week as dean Gyro had moved the office out of the house and into the first floor, front and centre, of the main college building. The governors had paid top dollar for an American to come and do a job. Part of that job was to wake up anyone who was mistaking Hampton for the suburbs.

  For what, in appointing Gyro, Hampton aspired to be was an internationally ranked business school – a madrassa of capitalism. Capitalism’s madrassas were needed for exactly the same reason as those of any other self-respecting religion. The human population was exploding, young and global. Therefore any religion worthy of the name – even a religion aiming only to stand still, and the doctrine of shareholder value demanded much more than that – needed to attract ever larger numbers of the young and equip them for their role in the cause. Therefore madrassas were many, and each had their imams, but they were not equal.

  A leading madrassa attracted ambitious minds from all over the world, and scattered them back to the world equipped not only with knowledge but fervour. William C Gyro had never put his job in those terms, but had the description been offered in a scriptural text such as the Harvard Business Review, he would have concurred immediately.