MBA Page 4
Seated in the lounge scanning the results, Ben felt optimistic. The 10 days and nights would be long and he would be rushed off his feet, but the challenges were manageable. They could be boiled down to four:
First, the Pinnacle family. Wilson Pinnacle Junior had bought into the idea of the tower as a monument to his family’s achievements, so egos were all over it. For example, Junior kept inviting new guests even though he had maxed out the tower’s capacity three weeks earlier. Typical tycoonitis, which needed polite but firm management.
Second, Pinnacle’s corporate executives. Short answer: tell them everything in triplicate and make them look good to their boss.
Third, the invited VIPs. These split into two groups. Those who had given money to the college already, like Bakhtin, needed to feel the college had not gone starry-eyed over someone else’s bigger bucks. But at the same time the earth needed to move for those who had yet to give.
That was not an ideal metaphor. The fourth and last cluster of challenges was the tower itself. There would be snagging – the usual things on a new building. But Ben could see that a lot of the job would involve sitting on the necks of the contractors day and night. Everywhere in the world contractors thought time and budgets were moveable feasts. Given that a significant portion of the world’s personal wealth was due to jet in on 21 June, opening a week from Thursday was less moveable than the Great Wall of China.
Outlandish terrorist threats had not figured in Gyro’s description of the problem, which suited Ben fine. With luck, he could turn some attention to how best to capitalise on the personal networking possibilities of this short stint. It was dawning on Ben that these might be as amazing as Gyro had promised. For example Gyro had just spotted the chairman of First Improvident, ‘his bank’. The phrase meant the bank from which Gyro collected £60,000 a year as a non-executive director. The two were absorbed in conversation on the other side of the lounge.
As Ben stood guard over Gyro’s briefcase and scattered papers, he realised that the next step for him was to judge the right timing and pretext to join the grown-ups’ conversation. What was abundantly clear was that slipping out to the airside shops to look for new underpants was not the opportunity for which he was looking.
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‘Your background in human resources struck us as just the ticket. Of course you’ve only just joined, but the governors wonder if you would take on a little mission.’ Dorothy Lines added hastily, ‘It’s not an investigation or anything like that – just finding out in your own time if we’ve learned all the lessons for the future.’
‘Lessons about what?’ Connie had never imagined becoming a student governor. The more she had seen of high places in organisations the less she had liked them. On the other hand, if the price of joining a board was accepting collective responsibility for its decisions, then she wanted her skills and values to make a difference.
Dorothy Lines explained. ‘Richard Vanish was the dean’s executive assistant until two weeks ago. I was the one Richard called on the Tuesday after the Monday holiday. He hadn’t slept over the weekend, due partly to the stress of the job and partly to bad news about his mother’s health. As the tower opening approached the job was just getting worse. So he asked if he could take his accumulated leave and not come back.’
‘He called you, rather than the dean?’
‘The answer would have been the same in either case, but one of us would have shouted and yelled. It’s OK, we’ve dealt with Richard and we will manage the opening. But the question for the governors is, is there anything about the job that is a longer-term risk factor? Is the normal, day-to-day pressure on the dean’s staff reasonable?’ Lines pursed her lips. ‘Not an inquiry, more of a second opinion. But a very valuable one from someone with your broad human resources perspective. In academia, we become insular very quickly.’
Connie thought that going to a senior manager in the NHS for a second opinion was hilarious, since the health service bred overwork and stress like flies. Perhaps that was the governors’ sense of humour. Still, better to be breakfasted and given something to do than placed on the mantelpiece as a diversity token. ‘A second opinion’s no problem. But my final MSc classes are next week so there’s a limit as to what I can do before then. ’
‘Of course. In any case everyone will be very tied up before the opening.’
‘Not Richard, presumably.’
‘No. But would talking to him be necessary? I promised we wouldn’t harass him. We were colleagues for many years.’
Of course it would be necessary, Connie thought. There was no point in being a dumb torpedo fired at the dean by an unknown clique on the board. Besides, Vanish might be a total fruitcake. The waiter came past and refilled their coffees. She took the opportunity to change the subject. ‘Speaking of the tower opening, the guest list is amazing. How did we pull it off?’
Lines nodded. ‘At first, like many on the board I wasn’t convinced. Would we simply end up with a glass toadstool – even become a laughing-stock? Those questions have been answered. The tower will be an extraordinary teaching space and put Hampton on the global map.’
‘So all of the board are behind Gyro.’
‘Most of us. Some questions haven’t yet been answered. But everything Gyro has promised, he has delivered. His contacts are amazing.’
‘So he’s good news.’
‘Definitely.’
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Ben and Gyro were flying close to the nose of the 747. The good news for Ben was a six-foot-six sedan chair with walnut trim that folded flat. He relaxed as Eric the steward laid the tablecloths and cutlery for lunch. Because of the time-zone change, in 12 hours the final meal on the flight would be breakfast.
‘Would that be your mediocrity research?’ Ben had remembered in the nick of time this morning to look Gyro up on Wikipedia.
Gyro’s expression confirmed that Ben had just scored some points. ‘Old stuff, Ben, at the start of the eighties. You were just born. I hadn’t planned to do a doctorate, but Harvard offered me a place, with funding. It was the chance of a lifetime, but I had to find a research idea. So there I was, drowning in people twice as smart, all scrabbling for something that hadn’t already been studied to death. Excellent companies? Tom Peters was just about to hit the big time with them.
‘Seriously crap companies that crash and burn? For years academics had been rubbernecking the wrecks on the corporate highway. And then one day I realised that there would always be thousands and thousands more mediocre companies than excellent or crap ones. All I had to do was figure out how to turn that into publishable research. And money.’
Ben was puzzled. ‘I don’t get it,’ he said. ‘Companies paid Tom Peters to teach them to be excellent. And they paid to avoid disaster. Why would they pay to be mediocre?’
Gyro reached across a generation to grip his companion’s hand. Nothing in Gyro’s life, before or since, had matched that moment of insight when he had seen the world differently and figured out how to put the difference into his bank account. ‘Wherever you are in the world, whoever you are, you are surrounded by mediocrity.
‘Maybe you’re excellent or maybe you’re average, but you’ve got mediocre competitors. You’ve got mediocre suppliers. You’ve got mediocre customers. You’ve got mediocre colleagues. Understand them, really understand them, take their mediocrity seriously and they can become your lunch. So I became a consultant and did a lot of lunch.’
Two thoughts passed through Ben’s mind like a bullet and its shock wave. Thought one: this was either genius or purest bullshit. Thought two: was there a difference?
They both ordered Bloody Marys as they picked at duck terrine. So this was why Gyro was building the tower. From being a well-paid consultant, Gyro was returning to the land of high academic ideas with a multi-storey idea of his own.
‘Every important concept of contemporary leadership is reflect
ed in the tower’s design. The auditorium is all glass. You look up? Everywhere you see the sky. What will students at the college learn? The sky’s the limit. It’s all glass. So you look down – straight down, between your feet. You see the ground. Nearly everywhere in the auditorium you see the ground. What do you learn?’
Don’t be a leader if you get sick easily, thought Ben.
‘However high you go as a leader, make sure you can see the ground. Then, the walls are all glass. A perfect circle. Which means – ?’ Gyro looked at Ben expectantly.
‘Scan the horizon?’ said Ben tentatively.
‘Exactly!’
Gyro’s eyes were glowing, and Ben was getting infected. The concept of the tower was uncanny, even mind-bending.
‘Normally the acoustics of a glass circle would be terrible,’ Gyro continued. ‘All boom and echo, no clarity – just like leadership in most organisations. But using nanotechnology to modify the glass panels, we will have the perfect acoustic for the human voice and the human ear. Speaking in a natural way, without amplification, and hearing the contribution of everyone in the organisation, wherever they are sitting. That’s another fundamental aspect of leadership. That’s how leadership should be all the time. And we will teach this at Hampton.’
Gyro put on a pair of eyeshades, took a sleeping pill and tucked himself in for the night.
Ben got it, for a few minutes at least: in 10 days he would help open the Sistine Chapel of leadership. However the relentless, fragranced, air-conditioned cleanliness of the eastern-bound airplane led him to realise something else. His suit would travel a large fraction of the planet’s circumference crumpled but serviceable. His shirt and socks, borrowed from Frank, had been clean this morning. But it had felt presumptuous to ask for the loan of a pair of underpants, and he had never made it out of the lounge to the shops at Heathrow.
He was wearing navy boxers with the word ‘Tangiers’ stitched down one side. These pants had already clocked up 18 hours on Monday. Another 36 hours were now in view, since Ben would turn round in Hong Kong without leaving airside or touching Chinese soil. He could do without trying to think about Sistine chapels while feeling dirty down below.
A thought came to him. A cornucopia of complimentary items for personal comfort had already come his way. Eric the steward had insisted that Ben ask for anything that might make his flight more comfortable. Arguably Eric’s ingratiating tone was over the top, but at £6,000 a seat one can do over the top and then some. What if, contra Bakhtin, the airlines had got first-class travel right?
Six thousand pounds which removed a top man’s trifling discomfort was nothing at all, if the greater greatness of the thoughts consequently thought – for example, beating malaria by giving away mosquito nets for free in Africa – could save millions from deadly peril. But how good was this first-class service, really? He should experiment.
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Dorothy Lines saw Frank just as she signalled The Sea Horse waiter for the bill. ‘Come and say hello to our new student governor! Do the two of you know each other? Dr Frank Jones, Connie Yung.’
‘Congratulations. Trust Dorothy to sink her claws in right away. Now help me – I’m sure I’ve taught you but what was the class?’ Frank perched the two shopping bags he was carrying on the table.
‘Finance 2 on the MSc? I was one of the NHS students. It was the only finance module which made the least sense, even if you did predict that healthcare would bankrupt the country by 2020.’
Lines smiled. ‘Frank does like to scare everybody witless.’
‘I salute your courage, Connie, in joining the board of an about-to-be-bankrupt college. You realise the whole thing’s a house of cards, financially speaking? It’s never a dull moment with our dean, as long as you realise it’s all bullshit of the most glorified kind.’
Lines hesitated. ‘We do speak our mind in academia, Connie. It may take you a few months to adjust.’ She tapped her code into the waiter’s machine. ‘Frank, if we might be practical for one moment? Practical and discreet.’ Dorothy explained the task that the governors had asked Connie to take on. ‘I thought that it might be useful if she spoke to Ben, whom you introduced into the dean’s office last night. He’ll experience the pressures of the role but won’t have an axe to grind.’
Connie choked on her last mouthful of coffee. ‘That man from Bakhtin is running the dean’s office? Surely we haven’t taken him on.’
Frank was surprised. ‘Bakhtin’s a hatchet man, but Ben’s a good lad. He got fired himself, you know, after the speech. Well, the speech was drivelling hypocrisy, but since it was pure Bakhtin we all knew it was going to be. Definitely talk to Ben: he’s only doing it for two weeks, so Gyro can’t threaten him and we might all discover what’s really going on.’ Frank swung round to face the deputy dean. ‘This is Gyro’s third trip to the Far East in six months, with no tangible benefit for the college. None at all. You can’t deny it.’
Dorothy eyed him sharply. ‘That’s cheap, Frank. You’re the first to bang on about how tip-toe cautious we should be about getting involved with business schools outside Europe.’
‘But we don’t even know which schools he’s talking to!’
‘Who in their right mind would share sensitive discussions about alliances with you? Anyway, there’s one thing you can’t deny,’ Lines concluded, picking up two canisters of hair dye in Halloween orange and lurid purple which had fallen out of Frank’s shopping. ‘Whoever you bought these for, it isn’t you.’ Frank’s scalp was as pale and smooth as a golf ball.
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Ben’s experiment with first-class service had gone like this. He had pressed the call button. Gyro was asleep but with other passengers in the cabin awake, Ben had drawn confidentially close to Eric before speaking. He had needed to strike a note of experienced confidence in what first-class service could provide. ‘Eric, by any chance do you have clean underpants on board?’ had looked like it would do the trick.
While most of the words had made it out of Ben’s mouth unharmed, the last had died still-born. So what Ben had said was, ‘Eric, by any chance do you have clean underpants on?’ After an appositely brief locking of eyes, Eric had murmured, ‘Let me see what I can do.’
Half an hour later, he had gestured Ben towards the galley and placed his hands lightly on Ben’s waist. Ben had explained his predicament. Eric had the situation sized up: Ben’s waist was 33. Now, after breakfast, Eric was coming through the cabin with Hong Kong landing cards. Instead of one of these, he passed Ben a note with a message and a scribbled UK mobile number. ‘Mark is crew on the return flight. I’ve radioed him to get you a pair. This is my number if you want something else. Eric.’
The sun was fully up with only the lightest tropical haze as the 747 circled Hong Kong’s outlying islands. The harbour was turquoise and shrinking; shrinking because no-one in Hong Kong had been told that land was supposed to be a found resource rather than a manufactured product. The crumpled turquoise handkerchief was criss-crossed with the wakes of innumerable container ships, passenger liners, barges, fishing boats and hydrofoils.
At 8am on Wednesday Hong Kong time (Tuesday midnight in London) these myriad vessels already moved with the busyness of an evangelical ant-colony moments before the Second Coming. Finally the sea vanished in favour of a protrusion and profusion of 30-, 40- and 50-floor honeycombs of apartments, a vertical mould spreading unstoppably over steep, rocky hills.
The return flight left on schedule at noon. Mark was working in premium economy but he found Ben and gave him two silver-coated packets. Two pairs of pants, 33-34 inch waist, one in London Lilac and one in Chicago Crimson. The twenty-pound note folded in Ben’s top jacket pocket did not feel nearly enough but Mark’s grin, as wide as a shark at playtime, covered any insult.
Desperate would have looked uncool, so he tucked one packet into his briefcase and waited five minutes. Then he went for a date with Ch
icago Crimson in the privacy of the first-class washroom. The cut and the colour struck him as more showtime in Las Vegas than pizza base in Chicago but the clean, out-of-the-packet fragrance was wonderful. The effect was like first communion and first date rolled into one. As a consequence Ben almost missed the instruction card with six national flags and microscopically printed texts in assorted languages.
How absurd! He had managed to put the underpants on; what warnings or other instructions could he conceivably need? ‘Danger of suffocation’, ‘Dispose of this product in an environmentally friendly way’ or – a particularly likely candidate – ‘May contain nuts’? He put the card in his briefcase.
Four hours later, book-less and unable to sleep, Ben’s body was on strike because of the crazy time-zone changes. Sarah Jessica Parker in the newly released Sex and the City movie was doing nothing for him, so he reclaimed the instruction card and read the English text.
WEARABLE COMPUTING BY LEADERSOFT
it began, revealing that the world’s largest manufacturer of software for personal computers had extended its leading-edge offerings to undergarments.
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WARNING. This wearable processor is activated and energised by natural secretions. For your safety and protection, as well as to benefit from the latest software updates, register your garment on our website using the unique identifier printed below within one week of first use. Thank you! 63TQ8-G9GFZ-1CR52-773UA-L4EWX.
Surreptitiously Ben folded back his belt and the top of his trousers to see what his SmartPants might be up to. Were they twinkling with LED or fibre-optic displays? No. If he shifted in his seat in a way that required his underpants to change their shape, would they refuse – or perhaps emit an alarmingly loud and instantly recognisable jingle? Apparently not. Frankly, did they feel any different from those slightly tight, daringly-cut underpants which he had first bought as a teenager bereft of any clue as to what might constitute sartorial taste in the groin department? Not really.