MBA Page 6
Hilary pointed the helicopter in the desired direction while Greg explained what was beneath them. That was why he was here. They headed towards two small outbuildings like miniature matchboxes at the far end of the lake, one of them a wooden boathouse. Then they came back along Pynbal’s Ridge, with its snaking road to Hampton, civilisation and London. Casey was busy using a GPS position-fixer to populate his Google Earth picture of the college with sites for articles for his 30th birthday war – ‘arms caches’, ‘minefields’, hideouts and ambushes.
They turned once more and flew along the less-used side of the valley. They skimmed Crassock hill, over grass meadows by the lakeside, three pairs of semi-detached staff houses and, near the top of the hill, the lovers’ lookout.
‘Zap those co-ordinates for mission control,’ purred Casey, his fingers flickering over the position-finder. ‘Great view of the valley. What’s on the other side?’ They flew over. ‘Oh wow, just imagine a tank hiding down there and then coming over the hill with no warning!’
Greg’s expression slipped briefly. His eyebrows and cheek muscles were saying ‘Pillock!’ but Casey mistook the expression for technical interest – boys’ stuff. ‘Maybe one of your old Brit tanks, a Chieftain or something, or an Israeli one like a Merkava 3. You can pretty much get them on eBay. I’d refit them with a searchlight and water-cannon. Then you need a water bowser as well, but that’s where the lake comes in real handy.’
The wooden boathouse – the one that Frank Jones rented. Greg suddenly realised that they needed to hover over it while he took a few pictures on his phone. Casey had no objection; the college were thinking of constructing a new path, Greg improvised, and the chance to get an aerial view was a lucky break.
For a few minutes the three of them hung as if by a thread, silent in their own thoughts while the circular ripples beat outwards the grass and the lake. Greg snapped away. He had seen from the ground the faint wheeled tracks which led to the boathouse, but what he had not seen before were three irregularly spaced circular patches (one or two feet in diameter, he estimated) where the grass was slightly discoloured, or at least a different shade of green.
When they climbed out of the helicopter, Casey’s digital cufflinks showed he was now worth $20 million more than when they had taken off.
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Greg found it a relief to drive to an airport big enough to make even Casey’s ego dwindle towards human. Terminal 5 had only opened earlier in the year, and approaching from an unfamiliar direction he needed to concentrate on his route more than usual. Ben had no luggage to collect but his aircraft got caught in Heathrow’s aerial traffic jam, so it was 6.45pm when the Lexus broke free from the airport. They headed to a shopping centre which Ben could raid for clothes and toiletries. Forty minutes later he returned with a tired grin and his arms full of bags and a suit-carrier. He’d bought a dark suit and a summery suit – the college was paying – and some casual shirts and jeans, a change of shoes, plenty of socks and – of course – pants.
Ben asked about Greg’s day. A few highlights from the helicopter trip were enough for Ben to thank his lucky stars that he would have moved on from his job at Hampton before Casey Pinnacle and his friends arrived to re-enact Apocalypse Now.
Greg flew a kite, airing some unanswered questions about Frank’s use of the boathouse. Disused previously, for the past couple of years Frank had rented it from the college. He kept it heavily padlocked, yet never rowed or sailed. Three times in recent months Greg had found tracks by the hut, as if wheeled equipment had been brought in or out. But Frank had never moved anything boat-like along the college roads.
In sharing these thoughts, Greg took a calculated risk: time was short if he was to find the evidence Amelia would need to take action on the tower opening, and Ben might turn out to be a friend. If Ben was in fact Frank’s plant, little would be lost. Frank already knew Greg was suspicious of him.
The kite crashed. Ben was so tired that his reaction to winning the Euro-lottery would have been non-committal, much less unanswered trifles about a boathouse, and for the remainder of the journey to the college the two travelled in silence.
After dropping Ben off, Greg parked the Lexus. He let the sound system play while he gave the leather upholstery its nightly wipe-down with spray foam and a cloth, but the house music it played now irritated him. He switched to the radio which flickered between unfamiliar stations, stopping at rock. ‘American Girl’ – a raw, lyric-led Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers song from maybe 1978 – leapt out at him. It sounded like a man shaving in the dark in front of a smoky campfire, using a cut-throat razor dipped in whisky. At any moment half his face might catch alight.
Greg was ready to catch alight. Even if others could not or chose not to see it, he was right to worry about the boathouse – seeing it from the air had been unexpected confirmation of that. Proactivity was Habit Number One for highly effective people, Greg recalled. Tomorrow he would not only check out the grass patches but buy a circular-hole saw. Then he could look inside the boathouse. The balance of waiting needed to shift towards action – so much so that with the rest of Ben’s clutter, Greg almost threw away a silver packet marked ‘London Lilac’ that had slipped under the driver’s seat.
When he got home he tried the pants on. They were an outrageously priced brand that Greg had never heard of, the equivalent of £50 in Hong Kong dollars for the pair, albeit with a ‘buy one, get one free’ sticker. Anyone stupid enough to pay that money for underpants could pay out for another pair. They were slightly loose on Greg’s lanky swimmer’s thighs – at least when he went to bed – but in the morning they fitted perfectly.
1 A New Earth: Awakening To Your Life’s Purpose, Penguin, London (2006)
2 The 8th Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness, Simon and Schuster, London (2004)
THURSDAY 14 JUNE
Shortly before 7am, Ben walked through the dean’s outer office and let himself into Gyro’s inner sanctum. For the next few days he had decided to use Gyro’s office as his own. With one week left until the tower opening, he had no time to waste on college staff and contractors second-guessing whether to pay him any attention.
Ben reckoned the best chair to sit in to make clear that he was no junior underling was Gyro’s. A quick look at his predecessor’s base decided the matter – a broom cupboard on the ground floor, as far away from the action as it was possible to get: ‘I’m hiding, I don’t know anything, don’t bother me’. The college might as well have booked an ambulance for Richard Vanish when they had given him the job, mused Ben. Besides, from the dean’s office the view down the lake was spectacular.
Vanessa, Gyro’s secretary, was a gem. She had fielded the messages that Ben had left from Hong Kong on her voicemail without complaint or, so far, error. For example, his identity and password had been set up on the college computer system with access to the correct computer drives. Hours could so easily have been wasted through unthinking sloppiness. He took a minute to register his SmartPants online – ridiculous, but who was the consumer to argue with capitalism?
Vanessa was on his side and Ben wanted to keep it that way. He knew enough about the power of secretaries. He hoped that giving her the afternoon off would be a pleasant surprise and set the tone for their relationship. He would not mention yet that on Monday he would need her not to be too precious about the position of her desk, her filing cabinets or the adjoining coffee machine and photocopier. It would just be for four days, but when Gyro returned Ben needed to share the outer office with her. He made a note on his pad – phone, another desk and computer network access needed by Monday.
He had two hours of quiet before someone plugged in the world and it started advancing towards him. He needed the time to read files, starting with the tower construction. He positioned himself in front of the widescreen laptop that Gyro used as his desk computer. The desk and computer formed the short bar of a T, with the long bar taken up by
a meeting table. By the time he talked to Gyro on the phone there were many things still unread, but he had already formed a clear impression of how Vanish had handled things. It was mid-afternoon in Hong Kong.
‘I started with the lift files. Talk about passing the buck! Between the architects, the builders and the lift engineers, never mind the announcement company, we’re being pissed on from a great height. Vanish’s idea of managing the situation seems to have been to buy an umbrella.’
‘Exactly.’ In the background Ben could hear Hong Kong’s frenetic harbourside.
‘I’m calling an emergency site meeting for ten o’clock this morning. From now we’ll have site meetings every twelve hours, 10am and 10pm.’
‘That’s a top plan. I like it.’
‘There’s a meeting with PC Plod about security and traffic for the opening; I’ll put that back to tomorrow. It’s not a Day One priority. Greg can help with that, he knows the college grounds and any traffic issues better than anyone.’
‘Good idea. Greg’ll appreciate being involved.’
‘How’s it going with the China big-wigs?’
‘I hate to say it in case it spooks things, but as of this morning pretty well. It’s been heavy lifting but I think we’re going to see some serious money move pretty soon. I damn well hope so, after the amount of eel and snake I’ve eaten.’ Gyro always sounded confident, but the confidence was infectious – Ben could feel it stirring inside him. The lift, the tower, the opening – it was all manageable. None of it was rocket science.
‘Vanessa has left a note about a 3.30pm meeting today? It was fixed months ago. Apparently you were going to dump it on Vanish. Her note says the meeting is ‘GSG’.’
Gyro snorted. ‘Oh, the Gender Strategy Group. It’s nothing, a routine meeting. Just listen to a bunch of women say things and make them feel important. Thirty minutes, if that. Apology for absence – change of personnel – screw-up – no higher priority for the dean than gender. You know, just like you did when you gave Alex’s speech on Monday night.’
Ben was getting into his stride. Sure, by 3.30pm he could have read the minutes of the last two GSG meetings. But Gyro’s reference to Ben having done the equivalent job for Bakhtin was on the money; Ben had learned to look further ahead. ‘What latitude do I have to agree things?’
‘Whatever you like,’ was Gyro’s reaction.
‘So, women get sixty percent of all faculty promotions next year?’
‘Don’t be a dumb ass. All right. But I can’t do anything right now, I’m just heading into a meeting on the HSBC yacht.’
‘If you could email me a few thoughts anytime up to 10pm?’ That would be 2pm at Hampton.
‘Yes, sir,’ Gyro conceded with a laugh. Ben’s spirits crept up another notch. Giving your boss orders was one of the trickiest bits of being a chief of staff.
Vanessa arrived at a few minutes before nine, all mumsy and sensible. Ben’s surprise offer of the afternoon off bowled her over. Clearly she hadn’t experienced any considerate management for a long time.
‘But will you cope? On your first day?’ she protested. But in no time she acknowledged that with things building up towards the opening, and then Richard Vanish not coping, she had been doing pretty much double jobs with no time off since January.
‘I’ll be fine. I’ll screw some things up but we’ll fix it. Take the half-day now; next week will just be worse.’ Ben was beaming. Now he had a team in place.
It was 9.10am. Oh yes, someone had plugged in the world.
‘Cardew McCarthy.’
Ben recalled that McCarthy was ex-military, the main staff contact with VST and the Pinnacles. The voice on the telephone fitted: flat and precise. Ben introduced himself.
‘We can do introductions next Thursday, Mr Stillman. I sure look forward to that. I’m glad someone’s in charge. If I may say so between friends, about time. Meantime, we’ve got an issue come up. Item, the environmental impact of the tower. Given the internal and external coverage we are aiming for, including VST customers and staff, Mr Junior has identified that the new tower needs to be, I quote, “a model of environmental leadership”.’
Ben’s mind raced through everything on the tower which he had read on the plane or in the files this morning. While the design specification had covered every other imaginable symbolism of leadership, he had read nothing about its environmental impact.
‘Well,’ said Ben. ‘It is a very high-quality project and I’m sure everything has been done in an environmentally thoughtful way. Perhaps I have got this wrong, but I don’t think there ever were environmental leadership parameters in the tower specification.’
‘Agreed.’
‘And now would be a little late in the day to be changing anything that has not previously been thought of.’
‘Agreed.’
‘So, ah –’ Ben paused. What had Gyro said about Cardew? Make the man look good to his boss. ‘So how about I let you have a note showing, um, how the decisions already taken on the tower are very environmentally friendly ones.’
‘I think we’ll do good business, Mr Stillman. If you could ETA that note to me in the next five hours then Mr Junior will be able to give it his consideration first thing after breakfast. We all fixed now on the elevator?’
Ben looked at his watch. Pinnacle was headquartered on the American east coast, so presumably where McCarthy was it was about 4.15am. Ouch. Working for Mr Junior must be fun.
‘Totally fixed any minute now.’ In the meantime he noted his pad – email McCarthy green 2pm. He could ask the architect at 10am whether anything about the tower was green. He doubted it; while the tower was full of high tech, it all seemed to be boys’ toys stuff rather than local materials and recycled rainwater. Quite what was environmentally friendly about a collection of outsize egos jetting from the far corners of the globe to Hampton next Thursday would no doubt occur to him by 2pm. He hoped.
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As he had expected, the 10am site meeting was hard hats and excuses. Ben’s plan had been to invest a maximum of five minutes oohing and aahing at the technical marvels. That was a good warm-up tactic with specialists, and allowed Ben to show off some of his file reading. But the tower had ideas of its own. For the first time Ben was seeing it up-close and personal, standing inside the shroud of scaffolding in daylight.
Gazing four floors vertically upwards he looked through the auditorium’s reinforced glass floor, past more than a hundred transparent seats and the glass ceiling, straight up into shifting brush-strokes of cloud scurrying 20,000 feet overhead. Some opaque floor areas hid engineering spaces and toilets but when a flock of starlings swept past, he could not tell if they had passed above the auditorium or beneath it.
‘It gets everyone the first time,’ murmured Tom, the project manager, and Ben agreed.
Wrapped around the central column of the giant toadstool at ground zero was a glass doughnut – the lift. According to one opinion in the file, the fault was misbalanced pressure between the hydraulic cylinders on which the lift was due to rise. Correction: one of the faults.
As the cluster of hard hats approached, the lift lit up and an out-of-work actress enunciated: ‘The doors of the lift are closing.’ Parts of the doughnut wall slid apart. Ben did not go in.
By 10.20am all 15 specialists had arrived, or were represented. Ben laid it on the line:
‘You and I know that with the Pinnacle Leadership Tower we are standing on the well-known “bleeding edge” of technology. It’s painful. Every one of you is proud to be part of this project. All of your firms are planning to put pictures on your websites. In fact, two of you already have although you don’t have permission.
‘You know the tower was contracted to be fully functional three weeks ago. That means we’re into penalty clauses. That means lawyers are on the case. And that means you’re losing money and we’re losing time.
We can all see a mile off what the lawyers are doing.’
Ben kept going. ‘Now it’s 10.20, Thursday. My proposal is we stop the clock on all the lawyers right now, get this lift working by 6pm Saturday, get the rest of the snagging done by 6pm Tuesday, and courier all the penalty clauses back to the department of hell they came from. Tom, you’re the project manager, you’re in charge. I’ll meet with you on site every twelve hours from now on. 10am, 10pm, every day without fail.
‘You all work on this 24/7. If you need to fly in experts, book their flights within the hour. Safety clearance needs the bureaucrats, I’ll settle for Monday on that. But you and I –’ he jabbed Tom in the chest ‘– are riding this glass doughnut to the top and back 6pm Saturday at the latest.
‘That’s Plan A. I aim to please, so here’s Plan B. Let me read you a list of some of the companies whose top dogs are going to be here next Thursday.’ Ben started on a roll-call of world-famous international and British businesses. ‘That’s for starters. Now that is, by my reckoning, some trillions of annual client dollars up for grabs in those organisations. And if on Sunday I have to email them all to cancel the opening because the lift is not working and Sunday is the latest I can leave it without looking like a complete dickhead, be assured that I shall in those emails mention personally each of you, your boss, his boss and your companies as responsible for the fiasco.
‘So the good news is, you and your bosses and I are all going to be famous one way or the other by the end of next week. So let’s be famous for succeeding.
‘There is no time for you to confer with your bosses, and their bosses and your lawyers. I need you solving the problems, right now. So while we’ve been out here, my office – the dean’s office – has been emailing your head offices with what I have just said. The email also says how pleased I am that you have all committed to Plan A.’