MBA Read online

  Ben headed back to the office not sure if it would do the trick. But it was a better shot than adding another 10-page letter to folders of correspondence already splitting at their seams.

  Of course the lawyers hated it, and for the next couple of hours Ben’s phone went crazy. Ben just swatted them back. Half of what he was doing was bullshitting them, but the other half was just wrapping up their own piles of bullshit and returning them to sender. Ben’s gamble was that pissing off the lawyers would motivate the engineers. The engineers wanted the tower to work; they just needed not to look like the only dumb-asses who cared.

  ‘Mr Stillman, this is Bill Andrews of Andrews, Caravajal, Sagan and Warner –’

  ‘Mr Andrews, your client and I are really short of time. Maybe call back when you’ve shortened the name of your firm? Pension someone off? Thanks.’

  Ben’s day was now dissolving into a blur, but he was acutely conscious that the engineering problems of the tower were only one horn of his dilemma; the human side of the opening was equally lethal. He locked the office door for an hour to wade through the accumulating VIP list with Vanessa before she took her half-day off. She showed him how to switch the phones through to college reception.

  Could the European vice-chairman of one of the major investment banks arrive by helicopter – no. One of the college’s governors was being shadowed at work that day by his daughter, could she come – no. Could the Maharishi Swami Tandoori, one of the world’s richest paupers who would be in religious silence that day, bring his aide to speak for him – um, yes.

  ---

  1.32pm marked a gear-change in Ben’s day. In the morning he had been seeing the wood for the trees, deciding, delegating, cajoling and instructing – showing leadership. No-one might follow his instructions and that was scary, but a different scary from having to cut trees down himself, which he now had to do.

  In 28 precious minutes he had to produce from scratch an environmentally green confection to get Cardew McCarthy off his back. By then, Gyro would have sent him some briefing for the afternoon GSG meeting, he hoped. He would digest this before 3.30pm with the ham sandwich and minutes of the last two meetings that Vanessa had placed on the meeting table.

  He needed to make a salad without leaves. The architects had confirmed that there was nothing particularly green about the tower; instead transparency had been the grand egotistical concept. In fact from an environmental point of view, it would be a particularly bad idea to ask questions about the synthetic glass-like material which had been used to make the auditorium’s seats, shelves and tables.

  Oh, well. Ben played for a few minutes with the calculator on a carbon offset website and then opened an email template on the computer. Its keys were light to the touch and the letters came up in a size comfortable for a 55-year-old to read; on a full-colour wide screen it was like being in the front row at the opera. Ben wrote:

  Mr McCarthy:

  The Pinnacle Leadership Tower is so many generations ahead of contemporary best practice that it cannot sensibly be measured in conventional environmental ways. The all-glass construction means that large parts of the tower are made of glass, which is a recyclable material.

  The glass ceiling maximises the use of solar energy for lighting purposes in the auditorium, reducing fossil-fuel consumption. The glass walls mean that tomorrow’s leaders who study in the auditorium will be continually reminded of the beautiful and precious environment around them, which it will be their responsibility to protect.

  In the evening, the glass floor ensures that the electric light which is used passes through to ground level, enabling it in effect to be recycled, reducing the need for path lighting. Therefore, the tower demonstrates environmental leadership where it should be, at the heart of conception and design, and not tacked on as an after-thought.

  In addition, we are committed to keeping the CO2 tonnage of the opening ceremony itself to a minimum. Our chef sources his produce locally. Of course this is not possible with the champagne but we are happy to consider the possibility of bringing this to the UK by barge and sail-boat.

  We are totally focussed at this time on the various preparations for 21 June, but please let me know if further environmental analysis will be of assistance.

  Ben Stillman

  Chief of Staff, Hampton Management College

  Ben hit ‘send’ with a comfortable five minutes to spare. Not bad, even if he thought so himself. ‘Consider’ was such a useful word.

  He reviewed his notepad again, and checked the computer. Terrific – an email from Gyro headed ‘GSG’ had arrived 20 minutes ago. Ben skimmed it: there were a couple of paragraphs of background in horrendously incorrect locker-room language and then three points which he could make on Gyro’s behalf at the meeting: exactly what he needed.

  The Appropriate Language Training pilot could be rolled out to all staff. A multi-disciplinary working group could develop a gender module for the MBA, but only as an optional elective. And Ben could pledge Gyro’s total commitment to appointing at least one, and ideally two, women to the four professorships remaining from the Pinnacle endowment, ‘especially if they had nice tits’. Unquote. He flinched at the possibility that he might not have scanned the email in advance and stumbled into reading it to the meeting verbatim.

  Ben clicked ‘print’ and picked up Gyro’s email. It was a glorious day and he could do with a breather by the lake, armed with his sandwich and the GSG papers. Then he would visit as many of the faculty and administrative staff as he could. Right now he was starving.

  ---

  The conversations with staff were friendlier and longer than he had hoped (several remembered teaching him). So with no-one in the outer office, when Ben returned almost exactly at 3.30pm, the Gender Strategy Group was already standing around the meeting table: a short, stocky farmer’s wife in a black T-shirt and trousers, about 50 Ben guessed; an emaciated museum curator in headmistress glasses and coffee-stained summer dress, also probably about 50; and behind them Connie Yung, the newly appointed student governor in designer jeans and a sleeveless white cotton blouse.

  Looking down the line, Ben thought Tesco, M&S and (maybe?) boohoo. The last time they had met, he and Connie had locked horns about Bakhtin so it would be good to kick off on a different note this afternoon. Ben reached out a hand and offered some words of welcome. ‘It’s good to see you, Connie. Your colleagues must be the Gender Strategy Group. I’m Ben Stillman, the dean’s chief of staff for the next couple of weeks. You may know I did my MBA here.’ The glance he got in return was friendly, but unaccompanied by a handshake.

  He realised that the farmer’s wife had held out her hand but then withdrawn it. ‘You may address me as “chair”. I was in here cleaning this office at eight o’clock this morning. You didn’t notice.’

  Ben instinctively made sure that the dean’s email was buried deep inside his meeting folder; this one looked the type to be able to read other people’s notes upside down. ‘Oh, I’m so sorry. My mistake. It’s a bit crazy around here, and my first day in the office.’

  She pushed past him to occupy the dean’s chair at the head of the table. ‘I’m the head cleaner and the staff co-chair of the Gender Strategy Group. The dean, we understand, though we were not properly informed, is away.’

  ‘In Hong Kong. A very urgent meeting at short notice connected with next week’s opening. He is very sorry –’

  ‘Clearly, then, I shall take the chair. You may tender the dean’s apologies for his absence at the appropriate place on the agenda.’

  The others arranged themselves around the meeting table – Ben with the wall of photographs behind him, the other two facing him with the wall of books behind them. Ben noticed that Connie’s arms were slender and smooth-skinned, like vanilla ice cream that had melted in coffee.

  Making the most of her regency, the chair took 10 minutes to proceed with apologies, minutes of the previ
ous meeting and matters arising. Having mistakenly assumed that he would be running the meeting, Ben had counted on having the whole thing wrapped up in half an hour as Gyro had suggested. That might be harder from where he was sitting now.

  ‘Any corrections to page 2 of the previous minutes?’

  Suddenly Ben sat up.

  ‘Mr Stillman?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he mumbled. Don’t mumble, he thought. Don’t draw attention to yourself. ‘Nothing,’ he said again.

  ‘Good. Any corrections to page 3?’

  The museum curator shifted in her seat. She was a professor by the name of Tilney. ‘If I might, chair, “obsequious” is mis-spelled in paragraph 6, and again two paragraphs further on. We are a degree-awarding establishment, so some visible competence in the use of language might make a pleasant change.’

  Ben got up as if to pick up something from the window sill. He could see the screen of the dean’s computer facing the farmer’s wife, as he had left it before going to lunch. Thank God, it was dark – he had been mistaken. Everything was fine.

  ‘Nicely put, Professor. Any matters arising?’

  But everything might not be fine. Screens go dark if you leave them unattended. They hibernate. They save the planet. But they spring back into life if you hit a key, and the last thing that had been on that screen was Gyro’s locker-room language. Ben had not anticipated being bumped out of his own seat.

  ‘Are you rejoining us, Mr Stillman?’

  ‘Of course. My apologies.’ He moved towards his own place. It might still be all right; after this long a gap, if the cleaner hit a key, she would probably come up with a log-in screen. But he could not take the chance. If he could get her out of the chair, he could hit a key and deal with the problem in a second. ‘Would you come over to the window? There’s something Dean Gyro particularly wanted me to show you.’ He moved to the window, pointing downwards.

  ‘Is this a matter arising?’

  ‘Absolutely. It could not be more arising. Or arisen. Honestly, it won’t take a minute.’ Connie and the professor started towards him. There was no movement from the cleaner.

  ‘Here, out here, about halfway towards the lake. Or, do you think, more to the left?’ Ben gesticulated inexplicably.

  From the chair there was no hint of movement. ‘What are you talking about? There’s nothing in the minutes about the lake.’

  ‘The statue of, ah, ah –’ Ben tried to think of a famous woman. ‘Florence Nightingale.’ Just for a minute he needed the chair out of the chair … ‘The nude Florence Nightingale.’

  Up, she was up! The chair hoisted herself into a standing position. She was thundering, but she was not moving. ‘Order, order. Back to our places. I’m calling the meeting to order.’

  Connie was at the window, trying to be helpful. ‘Where exactly are you talking about, Ben? I can’t see anything.’

  It was the wave of the chair’s arm that did it, the touch of her sleeve against the joyously light keys. From the window Ben could see the screen light up. He threw himself across the desk at the computer and pulled out the power cord. Papers flew. Professor Tilney screamed.

  ‘Are you all right?’ asked Connie.

  Shit. The screen stayed lit: it was a laptop with a battery. Ben hit the keyboard with his fist, pushing several keys simultaneously. Thank God! A log-in screen.

  Ben excused himself to go the bathroom, washing the sweat off his face with copious running water and nurtured by its protected status as a men’s room. Thank you God, thank you God, thank you God, he thought. It took a few minutes to pull himself together.

  ‘Thank you for returning, Mr Stillman,’ the chair said impassively. For precious moments Ben was grateful that his colleagues had used his absence to return the office to order, as if nothing had happened. But something had happened. Connie was blushing.

  ‘We were concerned,’ the chair continued. ‘We were sympathetic. We know about the pressures of the job. We have raised concerns about what happened to your predecessor.’ Then she softened, just for a moment. ‘I know that you are only with us for a short time, Mr Stillman. But you might consider joining the administrative staff union? We have very modern benefits, and one never knows when the protection of a union may become useful.’

  Ben nodded gratefully. He noticed that his own meeting papers had been replaced neatly in his folder, square to the table’s edge.

  The chair’s next words came at him with a distant plangency, not the comforting of a sympathetic or even neutral teacher or trade union official, but the sentencing of a judge. ‘But first, Professor Tilney has found a document which is pertinent to the proceedings and which she would like to read into the record.’

  ‘The G-Spot Group,’ began the woman in the coffee-stained summer dress, reading from the printed email that Ben had not the least difficulty in recognising. That was how Gyro had begun, and from there his language had careened rapidly downhill.

  ---

  ‘I didn’t know Chinese people blushed.’ Ben and Connie were alone in his office, Ben shell-shocked in the dean’s chair, Connie looking at him from the window.

  ‘I didn’t know men wept,’ Connie replied.

  ‘It’s in the Bible – Jesus wept.’ Ben coughed. ‘Look, I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Stop that. Sorry for what? It wasn’t your email. If we ignore the bits written in testosterone, what the dean offered was quite reasonable. In fact now we know why you dived across the table, it was even rather charming. Anyway, let’s see what was on the computer.’

  Ben wasn’t sure why the whole episode had put him in Connie’s good books, but right now he was happy to take friendship wherever he could get it. He tapped a key on the keyboard and entered his log-in. He expected the G-Spot email but it was one of the screens minimised behind it which had them both in hysterics: the curvaceously modelled men’s underwear on the SmartPants website. Ben tried to explain but the words that came out of his mouth stubbornly refused to make sense.

  ‘Don’t cry again,’ said Connie, clutching at Ben’s shoulder as her hysterics failed to abate.

  ‘I’ll try. Look, I’ll make some tea.’

  In the relative sanity that followed, Connie explained the gentle inquiry into Vanish’s departure which the governors had asked her to undertake; she had stayed on after the meeting to arrange to talk to Ben at a convenient time. Perhaps on Sunday, since she had tracked down Vanish and got an appointment with him on Saturday, and she had to be at the college on Sunday to start the last few days of her course.

  Sunday suited Ben since (unless the GSG fiasco got him fired) the tower and its opening had to be his top priorities and Sunday was several days away. Surely his history with Bakhtin would come back into the picture with Connie at some point, but with luck that bridge could be crossed when he came to it. For now, being fired by Bakhtin seemed to have made her more sympathetic towards him.

  Needless to say, reception had a pile of phone messages for him and it gave some relief to start working through them. He put to one side a message from Frank which wished him well, apologised that he was not around until Saturday evening, but offered him Saturday dinner in town – ‘something to get you out of the prison compound’. It was well past 6pm before he got to the message at the bottom of the pile. The caller was Roger Sling, with a phone number in the First Improvident branch in Alderley. Sling apologised that he had left some messages for Vanessa before realising that Ben had now taken charge (Ben laughed to himself). Sling identified himself as the college’s bank manager. He would value a meeting with Ben at his earliest convenience.

  Ben had expected a long first day, and had got one.

  FRIDAY 15 JUNE

  When life, work, play and love all revolve around the same thing, you’ve got passion! The key to creating passion in your life is to find your unique talents and your special role and purpose in the world.


  STEPHEN COVEY 3

  On Friday morning, Greg woke up feeling particularly sharp and proactive. Being proactive is more than taking initiative. It is recognizing that we are responsible for our own choices. As he swam his early-morning lengths, the pool surface was a ballroom dance floor with a hundred golden dancers waltzing with sunlight in response to his strokes. This morning he was thinking about the day’s choices particularly carefully. It was his 25th birthday, although he knew he looked much younger. This was sometimes a problem in undercover work. He drank little, but being asked for ID when he met someone in a bar was annoying.

  Gyro was staying in Hong Kong until Monday night to close a long sought-after deal, so today Greg had only two work engagements: taking the dean’s new assistant to a midday meeting at the district police headquarters, and driving Dianne to one of her Friday night London dinners.

  If luck was on Greg’s side she would decide early on which of her guests to sleep with, and with a lot of luck she would spend the whole weekend at her Kensington flat. In that case Greg would make it back to Hampton at a reasonable hour and be free until Sunday evening, but he did not count on it. VIP drivers did not make personal plans for their birthdays. In Greg’s case Gyro would have agreed the time off effusively weeks in advance, but it would have meant nothing if something came up on the day.

  In any case Greg’s passion, his work and his play, was unmasking the truth. That was why he had volunteered for undercover training soon after joining the police. And for his birthday what Greg wanted – no, what Greg was proactively choosing – was the evidence that would tip Amelia Henderson’s hand to commit departmental resources to averting whatever threat Frank Jones had in mind for the tower opening. The birthday present Greg wanted was audio monitoring in Frank’s house; it was the obvious next step.