MBA E-Book

Douglas Board

• Herausgeber: Lightning Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Why is so much of the world managed by arseholes? When workaholic business school hot shot Ben Stillman is fired, he has the chance to find out. Not a guy to sit still, Ben jumps head first into turning his former business school into world-class madrassa of capitalism. Ben has ten days to rescue the launch of its spectacular glass tower, and his own career - ten days during which he will have to confront terrorist plots, undercover police, the extravagant demands of the super-rich, and the only woman who can save him from this madness. A satirical thriller, a love story, and a wry look at modern management ideology all rolled into one - MBA is a piercing yet hopeful enquiry into the meaning of success.

Leseprobe

Published in 2015 byLightning Books, an imprint of EyeStorm Media Ltd29 Barrow StreetMuch WenlockShropshireTF13 6EN

www.lightning-books.com

ISBN: 978-1-785630-05-7

© 2015 Douglas BoardCover by Anna Torborg

Climb Ev’ry Mountain by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II ©1959 Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. Copyright renewed – extract used by permission of Williamson Music, a division of Rodgers & Hammerstein: An Imagem Company.

What It Is a translation by Gwilym Williams of Es Ist Was Es Ist (Erich Fried, 1983) ©2009 Gwilym Williams. Used by permission of Gwilym Williams.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, organisations or companies is coincidental.

The moral right of the author has been asserted. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Printed by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

In Praise of MBA

“A must read for anyone who enjoyed Franzen’s Freedom or Eggers’ The Circle.”

Felicity Wood, Deputy Features Editor, The Bookseller

“A wonderfully enjoyable dissection of the swirling currents of ambition, dissembling, power and fortune too often rationalised away in textbook accounts of ‘leadership’ … a rich satire nearer the bone of business than a lot of people would want you to think.”

Simon Caulkin, management writer in Management Today, Financial Times Business Education and at simoncaulkin.com

“Buy it, read it, then set a multiple answer exam on it. It’s a hoot.”

Peter Sullivan, former Group Editor-in-Chief of Independent Newspapers South Africa

“When the mindless, probably male, manager in your life puts you down, pick this up. Hilarious and spot on.”

Sandra Burmeister, CEO Amrop Landelahni

“By focussing his farce on the business schools he knows so well, Board updates the campus novel and takes a big swing at the insincerities inherent in the ideology of neo-liberalism.”

CM Taylor, author of Premiership Psycho and Cloven

“Board brings years of deep business experience and breathtaking wit to a La Cage aux Folles-like storyline which never lets the reader go longer than a paragraph without a smile … and more often, a guffaw.”

John C Beck, author of Good vs Good, Japan’s Business Renaissance and The Attention Economy

“Iconoclastic and LOL hilarious with an unrelieved bass-note of suspense, MBA unpick–s the fabric of leadership and interrogates the murky motives of the über-‘successful’.”

Rosemary Lain-Priestley, author of Does My Soul Look Big In This? and Unwrapping The Sacred

www.lol-mba.com@lol_mba

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

BOOK ONE: THE TOWER

MONDAY 11 JUNE (EVENING)

MONDAY 11 JUNE (NIGHT)

TUESDAY 12 JUNE & WEDNESDAY 13 JUNE

WEDNESDAY 13 JUNE

THURSDAY 14 JUNE

FRIDAY 15 JUNE

SATURDAY 16 JUNE (MORNING & AFTERNOON)

SATURDAY 16 JUNE (DAY & EVENING)

SUNDAY 17 JUNE

MONDAY 18 JUNE

TUESDAY 19 JUNE (MORNING)

TUESDAY 19 JUNE (AFTERNOON)

WEDNESDAY 20 JUNE

BOOK TWO: THE OPENING

MONDAY 9 JULY (MORNING)

THURSDAY 21 JUNE (TO MID-AFTERNOON)

MONDAY 9 JULY (LUNCHTIME)

THURSDAY 21 JUNE (EARLY EVENING)

MONDAY 9 JULY (AFTERNOON)

THURSDAY 21 JUNE (NIGHT)

AFTERWORD

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

LIGHTNING BOOKS

A NEW CONCEPT

WITH THANKS

THE AUTHOR

Foreword

(recorded at Hampton Management College three years later)

You’re recording now? Jeez. Well, I guess so. Can I call you Doug? Since we’ve learned a bit about each other now.

I get it – a foreword from one of the characters. Some say the leading character. Speaking from the heart and telling it like it is: which is what leaders do. Feedback is, I’m pretty good at it. About two minutes’ worth, you say? (Pause.)

None of us saw the banking crisis coming. Sure, I was ahead of most folks; I often am. But I’ve learned not to bullshit myself. Bullshitting yourself is a one-way trip; in God’s good time you find out no one’s selling returns. Remember the guy who made forty-six billion out of whatsmyname.com? Bill Szygenda. He bullshitted himself so much, he fooled the rest of us! But that’s another story – one you can read in my book Beyond Easy, Beyond Difficult.

But look at it another way: the future is inevitable. It’s staring us in the face. All we have to do is recognise it.

Hampton was zilch. Educationally, it was a trash can in the back street of a ghetto. For twenty years folks had dumped second-raters, third-raters and worse kinds of shit in it. But I saw a team hungry to be world-class. Starving. All they needed was leadership.

Today, the stars of the future know about Hampton. I mean – tomorrow’s really bright kids in tomorrow’s places, in Shanghai, in Togo, in Buenos Aires. Right here’s where they want to study. Ahead of Harvard. Ahead of CEIBS. Read the surveys, do the math.

Why? Because today, Hampton is synonymous with telling the truth. And integrity is the key issue for business in the twenty-first century. Just get alignment around integrity – talking straight, thinking straight, feeling straight – and amazing things will happen.

This is the story of how we did that and how we hit a few home runs along the way. You know – doubled the number of doctors in the NHS and saved the world’s banking system.

Here’s the thing: those man-on-the-moon achievements depended on totally unseen people. This book will show you those unseen people. That’s why I was tickled pink to become a Commander of the British Empire. What a neat idea –an empire you can’t see to honour the people you can’t see. Personally, as I told Her Majesty, it was a big enough honour just to spell ‘honour’ with a ‘u’!

The bottom line? The only thing that will save us from the next crisis is what we’ve learned from this one. And what we’ve learned is, in the twenty-first century, leadership and learning are the key business issues.

Alongside integrity. And the environment.

Professor William C Gyro CBE Deputy Governor of the Bank of EnglandChairman of the United Nations Task Force on Leadership and emeritus Dean, Hampton Management College

BOOK ONETHE TOWER

MONDAY 11 JUNE (EVENING)

London is being re-made. In 10 weeks the city’s mop-topped mayor, a one-man Beatles revival with added bleach, will wave the Olympic flag in Beijing’s stadium. Back home, the construction of a 21st-century stadium and velodrome has already begun. But the city’s re-making is much more than this.

The first re-making is up. Skyscrapers are sprouting on the city’s face like a fungus. Southwark Towers – 24 floors of offices next to the southeast rail terminus – is being demolished. In four years’ time the 87 floors of the Shard will take its place. If you’re going places in London, you’re going up.

Ben Stillman is going up. He’s barely 30 and he’s chief of staff to a billionaire.

The city is being remade back towards its centre. In places like Johannesburg, after the rich moved outwards they sent removal vans back in to take their jobs with them. But most of the jobs that matter in London are still in the centre, and the people with money have come back to hug those jobs more closely. In London, the centre is the place to be.

Where Ben’s at in his career could not be more central. He is the hub of 26,000 people labouring worldwide in everything from chemicals and agriculture to re-insurance. Ben is Alex Bakhtin’s right hand.

The third reshaper of London is glass. All the new towers are glass from top to bottom. Welcome to a new kind of power, which sees all and displays all. It has no need to hide. Perhaps this power is modern and clean, democratic and accountable. But then a gust blows, a cable slips and a window cleaner’s fingers get caught in the winching gear. As detergent and blood smear the glass, we glimpse something older. The cable that once suspended a human halfway between heaven and earth was the divine right of kings.

All-glass palaces: London’s new way to tell passers-by that they count for shit. You’re welcome to look in, because you’re so lowly that what you see has no consequence.

---

A cloudless June evening was beginning as Ben’s car crawled round London’s traffic-choked concrete corset. Given the priceless treasure he was carrying, he had thought about arranging a police escort; Bakhtin Enterprises had that kind of clout. But how embarrassing to drive an Audi with state-of-the-art LED running lights at only 30 miles an hour, surrounded by flashing blues. Knowing his luck someone would see him and post the picture on YouTube.

YouTube – now that was a business! Founded when Ben had been in the final months of his MBA, and sold for $1.6 billion 18 months later. What a time to be alive; what a time to be in business!

Of course, the other side of business was the gobbledygook that the bankers had produced for tomorrow’s meeting in Paris. How complicated could borrowing 700 million be? Quite complicated, if the bankers had dreamt up that you should pay the interest on some Chilean mining equipment while the Chilean government paid the interest on your frozen orange juice.

After turning off the main artery from London, Ben’s blood pressure rose. Not so much on the first part of the way to Hampton – small place, little traffic – as on the country road beyond. This snaked left and right and up and down. One unexpectedly sharp turn tapped the package in the back seat against a rear door, which made the driver anxious. This priceless package was a faux-Louis XIV chair made entirely of glass, one of Alex Bakhtin’s wilder ideas for a present.

From the top of Pynbal’s Ridge he headed down towards the lake and the college buildings of Hampton. Driving this way during his MBA, often the view had been cloaked in the dark of evening or winter. The valley’s contents had eventually opened themselves to his gaze, modestly picturesque and unmemorable. But back then he had been driving a second-hand Mondeo that had made everything ordinary; now he was parting the forests of larch and silver birch in a sleek and alchemical beast.

The lake, narrow but with the evening sun glinting off its length, resembled a drawn sword. The dean’s white house and the main two-level brick buildings were the handle, but now the handle was dwarfed by something new. A five-storey spore from outer space had landed, currently cloaked in scaffolding, hoardings and canvas wrappings. The new tower, presumably. The college had got a new dean and the new dean had got a new tower.

Looking back, Ben could not imagine how green he had been when he had started his MBA at the age of 25. Some of the teaching had been dire, but he had only paid thirty-five thousand to attend a second-division school. The main thing had been the business opportunities those three letters after someone’s name could open up. The new dean imported from America was good news for Ben. Hampton was climbing the rankings and its alumni’s careers were climbing with it.

Ben’s mind wandered and the Audi wandered a little with it. So much so that he almost drove into a silver Lexus stopped around a bend. The air bed improvised behind Ben’s seat did its job, cushioning 19 kilos of solid glass.

The rear window of the Lexus slid downwards. Above a green pashmina beamed the well-kept face of a woman who had been in her forties for perhaps 15 years. Her walnut hair, shoulder-length, was luxuriant to the point of deserving European environmental protection.

‘You must be Ben,’ she said. ‘Hampton’s golden boy returns. This is all my fault. I was telling Greg –’

She indicated the young man beside her. The driver was part blond, part jet-black, with gas-flame eyes, hair gel and an earring. He had about 20 years on the clock. An explanation of why Greg had stopped on the crown of the road looked as unlikely as an apology for escaping from a Hitler Youth boy band.

‘– that we absolutely must be back for your speech. And we will. I hope the chair is all right.’

Ben glanced at the back seat. As far as he knew, only the dean at Hampton was aware of what he had been so gingerly ferrying from central London. So the woman now disappearing in his rear-view mirror must be Dianne Peach-Gyro, the dean’s wife.

Ten minutes later, the mover and shaker himself came out of the front door of his house to welcome the college’s returning hero. And why not? Bakhtin was gifting the college not just a glass chair but three million pounds, and Ben was his trusted courier. Gyro was an energetic 55 and over six feet tall, not counting the charcoal eyebrows that arched like a burger chain. Ben would pick him as a doubles tennis partner, no questions asked. A thick lacquer of superficiality might sit on top, but underneath Ben warmed to someone who so obviously got one hell of a lot done.

They shook hands. ‘Safe trip?’ Gyro asked.

‘I was flashed a few times on the main road, but otherwise no problems at all.’ Ben opened the Audi’s rear door.

‘You leave it right there, we’ll take care of that baby.’ Gyro ran one hand through his hair as if to stop it receding like the polar ice caps. ‘You graduated here, when? Just before I arrived?’

‘Yes, three years ago.’

‘And now you’re Alex’s chief of staff. That’s damn good. Hampton needs more of you and, you know what –’ Gyro gestured at the scaffolding on the other side of the college building, ‘if I have anything to do with it, Hampton’s going to get them.’ Gyro clapped Ben on the shoulder. ‘What d’you say? A quick whisky, just a baby one, to steady the nerves?’

Ben smiled and shook his head. He wasn’t nervous. He had stood in for Alex Bakhtin so many times that he could do it falling off a log. In fact, of the two Ben was the better speaker.

Of course with hindsight Ben should have been nervous. But come on, how could he have known what would shortly transpire?

---

Sixty minutes later the glass chair had been removed from the Audi and taken inside, where it radiated boldness to the 50 people in the room. Ben flipped the pages of Alex’s speech notes but he wasn’t looking at them. He was paid enough to know Bakhtin’s life and leadership philosophy by heart.

The courtesies and apologies were complete. The dean had been thanked for his hospitality. The dean’s secretary had been thanked, with the flowers that she had been told to organise for herself. The audience wanted to hear the thoughts of the charismatic entrepreneur Alex Bakhtin. They craved vowels that surged with the power of fortunes made, consonants that broke on the wreckage of lesser sums lost. Ben began:

‘No less today than when I started, I teach my managers that the foundation of successful business is always people. Not any people, but those selfless people and their teamwork who create any business, any result, any human achievement whatsoever.

‘On the farm where I was brought up, harvest time was hard. We rose at five and did not finish until midnight. Of course that was a business lesson – to work hard. But every farmer works hard. Yet not every farmer’s child produces a business of international distinction.

‘The difference lay in the workers we hired and how we treated them. Every harvest evening, my mother prepared food under the trees. Grilled fish or eggplants as big as houses – the ovens did not stop as long as our workers were still coming. Ten o’clock in the evening, eleven o’clock, still they were coming. The selfless workers. We ate with them, of course – another business lesson. And they ate their fill.

‘I particularly remember the time when a son was born to one of our foremen. Without a word being said, my mother had already begun to roast a suckling pig. That foreman was a selfless worker. He worked the harvest the very day his son was born.

‘Around midnight I would help my father clear the table. We fed the leftovers to the dogs. “Son,” my father said to me one time, “have you seen any dogs better fed than ours?”

‘“None, father!” I replied. “None in the whole world.”

‘“You are right!” he exclaimed. “But remember, they only feed after the selfless workers have had their fill.”

‘So this is what I teach my managers. Your shareholders have sharp teeth. I am one of them. We are dogs. We want to be the best-fed shareholders in the whole world. But only after your selfless workers have eaten their fill.’

Ben paused to let some of the eyes in his audience moisten. As he did so the crowd at the back of the room parted to admit the walnut-haired woman, still striking in a green pashmina, but now sparkling with diamonds.

‘Distinguished professors and scholars of business, I fear that my working-man’s philosophy is not worthy of you. But tonight I am so appreciative of the honour that you extend to me – and also to my tragically deceased wife – by establishing this new Chair of Selfless Leadership in her name.’

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?’