Джозеф Файндер - Company Man

Atlas McKenzie was building an immense office tower in Toronto. A million square feet, a third of which would be their new corporate headquarters, which they wanted outfitted from scratch. That meant at least ten thousand workstations, at least fifty million bucks up front, and then there was the ten-year maintenance contract. If Stratton got the deal, it would be a huge win. Beyond huge. Unbelievable. Then there were all the Atlas McKenzie offices around the world, which could well be standardized on Stratton — Nick couldn’t even calculate how much that could mean.

All right, so The Film was flopping. They might as well have been watching some subtitled art house film set in a small Bulgarian village.

At least yesterday afternoon they’d been totally jazzed by the Workplace of the Future exhibit. Visitors always were, without exception. You couldn’t help but be. It was a fully functional mock-up of a workstation, eight by ten, that looked a lot more like a network news anchor set than some cubicle out of Dilbertland. The visitors were given ID tags to wear that contained an embedded chip, which communicated with an electronic sensor so that when you entered the space, the overhead lights changed from blue to green. That way, co-workers could tell from way across the floor that you were at your desk. As soon as you sat down, an electronic message was flashed to your team members — in this case, the laptops provided to the visitors — telling them you were in. Amazing what Stratton’s engineers came up with, he’d often marveled. In front of the worker’s desk in the Workplace of the Future was a six-foot-long wraparound computer monitor, superhigh resolution, on which appeared a page of text, a videoconference window, and a PowerPoint slide. Clients saw this and coveted it, the way some guys drool over Lamborghinis.

They were running about ten minutes behind, so Nick had to sit through The Talk. The screen faded to black, and slowly, slowly, the lights in the Lab came up. Standing at the brushed-aluminum podium was Stratton’s Senior Vice President for Workplace Research, a very tall, slender woman in her late thirties with long, straight blond hair cut into severe bangs and giant horn-rim glasses. She was Victoria Zander — never Vicky or Tori, only Victoria. She was dressed dramatically, in all black. She could have been a beatnik from the fifties, a pal of Jack Kerouac’s on the road.

Victoria spoke in a mellifluous soprano. She said, “Your corporate headquarters is one of the most powerful branding tools you have. It’s your opportunity to tell your employees and your visitors a story about you — who you are, what you stand for. It’s your brandscape . We call this the narrative office .” As she talked, she jotted down key phrases — “smart workplace” and “heartbeat space” and “Knowledge Age” — on a digital whiteboard set into the wall in front of her, and her notes, zapped instantly into computer text, appeared on the laptops in front of the folks from Atlas McKenzie. She said, “Our model is wagons around the campfire . We live our private lives in our own wagon but come together at suppertime.”

Even after hearing it a dozen times, Nick didn’t understand all of her patter, but that was okay; he figured that no one else did either. Certainly not these guys from Chicago, who were probably rolling their eyes inwardly but didn’t want to admit their lack of sophistication. Victoria’s loopy little graduate seminar was intimidating and probably soared over their heads too.

What these guys understood was modular wiring infrastructure and pre-assembled components and data cables built into access floors. That was where they lived. They didn’t want to hear about brandscapes.

He waited patiently for her to finish, increasingly aware of the visitors’ restlessness. All he had to do was a quick meet-and-greet, make sure everyone was happy, chat them up a bit.

Nick didn’t actually get involved in selling since he became CEO, not in any real hands-on way. That was handled on the national accounts level. He just helped close the deal, nudged things along, assured the really big customers that the guy at the top cared. It was remarkable how far a little face time with the CEO went with customers.

He was normally good at this, the firm handshake and the clap on the back, the no-bullshit straight answer that everyone always found so refreshing. This morning, though, he felt a steady pulse of anxiety, a dull stomachache. Maybe it was a rebound reaction to the Ambien he’d taken last night, that tiny sliver of a pill that lulled him to sleep. Maybe it was the three cups of coffee instead of his usual two. Or maybe it was the fact that Stratton really, really needed this deal.

After Victoria finished her presentation, the lights came up, and the two lead guys from Atlas McKenzie went right up to him. One, the Senior VP of Real Estate, was a slight, whey-faced man of around fifty with full, almost female lips, long lashes, a permanently bland expression. He didn’t speak much. His colleague, the VP for Facilities Management, was a stubby man, all torso, with a heavy five-o’clock shadow, a beetle brow, obviously dyed jet-black hair. He reminded Nick of Richard Nixon.

“And I thought you guys just did chairs and filing cabinets,” said Nixon, flashing bright white teeth with a prominent center gap.

“Far from it,” Nick chuckled. They knew better; Stratton had been courting them for months, making their business case, running a long series of offsite meetings that Nick had thankfully been spared. “Listen, if you need to check your e-mail or your voice mail or whatever, we’ve got a wireless campsite down the hall.”

The whey-faced man, whose name was Hardwick, sidled up to Nick and said silkily, “I hope you don’t mind a rather direct question.”

“Of course not.” The delicate-featured, blank-faced Hardwick was a killer, a genuine corporate assassin; he could have been an apparatchik out of the old Soviet Politburo.

Hardwick unzipped a Gucci leather portfolio and pulled out a clipping. Nick recognized it; it was an article from Business Week headlined, “Has Midas Lost His Touch?” There was a picture of the legendary Willard Osgood, the crusty old founder of Fairfield Equity Partners — the man who’d bought Stratton — with his Coke-bottle glasses and leathery face. The article focused mostly on “the millions in pretax losses incurred by Stratton, once the fastest growing office-furniture company in the U.S.” It talked about Osgood’s “vaunted Midas touch for picking quality companies and growing them steadily over the long term” and asked, “What happened? Will Osgood stand idly by while one of his investments falls off a cliff? Not likely, say insiders.”

Hardwick held the clipping up for a few seconds. “Is Stratton in trouble?” he asked, fixing Nick with a watery stare.

“Absolutely not,” Nick replied. “Have we had a couple of lousy quarters? Hell, yeah — but so have Steelcase and Herman Miller and all the other players. We’ve been through two years of layoffs, as you know, and the severance costs are a bear. But we’re doing what we’ve got to do to stay healthy in the long term.”

Hardwick’s voice was almost inaudible. “I understand that. But you’re not a family-run company like you used to be. You’re not running the whole show. I’m sure Willard Osgood’s breathing down your neck.”

“Osgood and his people pretty much leave us alone,” Nick said. “They figure we know what we’re doing — that’s why they acquired us.” His mouth was dry. “You know, they always like to give their companies enough rope.”

Hardwick blinked, lizardlike. “We’re not just buying a hell of a lot of workstations from you folks, Nick. We’re buying a ten-year service contract. Are you going to be around a year or two from now?”