William Hertling - Avogadro Corp.

“No, it’s to learn to work effectively with others,” Sean provided helpfully.

“Working more effectively means what?” David paused. “It means learning how others communicate and think. It means learning who is likely to appreciate a data-driven argument versus an emotional argument. It means learning who is likely to want to think out loud, versus who wants to see the arguments written down and have time to respond.” David looked at the group, forcing himself to stay upbeat and chipper even though he feared that the group opinion could easily go against him and the project at this point. “Is that manipulative? Do we take a Myers-Briggs workshop to manipulate people, or to be able to work effectively with them, and spend less time in arguments and disagreements?”

A few of the VPs turned and looked at Rebecca, waiting for the CEO to respond. Rebecca slowly nodded and agreed, “It’s not manipulative, it’s helpful. I can see that. I’ve been through more than my fair share of those workshops.”

“If two people took one of those workshops together, they’d get to know how each other think. I don’t know if it’s been studied, but perhaps two people who have taken a Myers-Briggs workshop are also more likely to have a successful date together. What we’re doing with ELOPe is giving everyone the same benefits they would get from one of those workshops. We’re enabling people to be more effective communicators and collaborators. Who doesn’t want to be a better communicator? Who doesn’t want the people they work with to be better communicators?” David saw with relief that the tension in the group had dropped palatably.

“Remember, we’re measuring sentiment in these messages,” he went on, pacing back and forth in front of the display again. “It’s not just a grudging assent: people are having and maintaining more effective and cooperative ongoing communication when our tool is enabled. We’re empowering people, giving everyone the equivalent of what they would get in an expensive management workshop. Once, spell checking was the big innovation that leveled the playing field between people of good or bad spelling ability. Now we are leveling the playing field for people for writing — enabling people of all writing abilities to create powerful, well crafted communications.”

There was quiet for a minute, then one of the executives asked, “What’s the timetable for releasing this?”

With that question, all the remaining tension went out of the room. Discussion went on for another fifteen minutes, but the topics were all implementation details and business return on investment questions.

At the end of David’s presentation, Sean walked him to the conference room door while the executives milled around and helped themselves to another round of coffee and food. “Good job,” he said privately to David, as he ushered him out. “I’m confident they’ll endorse the next phase.”

As the door closed behind him, David leaned against the wall outside the conference room. The presentation had been more draining than he realized. Then he chuckled. The dating example had been contentious, but it was better to raise it and address it early than leave it as a lingering issue. He was sure the presentation had won them over. The language analysis he ran last night in ELOPe against his presentation predicted a ninety-three percent favorable response.

“Look Gary, you know as well as I do that it doesn’t make sense to optimize until after we’re done.”

While David was at the big presentation with the big wigs, Mike was stuck having to defend their resource utilization with Gary Mitchell. Mike wondered if David had somehow arranged the time of the meeting with Gary to conflict with the executive briefing just so that David wouldn’t have to go. Give him a thorny bug to fix, a new architecture to design, and he’d be happy. Give him a team of developers to motivate, and that would be just fine. But he hated playing organizational politics. David was definitely going to owe him one for this.

“Of course, we’ll only use a fraction of the number of servers after we optimize. However, we’re only going to optimize when the algorithm is done. If we start optimizing now, it’ll hurt our ability to improve the algorithm. This is basic computer science.” It was like talking to a wall, the words just bounced off.

“Mike, Mike, Mike.”

Mike rolled his eyes at Gary’s condescending tone, a safe maneuver since Gary couldn’t even be bothered to look at him. Mike studied Gary across the expansive desk. Gary leaned back in his car, arms stretched behind his head, white dress shirt stretched over his belly, jowls hanging down under his chin. He appeared to be studying the ceiling. Mike thought that Gary would be more at home as the VP at a place like General Motors. Only a big glass ashtray and cigar was missing. He wondered, not for the first time, how Gary had ended up at Avogadro.

“I know your project got special approval from Sean to use production servers. Servers that keep Avogadro’s day to day operations running, I might remind you.” Gary finally heaved himself upright and looked at Mike. He pointed a fat finger at Mike before going on. “You’re eating up so much damn memory and bandwidth on the AvoMail servers that I’ve had to bring in additional capacity. You think your project is mana from Heaven, but that’s what every R&D team thinks. Meanwhile, I gotta keep things running here, and your one measly experiment is making us run critically short of spare capacity.”

“Gary, we…”

Gary ran right over him. “Approval from Sean or not, I’m in charge of Communication Products, and I’ve got ultimate responsibility for ensuring absolutely zero downtime. I’m telling you that you’ve got two weeks to get your project resources down, or I’m bouncing you off our production servers.”

“Listen Gary, we can…” Mike started, but Gary interrupted him again.

“No more ‘Listen Gary’,” he shouted. “We’re done here. I’ve had this discussion with David repeatedly. You’ve got two weeks. You go tell David. Goodbye.” Gary shooed him out of the office with his hand like an errant cat.

Mike left Gary’s office, blew past Gary’s startled admin, and resisting the urge to slam doors, he walked back to the R&D building. He stalked down five floors, across a street and down a block, then up again, and finally through a maze of hallways in his own building, fuming with unspent anger.

As Mike walked, he relaxed again, one benefit of the sprawling site. Avogadro Corp had expanded so much that they now spanned seven city blocks in the Northwest part of Portland, on the site of an old trucking company. A dozen buildings, most new, a few old, and constant construction.

As the company and their profits had grown over the last fifteen years, they put up one new building after another, so fast that even the employees couldn’t keep track of who or what was where. Even Mike had seen three new buildings go up in his few years with the company.

It was an ongoing source of curiosity among the employees to discover what the different buildings contained. While most of the office complex was quite normal, there were some oddball discoveries, like the telescope observatory on top of one of the buildings that could only be opened by certain, apparently randomly chosen, employee access cards. There was a billiard room that apparently changed floors and buildings. Mike had seen that one himself. Whether the trick was managed by having an actual room that moved, or by facilities staff moving the contents of the room, or by duplicating the room, no one knew. Of course the engineers at Avogadro couldn’t resist a puzzle, so they had done everything from hiding wifi nodes to RF encoding the furniture, with random results that just puzzled everyone even more.