It was all I could do to not start floating again.
“And maybe,” Cliff started to say, pausing to swallow the last bite of his donut, stopping in a hallway before turning away from me toward his office. “Maybe,” he said slowly, his lips tinged blackish blue from the donut’s smooth frosting, “what I really meant was a Caesar salad.”
Cliff was a man of TV trivia and detailed balance sheets, the forty-year-old arts major with a gift for numbers and finance. Even for me, this fed into the uncertainty over which food Cliff really was. Because Cliff was without question the salad among us, but exactly what kind of salad might never be determined.
To my office and the two hundred e-mails waiting from the morning. Sixteen voice mails. Ten handwritten messages taken by my assistant. The messages in all their forms came from bankers, lawyers, outside sales representatives who’d found their way up to me, analysts from six large mutual funds in Boston and New York, employees from all departments and levels of the company, my life insurance agent, my dry cleaner, a man trying to sell me long distance for my home. It was a twisting kaleidoscope of requests, comments, complaints and chatter.
Twenty minutes and I’d responded to or deleted half of the messages. Quick conversations and short e-mails.
Yes.
Today.
Let me find out.
Talk to Julie, but sounds fine to me.
Unfortunately, no. Which I hate to say. But that’s my only conclusion.
Thanks, but no.
Thanks, but no.
It’s a tax issue.
He’s got it wrong.
Great news.
Yes.
If you think so, then yes.
Unreal.
No.
No.
Thanks, but no.
Nine-thirty, and I was passing through meetings between teams from R&D, Strategic Planning, Technical Development, Production, Operations, Customer Service and Tech Support. Most Mondays I made brief, unannounced appearances at a handful of staff meetings. I nodded and smiled at group VPs, section managers, entry-level employees still learning to use their voice mail. I shook hands. I dispensed Hello s. I asked for the names of the many people I had never met. I told them to go about their business as usual, leaning against a high window or a green glass wall, sometimes sitting down in a corner next to a group of latecomers to the meeting, knowing I needed to sit silent, motionless, fading from the minds of the attendees around me, and hopefully they’d begin to sit back in their chairs or stand up to talk as if I weren’t there, some of them flicking bits of paper at their neighbors, others doodling in their planners or swearing at the person writing too small on the whiteboard, and I watched as the group followed a sometimes well-designed, sometimes undefined path toward decision, compromise, acquiescence and assent.
“If the Germans can come through, then yes,” said a financial analyst in one meeting.
“Not that I’m skeptical, but can we see it on a Pert chart?” said a programmer in another.
“Ergo, I give to you six months of research,” said a marketing assistant.
“Beneath my clothing, I, like you, am naked,” said a trainer from Tech Support.
This was not a normal company.
By eleven A.M., two business reporters were following me across the sixteenth floor. It was a puff-piece interview arranged by our Public Relations department, which had spent the last three years pitting the business papers against TV, cable against the networks and the networks against the newsmagazines in order to keep the name of Core Communications and Robbie Case, its poster-boy CEO, in every possible media outlet.
“This kind of growth is what we always said we wanted,” I told one of the reporters as we walked down a hall toward Strategic Planning, where I would pass them back to our PR group. “Still, anyone who tells you they’re ready for this is, I think, lying.”
It was one of my standard lines.
“By your saying that,” one reporter asked, “couldn’t you drive your stock price down three, four, even five dollars?”
I shrugged. I smiled slightly at him. “But I’ve got other things to tell you that will drive it up by ten.”
Who is this person I have become?
Passing through the home of one of the main marketing groups, the reporters scribbling eagerly as they heard hip-hop music rolling across the tops of workstation walls. These were the product development people, ad-agency refugees now creating taglines and branding campaigns not just for our famed Blue Boxes but also for a wide range of new products and services unrelated to Blue Boxes. Whitley in black in the center of a group of eight, for a moment dancing with her hands toward the ceiling, silver bracelet on each wrist caught for a second in the light, her black suit coat unbuttoned, her still face now smiling as her sharp hair fell to the sides, the group around her laughing in sudden surprise, clapping for the boss who in that motion had revealed herself as a onetime club kid turned Chief Operating Officer.
“Stop that dancing,” I said loudly, standing back from the group, the appropriately benign comments of the passing CEO, a scene tailored on the fly to the trailing business press.
“No rock and roll,” Whitley yelled back. “No swear words. No long hair. No smoking. No laughing. No thinking. No fun.”
Leaving the reporters with one of Whitley’s press people.
Walking again, usually with a group, rarely alone—informal meetings made faster if we did not sit down. Walking and discussing any range of issues as we passed through the divisions of the company, the meeting participants sometimes scheduling their walks with me ahead of time, sometimes intercepting me in stairways or elevators or tracking me down on my cell phone, and all of it was okay if we did not stop, if we kept walking, talking fast, never bogging down in one issue, all of this time—my time of walking and meeting—all of it scheduled, in advance and down to the minute, by my assistant on twenty.
Always in my life as CEO of Core Communications, there was merely the appearance of spontaneity.
Picking up Julie for a discussion of production issues at two European facilities.
Passing people in suits, people in jeans, people in shirts that crossed the line from earth-tone casual to weekend camouflage.
Seeing bright computer monitors reflecting off glass walls and young faces.
Glancing into a makeshift bunkhouse in the middle of fifteen, a onetime conference room now lined with small beds and padded cots, all used for late-day naps or overnight stays.
Reading a list of the animal names we gave to our computers, the tree names we used for our servers, the former republics, capitals and other landmarks of the Soviet empire that we gave to our many conference rooms.
There was an overriding if obscure logic to our company, one formed so chaotically out of the disparate rhythms of so many different people.
One hundred new e-mails by noon.
Four women entering a conference room named Turkmenistan, and all of them wearing green.
Walking again, now talking with Cliff as we passed through a new,