Learning Curve (16 page)

A
lone in his office, Dan Crowen watched the interview on the display of his computer. It ran in a box in the upper right hand corner with the weekly sales numbers on the rest of the screen. The interview had begun as a typical Cosmo Validator charm session, so Dan's attention shifted back to the numbers. But when he heard his own name, he quickly switched the interview to the main screen. That's when he heard Validator say, “… full
faith…”
in a manner that suggested just the opposite.

“You son of a bitch,” Dan said aloud. “You create this clusterfuck, you expect me to make it work—and now, just when I'm finally turning things around, you saw me off at the knees? All so that the mighty Cosmo Validator can take credit if it works, and shift the blame to me if it doesn't.”

“So, tell me, Cosmo,” asked Cavuto, “is all of this upheaval at Validator at an end? Will we now see a return to normalcy at Validator Software?”

Validator rocked his head slightly, as if trying to minimize his answer. “Not quite yet. There's one more comparatively minor downsizing that's about to take place. That should do it.”

The interview went on for another two minutes, but Dan heard nothing else after that. He spun his seat around and stared out the window at the small Japanese garden.
How does he know that?
he asked himself. And the realization hit him like a gut punch.

By the time he turned back to his desk, the interview had been replaced by commercials. He cleared the image and called up Instant Message. “I need to talk to you immediately,” he typed. “In my office.”

Less than a minute later, there was a knock on the door. “Come in,” said Dan. He didn't stand as Lisa walked in. She walked over to take the sole chair on the side of the desk, as she had many times before.

“No need to sit,” Dan said peremptorily. She seemed surprised, then her face became an expressionless mask, and she stood, feet together and hands folded in front of her.

“You asked for me?” she asked in a flat tone.

He studied her for a moment: the cold eyes, the sharp features…
how did I ever see her as pretty
? he wondered. “Cosmo just ratted you out,” he told her. “You're finished. I want you out of here by five tonight.”

She didn't react. “May I have a ride to the Jetport?”

“Take a cab,” he snapped. “And bill Cosmo for the…
service.
”

She nodded slightly. “Anything else?”

There were so many things Dan wanted to say, so many words he wanted to throw at this woman and her boss. Then it struck him that the smart strategy was to not show his cards just yet.

“No.”

She nodded again. “Mr. Validator has asked me to tell you that you have two quarters to show positive results for your efforts—or he will find someone who can.”

Dan forced himself not to react. “Message received.” He locked eyes with her, and didn't take his eyes off her until the door closed behind her.

When she was gone, he hurled himself out of his chair and began to pace the room. Thoughts and arguments and accusations raced through his brain too quickly to settle on any single one. After thirty minutes of angry insanity, and another fifteen minutes of surfing the Web to plumb the business world's reactions to Cosmo's latest remarks, he found himself outside, sitting on a cold stone bench in the Japanese garden. The soft spectrum of greens and the precisely trimmed borders cooled the raging fire in his brain and reasserted an order to his thoughts.

He could hear cars in the parking lot just beyond the bamboo screen.
If they weren't watching that interview,
he told himself,
they've all undoubtedly heard about it by now. How am I going to walk out and face them all—and ask them to trust me and make even more sacrifices—when all 32,000 of them now know that the beloved founder and chairman of the board has lost faith in me? How can I convince them all to follow me, when everyone from the janitors to my own executive team now assumes I'm a short-timer?

He shivered slightly in the cold, but he didn't move. A tiny bird hopped out from under a boxwood bush and up onto a nearby juniper plant, where it began to tear off the dusty blue berries, apparently in pursuit of just the right one. Eventually, the bird noticed the large figure on the nearby bench. It stopped and stared, turning its head one way, then the other. Dan made a clicking sound with his tongue… and the little bird, almost comically, fluttered back under the boxwood for safety.

He took a deep breath that seemed to revive him. What have I got to lose now, but everything? The hyperbole of the words made him chuckle out loud. Still, it was true—and the words were somehow liberating. If he was going to fail anyway, then why not go down fighting for what he believed in?

But what
did
he believe in? Dan was astonished—his jaw actually dropped—to realize that he already knew:
he still believed in Validator Software. Even more amazing, he would willingly
die
to make it a success again… a company that bore the name of the man who had just betrayed him.

And also, he realized—with far less surprise—there was something else he would die for.

I
t was late, and the line of headlights across the Bay Bridge had thinned enough for the cars to drive at the speed limit. Alison could just make them out in the reflection of herself standing at the whiteboard in the nearly empty conference room. It's a good thing there's nothing fourteen stories tall between here and the Bay, she thought, because what I'm writing could make somebody quite rich.

There was a magnum bottle of Two-Buck Chuck merlot on the counter by the sink, along with a toppled stack of Styrofoam cups. She poured herself a half-cup and sat down at the chair that she'd placed ten feet in front of the whiteboard. She took a sip—
God, this is terrible stuff,
she thought—then sat back and studied what she'd written.

Emerging from the pentimento of a half-dozen failed attempts and erasures was half of an organization chart. Manufacturing, customer service, sales, marketing, and marketing communications were in place—but not yet R&D, finance, or HR. Most important, the upper levels of management, and the people to fill them, were done. She had worked on those first.

She studied the titles and names in the upper regions of the chart. An understanding had been quietly growing in her over the last few weeks that having most of the eTernity start-up team quit—so painful at first—was going to be a blessing in disguise. All those newly-emptied slots had freed her to raise to those executive positions a new group of stronger and more experienced managers. Most of them would never have survived the disorganization and improvisation of eTernity's early days. But all were perfectly suited for the rough and tumble of global competition and corporate politics. If she could hold them together, they'd make a potent team.

She took another drink of bad wine.
Here I come, Cosmo
…

P
rimroses had been planted along the walk from the driveway to the house. And there was now an elegant little fountain in the center of the koi pond in front of the guest house. Dan was disheveled and his head was bowed, but he registered each change as he passed. Each was a reminder of how long he'd been gone. How much life had been lived here without his presence?

He climbed the front steps. A line of new ceramic pots, each filled with a different lily, ran up the steps beside him. In the entryway, a new teak bench had replaced the old wrought iron one they'd bought at an antique shop in SoHo before Aiden was born. He paused on the threshold, caught his breath, straightened his hair and tie, then rang the doorbell.

After a few moments, the handle clicked and the door opened. Annabelle, in her gardening clothes and wearing a scarf, was as beautiful as Dan had ever seen her. She looked surprised to see him. Sh
e brightened with recognition, then caught herself. “Don't you still have a key?” she asked.

“Yes,” Dan said, “but I felt I needed your permission to enter. I have something I want to say to you.”

T
he swelling and waning of the roar of the crowd on the far side of the curtains reminded Alison of waves on a shingle beach. Tony D. was standing beside her. He was the new eTernity VP of Sales, and he would be introduced to the shareholders today.

He raised a fist. “Reminds me of an Apple event.”

“Great,” said Alison. “As long as they aren't expecting me to be Steve Jobs.”

He grinned. “You've got much better legs.”

She forced a grim smile. She'd been warned that suffering through Tony D.'s banter would be the cost of getting a great sales director—and sticking it in Validator's eye.

She looked around. Backstage was filled with excited young people, all of them eTernity employees. Only a few of them had been with the company more than four months. They all knew how lucky they were to be part of the most exciting company of the moment… and all felt that they more than deserved it.

It was so different from just a year ago. The team was all amateurs then, smart but inexperienced, and making it up as they went along. Now most of them were gone, taking their riches and heading off to live out their dreams. This
is
my dream, isn't it? Alison asked herself.

She studied the backstage crowd. All of them were pros; there wasn't a neophyte in the group… well, thought Alison, except maybe me. She spotted a woman—slim, crisply dressed in a business suit, short blonde hair—holding a clipboard in one hand and a stopwatch in the other. She was the event organizer, the best in the business, they said, and her job was to organize the entertainment and set the schedule, and then to make sure that schedule was followed to the minute.

The woman, who probably knew where Alison was at every moment, caught her eye for instant, nodded, then studiously looked away. She's probably been told not to speak directly to me, Alison realized.

Alison found it all a bit unsettling. But then, wasn't that what big successful companies did? They found strength in their size and their organization, and they timed their actions to the second.

She heard music, and the roar of the audience swelled again: the five-minute slide show prelude had begun. How they found that much content for a company this young remained a mystery to her. But Alison also knew that it didn't much matter. This crowd had come to celebrate, and nothing was going to divert them. And, in fact, the cheers had already begun.

And why not? The stock had climbed 700 percent since the IPO, which had not only made those shareholders out there a lot of money, but also gave them the social cachet of being able to say they'd been with eTernity from the start. That made them brilliant investors—and there was nothing better in tech than to be perceived as a genius.

The folks standing about chatting and laughing backstage were delirious, too. For sheer social power, the only thing that trumped investing in the hottest company of the decade was to work for that company. Whatever the future brought, the employees knew that to have this era's eTernity on their resumé would put a fine glow on the rest of their careers. The world would assume they were the best in their profession, that they were smart and clever… and most of all, that they were
lucky.

None of them would notice—not yet at least, because the information was still internal—but there was already a lot that kept Alison awake even more than usual at night.

The core product line was still as strong and popular as ever. But several of the add-on applications had been met with mixed reviews from both reviewers and customers. Meanwhile, Version 2.0, which was promised for introduction six months from now, had already begun to slip. There was real doubt they'd hit even that intentionally generous delivery date; they might be as much as three months late.

Rumors of that fact had in turn begun to worry company vendors. After all, they had dropped their safe, proven Validator partnerships to take the risk of adopting the popular new eTernity standard their customers had demanded. They weren't freaking out yet, but Alison sensed they were beginning to wonder if they'd made a dangerous mistake. Perhaps the word was getting out too, because the torrid pace of the stock price had begun to slow. Most analysts thought it was temporary, but maybe it was more.

And that was just the product. Alison knew there were some internal problems at eTernity. So did the rest of the company, though most of them dismissed it as ‘growing pains' that Prue and her team would fix. One vice-president, formerly a well-regarded lab director at a Fortune 50 company, had joined eTernity… and quit two months later to go back his old employer. The official story was that the giant company had offered him a king's ransom to return. But Alison knew how much salary and stock she'd offered to get him to join eTernity—and she knew he would have stayed if he'd felt comfortable working at the new company.

Even worse, she'd decided that the costs of success might be outweighing the costs of failure. She thought back to that night when she'd sat at that whiteboard and reorganized the company. Like a good technologist, she had focused on the part of the company that designed and sold and serviced the company's products. Why had she assumed that Human Resources would take care of itself? Why hadn't she made hiring of the rank-and-file of the company as much of a priority as her own recruiting of senior management?

Now she had a mess on her hands. Like every hot tech company—and these days eTernity was a supernova—it had initially been buried in thousands of job applications. HR had managed to hire the best and brightest (and youngest) of these applicants, but it had taken too damn long. In fact, the hiring was still going on.

And that was only the start. Once those legions of newcomers arrived at eTernity, they soon discovered that HR had almost no place to put them, much less assimilate them into the company's culture. New hires camped out in offices with no furniture, taking jobs that as yet had no description. Much more dangerous, these new hires had naturally filled the cultural void with the one they had brought from their last employer.

In an older company with established patterns and a body of corporate legends, that wouldn't have been too bad, but in a young company like eTernity, with a fragile and still incomplete sense of itself, the organization quickly began to divide into different camps—the Validator crowd (the product of successful raids on that company's former sales staff), the Twillium crowd, and the very dangerous Google crowd. They were all pulling the company in different directions to impose their own personality on the organization.

The problem would be fixed eventually. Alison had fired the HR director. It had been the first major firing of her career, and it would have gone worse if she hadn't kept Arthur Bellflower's words in her head. The woman had walked out of the company with $10 million in her pocket for five months of incompetence—thanks to Alison's mistake of giving her vested shares on hiring. But at least she was gone. And the new HR director, a veteran from Hewlett-Packard, had already begun to assert control. Fortunately, those HP guys really knew corporate culture and new employee orientation.

But there were still pockets of competing cultures, nowhere more than in the newly created sales force. Alison had been told that Tony D. was an oversized personality, but that wasn't the half of it. Unconstrained, he'd formed the sales department in his own image, one very different from the rest of the company.

She glanced over at Tony D. He caught the glance and grinned. “They're pissing on themselves out there. This is going to be a goddamn coronation.”

She smiled, nodded, and turned away.
We'll cross the Tony D. bridge when we come to it.

There was a tap on her shoulder. She turned to see the event organizer standing beside her. “One minute, Ms. Prue,” the woman said. Alison nodded. The woman remained beside her, looking down at the stopwatch—now attached to the clipboard—and adjusting her earpiece.

Enjoy this,
Alison told herself. Who knows when it will be this great again? I just need to emphasize the profits. A great profit margin means money in the bank—and that money can cover a lot of mistakes. It's a cushion for hard times. It'll enable us to hire more codewriters to get that damn 2.0 version out on time. And the stock market loves cash. Just keep talking about that—the rest will take care of itself.

The woman flicked the switch on the battery pack attached to the small of Alison's back, then stepped in front of her to grab the edge of the curtain. “Three,” she said, “Two… One…”

Tony D. gave her a hearty thumbs up. The curtains were pulled back. Alison saw a sea of faces and brilliant lights. The crowd roared.