Roger LeBrock was sitting in his customary spot at the far side of the boardroom table—a custom-made granite triangle, cut to match the peculiar shape of the room—when I walked in. He was wearing his signature black and blue Prada, from his glasses to his shoes. But even so, he didn’t seem his normal self. He looked thinner and somehow slightly deflated, a shadow of the grinning man who was shaking hands with Bono and Hillary Clinton and Steve Jobs and a dozen others I vaguely recognized in the photographs on the glory wall behind him.
“Marc!” He stood and moved closer to shake hands. “Good to see you. I’m glad you’re here. How was your weekend?”
“Busy. But good. Yours?”
“It was fine.” He tried to smile but only managed to mobilize one half of his face. “Now, please. Sit. There’s something we need to talk about.”
“Aren’t we waiting for the others?” I gestured to the three sets of papers piled up on the other side of the triangle.
“I don’t think so.” He returned to his chair and waited until I was seated. “They have things to attend to.”
As he spoke, the lower lid of his left eye started to tremble. Very slightly. I’d seen it do that once before. Years ago, when he’d brought me in to run numbers for him at a meeting in St. Louis. He’d been trying to revive a deal that was in danger of going south. And on that occasion, I’d known for certain he was lying through his teeth.
“That sounds ominous.”
He tried his smile again, with even less success.
“There’s no point beating around the bush, I guess, Marc. You knew we were facing some pretty serious challenges when you came on board. I was pretty candid about that, wasn’t I?”
“Where’s this going, Roger?”
“And it’s not just us. The industry as a whole is facing the biggest shakeout in its history. The landscape’s changing faster than ever before. Soon it’s going to be unrecognizable.”
“I know all this, Roger. Save it for the shareholders. What’s your point?”
“The point is, the efficiencies you’ve helped us to identify? We’re really happy with them. They’ve made a tangible difference. But now we’re in the final stretch, and things are different. We have to make some tough choices. Choices we’re not happy about making. But this is business, Marc. Our own personal happiness doesn’t factor into it.”
“The final stretch?”
“You know what I mean.”
“The bandwidth auction?”
“Of course. It’s a watershed. Win or lose, everything’ll be different.”
“And you’re not confident of winning? After all the time you’ve spent in D.C., glad-handing the stuffed shirts and bullshitting the White House committees?”
“Ask me at noon tomorrow.” He shrugged. “Then we’ll know our fate. One way or the other, the guessing’ll be over.”
“There’s no guesswork involved. Just a finite number of known outcomes, and I’ve helped you plan for all of them. The work I’ve done for you—the customer behavioral analysis, not the boring cost-saving stuff—it makes you unique. Even if you come out of the auction empty-handed and have to sell the company, it’ll be worth five times what it was before I started. At least. No one can match the kind of insights I’ve given you. They’re gold dust. They put you light-years ahead of everyone else.”
“AmeriTel will be worth fifteen times that, if we win.”
“You’ve got to keep some perspective, Roger. The other players are way bigger than you. There’s no shame in being outbid by a crew with deeper pockets. Especially if it’s the usual scenario where the winner pays too much and ends up bankrupt.”
“I’m not paying too much. I’m not a moron. I just don’t like to lose. And the bottom line is, I don’t want to lose—the company, or the extra money we’ll make if we stay in the game.”
“Are we in Death Valley yet? Has your bid gone in?”
“We’re putting in a revised bid this morning. The deadline’s five pm, eastern.”
“So isn’t this a conversation for tomorrow?”
“No. Not really. I’d like to get the decks cleared now.”
“What does that mean?”
“It’s like I said. Tomorrow’s a watershed, Marc. Either way, after tomorrow we’re going to have a very different kind of company on our hands. We’re going to have very different support requirements, going forward. And that’s where those difficult choices I mentioned come in.”
“Difficult choices? Such as?”
“Look, Marc, this isn’t easy for either of us. And I want to be straight with you, right from the start. We’ve been extremely happy with the work you’ve done for us. We’ll be happy to recommend you to anyone. We’ll make sure that everything that’s due to you gets paid without delay. There might even be a couple of bonus clauses we can activate. But as of this morning, the reality is—your contract? It’s being canceled.”
My contract is being canceled? Great use of the corporate passive, I thought. All those brave words about being straight with me, but he still couldn’t take responsibility for the six inches of steel he’d just plunged between my shoulder blades. I thought about calling him on it. I thought about my wife, Carolyn, who’d encouraged me to take the contract. She was a ten-year veteran of AmeriTel and a fixture at the place—unless she didn’t fit in with the new corporate support requirement landscape bullshit, and had been bulleted, too. And then I thought about my weekend, which had mostly been spent there at AmeriTel instead of at home with her. Again.
“Difficult choices? I’ve got news for you. You need a new dictionary, my friend. Because you’re confusing difficult with stupid. Have you got any idea how much money you’re setting fire to, letting me go? How many opportunities you’re going to miss out on?”
“I understand you’re frustrated.” He clasped his hands and placed them on the table in front of him with all the practiced sincerity of a TV preacher. “You’re brilliant at what you do, and I truly respect that. But try to look at things from our perspective. We’re facing a time of unprecedented change. We need to trim our cost base to the bone. And we need our operations to be as lean and agile as they can possibly be.”
“And there’s no room for me in that picture?”
“I’m afraid not. Look, this day’s dawned a little sooner than you or I expected, but we always knew it was coming. That’s the point of using consultants, right?”
“If you think that, you’re even more stupid than I realized. You want to cut costs? How much do I cost you?”
“I’m sorry?”
“You’re firing me to save money, so it’s a fair question. How much do I cost you?”
“Marc. Be reasonable. I don’t have your contract in front of me. I can’t comment on the details. Only on the overall principles we’re trying to adhere to—”
“Nothing.”
“What?”
“I cost you nothing. I take a percentage of everything I save you. And a percentage of everything extra you make, based on my ideas. Keeping me costs you nothing. Fact. And firing me will lose you money. Fact.”
“It’s not that simple, Marc.”
“It is that simple. Without my analytics you won’t know where your inefficiencies are. And you won’t know where to aim your new products. If you’re worried about cost, firing me is the last thing you should do.”
“Your initiatives have been very successful up to now, sure. That’s why we’re paying you, and why I said we’d be happy to endorse your work. But here’s the real problem: What you do is make recommendations based on the past. Now, a lot of your insights are fascinating. And those grenades you hit us with early on? Like that sales guy you found running an escort service on company time? Dynamite. But if things haven’t already happened, how can you analyze them? You see? You’re rooted in history, Marc. We’re not. AmeriTel’s entering a new era. We need different thinking. Future thinking. Radical transformation, not a way to milk the most out of the status quo.”