Winners and Losers

         Joe took his seat at the back of the grand auditorium. As a techie he preferred obscurity. In a more public location, people would just home in on him with their computer issues and he had enough to be getting on with as it was. There were maybe a thousand people in the conference room which curved like a theatre focused on a grand stage before them. Various important board-level directors took their comfortable seats on stage. But they still awaited the CEO, Samuel Winterbottom, who would give the speech today. The air buzzed with a multitude of conversations and the place was a mass of color and stories. He looked around and saw Jill, his ex-wife, sitting on the stage in full view of most of the audience. She always loved the limelight. She was laughing with the other members of the board. She looked pretty in the lighting which shone in her eyes and hair, she dressed immaculately as always, as fitted her Sales directorship position and a salary that was three times his own. Then he remembered her tantrums and her guilt trips, and a feeling of relief passed over him. I am so glad that's all over he thought. She had not seen him yet and he realized that he had not come with any friends or colleagues. He did not want her to see him like this. She always criticized him for his lack of communication and 'concern' for others and so he moved to another seat behind a pillar where she could not see him. What she called concern he called fake smiles and false connections but that was all water under the bridge now.

         The lights dimmed on the seats and now focused people's attention on the stage where it stayed bright around the podium. The CEO was a small man and of a slight build. Joe had been an athlete and a nerd in school getting good grades and the girls as well but he had studied politics in university which was useless for getting jobs and so he had ended up in IT. He was 6’ 3’’ and well-built. Exercise was important to him and balanced his brain-intensive programming job. The man on stage was the small kid, with the silly name, that would have been bullied at school, the one with a chip on his shoulder that ended up being successful because he knew no other way to survive. But when Winterbottom arrived at the podium the auditorium stood and erupted with praise. The CEO lapped it all up smiling and loving all the attention. Good grief thought Joe to himself as he also clapped wearing the inane smile of some acolyte. Images of North Koreans praising their leader for fear for their lives came to mind and again he sniggered to himself looking around. These people were just playing the game, securing their jobs by giving undeserved praise to a small man with a big attitude. Things settled down as the CEO began to talk and he returned to his seat. Joe was glad he had brought his mobile and was sitting in the back where he was not so clearly visible as the CEO's speech droned on for an hour. He busied himself with his emails and read some news and an interesting article about AI. But he then realized the CEO was beginning his concluding remarks and shifted his attention back trying to get a few one-liners from the speech to share to confirm he had indeed been listening, just in case people asked him.

         "I built this company from the ground up, but I cannot do this without you. Maybe it's 50% me and 50% you guys." The CEO concluded his speech in what was meant to be a motivational way, but this just sounded to Joe like pure narcissistic self-promotion. Joe dissected the statement. In Joe's mind's eye, the CEO was articulating the Thomas Carlyle, "Great Man View of History" as opposed to a more Marxist perception that grand impersonal materialistic forces gave incidental benefits to an elite few. The CEO was in his own eyes a Winston Churchill of the times. But was that true, was he so important? The company had split from a larger multinational and so its essential organization was a lot older than the CEO. With Winterbottom in charge, it had bought out a whole load of successful smaller companies and grown rapidly. The numbers sure looked good, and the various companies worked well together, although a lot of good people and potential growth lines had been sacrificed in their absorption also. However, it was the people on the ground who did most of the work and created most of the company's products, revenues, and profits. 60% of the company's sales came through the web portal that Joe and his project team had built, though sales took credit for this success. This company was built on the sweat and tears of a lot of normal workers like himself.

         Resentment seethed inside him but then in a moment of self-reflection born of his church-going background, he reflected, no I will not let such a bitter root control me. I must be objective about this. The CEO added value in one way and created synergies that helped the company's success. But most of the business would have grown even without him. What he got right was that he could not have done it without the rest of us. He is simply wrong about the percentages and his obscene salary is the symptom of a broken system. I'd rate his contribution as about 5%, which means the CEO qualified for an immediate salary reduction of about 70%. Am I a socialist he sniggered to himself? If so, I must keep quiet, socialism gets a man fired in the good old US of A.

         As they filed out Joe listened to his colleagues, pretending to be fans, speaking loudly about various parts of the speech, hoping the right people would overhear them. "I liked the way he highlighted...", "Wasn't it great how he...", "I loved his joke about..." 'Good grief Charlie Brown,' Joe face palmed in the silence of his mind. He longed for a real conversation and sought out the only man in the company he knew could give it, David Garnett, the IT Director. This guy studied philosophy and ended up in IT too. He was Joe's boss. But like him, he could play the game and still be real. He could sit up on stage with the rest of the board and yet was still capable of truth. His authenticity was hidden behind the clown masks the rest of the company wore. Both David and Joe understood that the more discerning managers would see through the masks and observe the actual wry amusement, at their pretensions, that lay underneath. So David and Joe made themselves indispensable by being the best at what they did and leaving their coolest tricks out of the documentation they were compelled to write for all their work. The business managers would always say, 'If tomorrow you got run over by a bus could the company continue to run without you,' you must document all your work. What they meant was that if I have to fire you you need to be easily replaced. But these same chiefs were so far abstracted from the work that IT did that they could not understand even the documentation that was provided for it, nor that their entire sales process, ERP, and CRM systems were dependent on this one department. It would take a team of consultants several months to work it all out should the company ever decide to fire the two of them. It was a different kind of success but at least it kept the paychecks coming and only an idiot would terminate them for not showing due respect. But the price of such victories was to be consigned to the basement with the company servers and an IT department, out of sight and out of mind of the 'beautiful people' with the sunny, skyscraper-high views of metropolitan New York. These got by using AI to write their presentations and emails which were mainly devoid of the actual detail of how things worked.

         "Well, what did you think?" Joe asked David when the soundproofed office door was shut.

         David grimaced, "He is full of himself, and trying to sort fact from fiction in that speech of his was tiring work but it seems he is going ahead with the merger with AltGood Ltd and that will be a bit of work for us integrating systems."

         Joe raised his eyebrows, "You actually listened to all that, don't you feel kind of dirty now?"

         David laughed, "Yes well overdue for a river to flow through the Augean stables of my mind and wash all the crap away. But the price of sitting on that stage is having to listen for all the relevant stuff."

         Joe paused, "I saw Jill sitting with you during the speech, she looked good and was doing her extravert thing. She seems to be loving her new role as Sales Director. She is earning a fortune compared to both of us, well more than both of us put together actually, and even despite you being a Director. You know she divorced me because I just would not play this game of impressions with her, she plays it even in private, it is all about self-promotion and looking good. She told me I did not know how to talk to people to get ahead and that I was a toxic weight on her ambitions. Maybe she was right about that, she is thriving without me. Do you ever feel like a loser trapped here in the basement watching all the rising stars taking all our hard work and turning it into fancy houses, cars, trust funds for spoilt kids and holidays for themselves? That is what Jill thinks about me. She does not go to church anymore; she says she has evolved to a higher level. It all seems so false this world we live in, so deeply dark and broken."

         David shrugged, "Maybe I should make a bid for a pay rise and get you one too, even the scales a little. Sales do overestimate their importance in the new world. You're right she seems to be thriving but maybe you are in a better place, don't put yourself down just because she wears the outer trappings of success, and you do not. I was reading a book on the First World War last night about the British command and control structure at the beginning of the war. It was class-ridden and the ruling elite in effect did not have a clue. They sent soldiers into battle using tactics that had worked a hundred years before. They told them to walk in lines towards machine guns and then wondered why 70000 were killed in a single day on the Somme. But then as the war progressed, they started to realize they had to change and they started to listen to the guys on the ground doing the actual work, they started to let their men take cover, work with tanks, and use airpower more efficiently."

         "So, we need a war or some great shock to wake the world up so that we can see things as they are? World War One and the war that followed cost millions of lives, do you think people ever really learn from such catastrophes? Must they always be so severe?"

         "Hard to say, sometimes eyes can be opened with simple conversations like this one, and sometimes they require the end of the world and biblical plagues to grab people's attention. To paraphrase the Delphic Oracle, until then to thine own self be true. Now show me that program you were working on for the Sales margin comparisons."


Notes ▼

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PROMPT: "It's fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure."
— Bill Gates
WORD COUNT: 1998