‘Are you going to be long?’ Mabel asked him, and Marroné was tempted to scream ‘Can’t you see that, if you hurry me, I’ll feel pressurised and end up taking twice as long?’ when he remembered that he’d already undergone his daily ordeal and was only looking for somewhere quiet to get some reading done.
‘I’ll be as quick as I can,’ he replied as usual and, before Mabel could answer back, he had left the room and was descending the stairs and heading for the bookcase, where he began running his index finger over the spines and titles in search of a book to keep him company. Drucker’s The Practice of Management? No, too constipated. Edward de Bono’s The Use of Lateral Thinking? Already knew it by heart. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful? It had been a gift from a hippie professor at Stanford and he hadn’t been able to get past the opening pages. He needed something more reader-friendly, something from his favourite genre for example, a book that could draw ideas and principles of business philosophy from the great works of universal culture. He owned several, some very good, others so-so: Jesus Means Business, for example, was nothing but a rehash of Og Mandino’s classic The Greatest Salesman in the World; but Konosuke Takamura’s Haikus for Managers was a real oyster bank from which he had extracted such pearls as:
A huge pyramid
An elephant can’t climb it
A tiny ant can
But his undisputed favourite was Shakespeare the Businessman by R Theobald Johnson. Thanks to this volume he had been able to maximise the benefits derived from reading the Swan of Avon in the classrooms of St Andrew’s, for Shakespeare the Businessman taught you to apply what you had learnt at school to the daily routine of the efficient executive, turning each play into a fountainhead of practical teachings: from Hamlet, for example, you could learn to avoid endless, fruitless procrastination in the decision-making process; from The Merchant of Venice, to pore over the small print of a contract, especially when dealing with venture capital; Henry V was a lesson in leadership, and Timon of Athens an appeal not to overspend on advertising and representation; King Lear alerted one to the dangers of dividing up a great family enterprise among the heirs, of rewarding the flatterer and punishing the critic and, above all, of putting off the appointment of a successor till the last moment and then naming them on a whim; Romeo and Juliet was about the sometimes tragic consequences of communication failures in companies, and Richard III about the destructive potential of the executive hell-bent on reaching the top by climbing a staircase of severed heads. Macbeth got it on the nose when it pointed to the wife who stays at home as the true power behind the unscrupulously ambitious husband, as did Antony and Cleopatra – but about the opposite risk: of losing in the voluptuous arms of a lover the Spartan virtues demanded by one’s profession. Othello offered the most penetrating analysis of in-house intrigues – that daily hell unleashed by jealousy, envy and rumour – and of the unimaginable destructive potential of a mid-ranking executive who feels he has been unfairly overlooked in his promotion. The Tempest, on the other hand, was an object lesson in how to regain control of a company with minimum damage to the organisation; and Mark Antony’s speech in Julius Caesar provided a master class in public speaking, combining the best classical oratory with the highly efficient use of the material props of a modern audiovisual presentation: the slashed cloak, the blood, the body of the assassinated leader. Bidding it farewell with a wistful caress of its well-worn spine, Marroné’s finger moved on until it ran into Michael Eggplant’s Don Quixote: The Executive-Errant, which his parents had recently brought him back from Spain. With a whoop of jubilation he grabbed it off the shelf and made straight for the bathroom, where, dropping his trousers out of mere habit, he sat down on the seat and began to read:
Hundreds of years ago western civilisation was about to perish under the onslaught of the armies of the night. There then emerged a special class of men, emissaries of light, pillars of society, defenders of justice and the true faith: the knights-errant. Thanks to them Christian Europe was able to defeat its enemies within and without, and prosper, sending out its light to all the peoples of the world. Today, as the darkness takes on new forms and once more lays siege to the citadel of civilisation, the future of the free world and the liberation of the iron-bound once again rests with a force of chosen men, the true heirs of the knights-errant of yore: the managerial classes – the executives-errant. Their castles are the dazzling crystal towers of corporations; instead of lances they bear fountain pens, and briefcases instead of shields; they travel not by horse but by plane, yet fundamentally nothing has changed. The emergence and development of the executive class is the crucial, defining event of our times, and one of the most significant in the history of mankind. More than presidents and statesmen, more than religious and military authorities, more indeed than the owners of businesses, it is executives who pave the way, who are in the front line on the battlefield as were the knights-errant of yore. Their appearance at the start of our century coincides with the most spectacular leap forward in the history of mankind: one that leads from a materialist civilisation, subject to the tyranny of existing resources, to an idealist one, in which the unlimited generation of resources ensures the true liberation of the human spirit. In this very spirit Cervantes’ celebrated hero, Don Quixote of La Mancha, decides one fine day to turn his back on the meagreness of his material life and the shallowness of the world around him – gutless mediocre folk devoted to traditional ways of doing things, for whom the word creativity is anathema – and strikes out on the highways in search of adventure. Don Quixote’s gesture encapsulates the adventurous spirit of today’s businessmen: conquering new markets, daring to vie with the corporate giants, earning themselves a name and an image, and devoting their lives to it. Until this moment – his fiftieth year – he has done nothing with his life: a village squire, a poor squire, so obscure and retiring that we cannot be certain of his real name: Quesada, Quijana, Quejana… Sr Quejana has not lived, but merely vegetated in the shadows of others’ adventures, like some small-time village tradesman who seeks consolation for the flatness of his life in the biographies of millionaires. Then, one fine day, he looks in the mirror and does not recognise himself. That dull, grey face, those lacklustre eyes, that look of defeat – the bitterest look of defeat, the look of someone who has never fought – cannot be his. Another expression is possible: that of his true self, that of his unexplored potential. And on that day he resolves to become Don Quixote of La Mancha.
Marroné closed the book for a moment. There’s no such thing as chance, he thought. This book had been sitting patiently on the shelves of his bookcase for the right moment to awaken. And that night, of all nights, on the eve of his new life – a life of adventure, a life in which his dreams would begin to come true – it had called out to him, to pass on its message of encouragement, and his hand had reached for it. This was what he had been waiting for, he saw it clearly now. Tomorrow, when dawn broke, Ernesto Marroné would go out into the world. Who knows who would come back?
Anxious and enthusiastic, he skipped the rest of the introduction and, opening the book at random, began to read a section entitled:
Some Episodes Analysed
The Windmills
In this, perhaps the most famous of all his adventures, Don Quixote charges full tilt at some windmills he takes for fearsome giants, with predictable results: the great sails begin to turn in the wind snapping his lance into several pieces and bringing down horse and rider, who instead of recognising his error accuses some ‘evil enchanters’, who he claims are pursuing him, of having ‘transformed these giants into mills, to deprive me of the glory of the victory’. Although the proverbial phrase ‘tilting at windmills’ has come to be associated with an attitude of heroic or, more properly, ‘quixotic’ idealism, the executive-errant would do well to avoid imitating our knight to the letter. The giants of the market do not surrender at the first charge, their weapons are many and far-reaching, and a small or medium enterprise willing to give battle
must tread carefully if it does not want to bite the dust and wind up bankrupt. Windmills perform a useful function, like any big company; seeing them as enemies to be destroyed is another example of the aforementioned quixotic lack of proportion. The executive-errant must rather design better, cheaper, more efficient windmills, and offer them on the market, and the giants will soon become obsolete and collapse under their own weight without anyone having to be ground down to defeat them.
The Helmet of Mambrino
A barber comes down the road, wearing his shiny golden barber’s bowl on his head to protect his hat from the rain. This bowl Don Quixote takes for the golden helmet of the legendary Moor, Mambrino, and after accosting him and tearing it away from him, he dons it himself, to ridiculous effect. The well-known saying ‘all that glisters is not gold’ would do very well to summarise the moral of this new adventure for the executive-errant: how many times on our journey does the oft-sought ‘golden opportunity’ seem to come our way, without us seeking it? That perfect deal whose brilliance blinds us at a distance, but once it is in our hands – and all our capital invested in it – turns out to be yellow brass that we have to ‘wear on our heads’ and we become the laughing stock of the business world.
The Freeing of the Galley Slaves
This episode is especially recommended for any general or personnel managers who might be tempted in these turbulent times to yield before the incessant demands of their employees. In this adventure our hero runs into a chain of galley slaves condemned by the king’s justice, whom without further ado he decides to free, and sets about their guards. And in token of their gratitude he is rewarded with a hail of stones that knocks him to the ground. In this adventure our gentle knight, in the name of an ideal of justice as abstract as it is dogmatic, interferes with, of all things, state justice, setting free a band of dangerous criminals, whose guilt they have confessed to him themselves, thus becoming the first – but probably not the last – victim of their criminal actions. This is precisely the way trade unions or other workers’ organisations proceed today: the workers, often ‘chained’ to them against their will, are led into action by resentful or opportunistic leaders, and shower us with stones where thanks are due. He who yields to the incessant and outrageous demands of strikers and expects those who benefit from his generosity to meet their obligations is not only guilty of quixotic naivety, but may have done his company serious, perhaps irreparable, harm.
An idyllic scene awaited him when he got back to his bedroom: his wife asleep with a child on either side; little Cynthia in the middle of the bed, her tiny, half-open mouth brushing the exposed nipple that peeped out from under the lip of Mabel’s unfastened bra; Tommy at the edge with his mother’s arm around him to stop him falling. Looking at them, he was overcome by a wave of tenderness that reached the depths of his being, where it stirred up a sediment of guilt that muddied the purity of his initial feeling. What kind of a man, he asked himself, extricating little Tommy from his mother’s embrace and carrying him to his room, was incapable of spending some time with his children like any normal father? What kind of a man needed to lock himself in the bathroom to hide from… what? From a two-and-a-half-year-old boy, from a barely two-month-old baby? Was he, at twenty-nine, becoming one of those workaholics he knew so well, incapable of thinking about anything other than their jobs, who before long end up sleeping with the secretary and filing for divorce? (‘In your case not even that,’ his sly right brain whispered to him, ‘she’s sleeping with Cáceres Grey.’) As of today he would do his best to be a better father, he promised himself as he carried the little girl to the bedroom that had until recently been his study, feeling her sweaty brow with the back of his hand to make sure she didn’t have a temperature (he’d call the doctor, he’d save his little girl; reduced to tears, Mabel would say to him, ‘If it hadn’t been for you, I don’t know what would have happened’), checking her nappy to see if it would last till morning – he could always change it, but with the shortage it was wiser to make it last as long as possible. Perhaps, he thought as he slid beneath the sheets and, trying not to make contact with his wife’s body, rigidly lined up his own with the edge of the bed, the problem was that he had got married and had children too young: at an age when others could devote themselves fully to their studies and careers, he had had to divide his energies between work and home. Not that he’d had any choice: he and Mabel had met in the classrooms of the Faculty of Economic Sciences, where he gave classes as an assistant and she was finishing her last subjects, albeit embattled by endless assemblies and occupations and revolutionary trials of lecturers and tributes to Eva Perón and Che Guevara. Fleeing from the upheaval, they had met in the ground-floor bar and shared a complicit cup of coffee. At first, he had thought she looked quite nice, almost pretty if she’d known what to do with make-up, and through the layers of winter clothes her body had looked warm and desirable; but when at the start of the summer he finally managed to divest it of its last wrappings, her naked skin felt unpleasant, like one of those woollen mattresses that are soft on the eye but lumpy to the touch. ‘She needs a good carding, not make-up,’ his mind whispered to him as he caressed her mechanically and, thinking thoughts such as these, for once he didn’t come too soon and, as he collapsed in tears into her arms, he must have made the easy mistake of taking relief for love. They went on seeing each other for two months, at the end of which Marroné was grateful for the respite provided by a trip Mabel and her parents made to Europe, which would give him a month to think about how best to end the relationship without causing her too much pain. But before the month was up, they were back and, by the time he’d recognised his future in-laws’ Mercedes-Benz outside the front door of his parents’ house, and the four progenitors had locked themselves in the living room for talks, and Mabel, her skin all red as if it had been pickled in brine, and wringing a little embroidered hanky between her bitten nails, had broken the joyous news to him, the future course of his life was all mapped out. The wedding took place two weeks later and they did without a honeymoon so that they could do up the house for the arrival of their firstborn, who stopped growing almost immediately and slipped away from them in a miscarriage, and had it not been for the need to put any small-mindedness aside and accompany Mabel through her subsequent depression, Marroné might have felt that to the indignities of blackmail had been added those of a confidence trick. Although over the years he had learnt to like her and appreciate her good qualities, there were times like this, while his sleepless eyes flicked across the shadows on the ceiling in time to the monotonous ticking of the clock, that he asked himself in bafflement if there wasn’t a certain irony to the fact that Mabel had been the only woman he’d been able to have satisfactory or at least full sexual relations with precisely because he didn’t find her attractive enough. Something similar, he told himself, often happened in the world of business: an efficient executive might chafe in the ignoble restraint of a job he considers below his abilities, but when he finally obtains the position he has longed for, next thing he knows his career, instead of being catapulted forwards, has ground to a standstill; he tried to shape this into a general rule that would in the fullness of time bear his name – ‘Marroné’s Law of Inverse Something or Other’ – but sleep was already closing his eyes, and besides, he couldn’t see himself using examples from his sex life in a business presentation…
3
The Bosses’ Bacchanal
‘Eighty-nine busts of Eva Perón, standard model, plain plaster of Paris, at 2,000 pesos a unit, that’s a subtotal of 178,000 pesos, plus three in white cement for outdoors, at 2,500 pesos a unit, that’s a subtotal of 7,500 pesos, that makes 185,000 in total, a 10 per cent discount for… payment upfront, is it?’
The Adventure of the Busts of Eva Perón Page 5