by Mari Reiza
‘I was the first in my year at Phillips Exeter,’ he told us in a rich baritone.
Was that an elite school?
‘From there I went to Stanford and got top marks in their bioscience programme,’ the kid did not need to be put at ease to boast about himself.
You could tell he dreamt of being proved a fearless ninja like Samir Arora, and to become one of the top billionaires under forty.
‘Although, of course, it’s not about the money,’ he was lying.
I at least found consolation in the fact that, despite having the right voice, he was the wrong height and shoulder breadth for a CEO. He looked more like the average smug bastard who you wished would move on to shine or die and leave the rest of us, mere mortals, in peace. A guy who would spare you little time once he became senior enough, unless you were considerably more senior than him or a girl with your knickers round your ankles in awe of his pretty face. Still, despite my reservations, I could foresee a mass of Enterprisers adoring Mike for being ‘cool’ with VC clients that one day would buy him a whitewashed Manhattan pad for his orgies. I could foresee his fans unable to tell that this muppet had none of the nobility of Peter-Moses. And I would have to find a way to live with it.
How I dreamt of some corrective punishment for this jerk, like marrying someone like Alakrita to sweat for his fucks, wiping that angelic grin off his face. Alakrita, my dick’s desire.
My last junior entry was Dimitri, and I was convinced Enterprise could not have picked a more loathsome person.
It was clear from his introductory remarks, ‘I really enjoyed the discipline in the military service,’ that he thought of himself as a smooth operator, definitely playing to the unsung soldier figure.
He did actually look the sturdy part of a soldier, with hair clipped short to nothing and an abrupt manner which made him walk in a way that bordered on intimidation, emphasising the breadth of his shoulders and the weight of his arms. But he also claimed to have sophisticated tastes.
‘I am a fussy eater,’ he stated two minutes into his introduction.
And I imagined the thug having crunchy granola and yogurt for breakfast, washed down with a glass of lemon water because it was healthy, and frequenting those longevity restaurants where semi-nude, seventy-going-for-twenty Isabella Rossellini lookalikes administer food as if it were the drug of eternal life.
‘I am really into my culture,’ he added next.
He didn’t sound it. I was certain that he had never read the Odyssey, but I could be convinced that there was no overpraised new thinker he did not own, and that it would be his pride to be the first person at Enterprise to buy this or that book, even though he would never read it.
‘I love buying modern art.’ He declared to be so many things in so little time.
He would never take a lunchtime stroll to contemplate the Bacchus and Ariadne at the National Gallery, I was sure, despite it being an eight-minute brisk walk from the London office, but he would soon try to invite Bev to the premiere at the latest gallery of an obscure artist who used milk and flour to create paintings that developed mould, so you could see something new every time you looked at them.
‘Are you available to do any work at all?’
He laughed.
I was already predicting he would be as useful as an ashtray on a motorbike, and that his Squads would hate him. His juniors, interns and PEN-ers would complain that he must have lived a previous life at the time of the slaves where it was all about the rank and the packing order.
Upwards, Dimitri would probably tell us (swearing we were ‘mutant fuckstick handpumps’ under his breath) what we wanted to hear and then ignore it and he would be fine, because we would fight the urge to crush him, in case his dad was the Defence Minister of Israel and we risked dying in suspicious circumstances like being poisoned by a brugmansia flower in our single malt night cup.
It was clear to me Dimitri had his ambitions set high and would rush them, and although I thought he did not have it in him to become a CEO, it was obvious he could very well end up as the next leader of some not-so-small tyrannical dictatorship...
Was this really my new little army?
The lads had depressed me.
How would I survive through nurturing, training and inspiring these knobs? It was hardly a promotion.
We finished the coffee and headed up to the office to start the new phase in my Enterprise life, almost in tears.
Keeping sane
Walking into the office one winter morning in early 2004, I stopped as usual by my heroin-chic barista. She was wearing a hot little black knitted jumper that said ‘Successful women are made of coffee’.
What were successful men made of?
It was worth thinking about because my new trainees kept asking me, and I usually gave them the textbook answer, that Enterprise would take care of it. But I was less and less convinced of it myself.
After our fatal coffee chat that first day, Matt, Mike and Dimitri had joined all other newly recruited Enterprisers to receive the same training globally, through the Enterprise Learning Channel (ELC). Like I had done before them, they were expected to soak it all up through attending global courses, lectures, seminars, peer academies and Renaissance weekends, which were guaranteed to be identical whether held in summer or winter, in Bangalore or Rome. They would not see more than an Enterprise office room.
‘Who would want to enjoy Cardinal Scipione Borghese's outstanding collection of art when you have the best Enterprise coaches in town?’ I told Dimitri and realised he didn’t know who Scipione was, despite being an art lover.
‘They keep repeating to us different versions of the same thing,’ he dared to complain.
‘Repetition is fortification,’ it was such an easy reply, ‘until the conception of the given story becomes fixed and unmovable.’ I sounded like such an Enterprise man. Although, I thought to myself, repetition can also morph things into abstraction until they do not mean anything…
Yet, I heard myself constantly telling my trainees that whatever they needed, there was an Enterprise training for that: ‘Basic EntErpriser Foundation (BEEF); Centered Beliefs (CB); From Good to God (FGG); Find your Passions Confrère program (FPAC); Insights Learning Lab (ILL); Killer Insights (KI); Voicing for Impact (VI); Model-in-1-day (M1)... I had done them all in my time. We were very ambitious at Enterprise, relentlessly aiming to fit into the faith mass that would take us closer to God.
‘If you want to become great roundtable facilitators, for example,’ I would explain to them, ‘you only need to get on the course.’
I had found it riveting years before, how course mentors had taught me to effortlessly pick three not particularly relevant leads from patients at roundtables, and repeat them to them mid-meeting, as if when re-formulated by an Enterpriser they had acquired additional value.
‘Guys, does this sound like what you are thinking too?’
Had trainers really told us to ask these open-ended amateurish questions to CEOs? Had they told us to condescendingly call them guys? You needed balls to do that, a deep inner feeling that you were chosen and justified, a feeling you only got if you went on our course.
‘There are the teachings for proprietary tools too,’ I encouraged my trainees to get into these fast, as Enterprise rebuilt every programme to the firm’s own specifications which meant you could never rely on common sense or intuition to operate them.
For example, we did not trust PowerPoint, but had our home-grown BrightCell, packed with incomprehensible da Vinci frameworks that incessantly crashed our computers.
‘You need to get great at BrightCell,’ I would tell them, ‘to be able to take advantage of its full capability!’ I never had.
‘Perhaps we could make our own furniture soon!’ Matt was often spot on and for that he would obviously pay one day, because we didn’t like smart asses at Enterprise.
And I made it clear to Matt, Mike and Dimitri that outside these trainings, they were ON THEIR OWN.
They could expect little day-to-day peer advice from me. My job as a soon-to-be Confrère was to give vague instructions and crack the whip and make sure that everything turned up nice for my Truth Leader, Hammi. And I was not going to waste any time introducing my juniors to my new clients, or facilitating their load by telling them where they could find some information sitting on a file on my laptop. This was the way collegiate Enterprise worked, how it had worked for me. I wasn’t planning to make it easier for anybody else.
But I still pressed upon them that we were a family, brought together by Enterprise’s code of ethics, our beloved values. And that attending Ethics Days was non-negotiable for anyone at Enterprise.
Enterprise did not commit to universal values, not because we thought other widely held values were inferior (which perhaps we did), but because our values were unique, and uniqueness underpinned our success.
I had from the beginning of my career felt torn between moving loyalty and deep apprehension hearing Enterprise’s most senior leaders humbling to our collective credence. In fact, in our early days, after carrying a thorough analysis the way Enterprisers only could, some of us were alarmed by how our ethical code had changed in tone significantly over the years, with later versions being over-evangelised.
It had been Alakrita’s analysis which had concluded that over-evangelisation had started with the adoption of the actual words ‘mission’ and ‘value’, which in earlier incarnations of our ethics code had been defined with less righteousness as ‘objectives’, ‘policies’ and ‘working approaches’. This had been followed by the shying away from talking about company profits, though our actual profits had, according to whoever was counting, skyrocketed. Our predecessors had naturally talked of ‘continued growth in Enterprise influence and profits’ and of ‘offering sufficient pay, advancement and other satisfactions to attract talent’, but in our modern day of Enterprise we never talked about pay as a satisfaction.
Gert’s explanation to Alakrita’s exposé, as office manager in charge of finalising the wording and printing of thousands of value booklets every year, was that Wall Street had thrived, greed had become too tempting and Enterprise leadership had felt our wording required to be tightened up a notch.
Alakrita had been deflated by the idea of there being nobility in poverty, and would not be taunted by Gert’s historian quotes about dollars being linked to neurosis, excrement and the Oedipal complex. We had sat and loved watching them pecking each other to death, but I was still attending Enterprise Ethics Days every year, playing the game.
Did we eventually cling to these morals because we were losing our own selves? I was up to believing in any credo to be up there with Peter-Moses, but perhaps I was indeed losing myself. In private I often wondered how I was supposed to keep sane through Enterprise’s cretinisation schedule. And now I had to force it upon other people?
Perhaps we weren’t supposed to keep sane. Not the way sane people think of sane. We didn’t need to be sane anyway. We could suspend belief and follow the system. That is what was expected of us. Because the system was a sweeping force and had proved to be successful.
Was there any way I could keep some inner core, some remnant of my old self?
I did a tree list and then trimmed it for the key branches… what had I become! After my crude brainstorming, I was left with a song and a single malt night cup as potential solutions to hold onto myself. I abandoned the idea of carrying my sitar in my travels, it did not fit in the Tumi. Would there be a market for sitar-encompassing Tumi bags? I doubted it, but you never knew with the rise of the successful Indian businessman.
I knew seriously that I had to do something urgently or I would soon irreversibly turn into an Enterprise drone.
How did other people do it? How did they put up with this constant hammering?
I had seen Hammi devouring his little parcels of pappa reale from his mum in Italy. They were supposed to have anti-ageing properties and he claimed they cleansed his soul. Alakrita had opted to smoke like a chimney, her skin permanently smelling of Chanel N.5 mixed with the stink of cigarettes. (Anyway no one, not even Enterprise, would change that woman in a hundred years, I could rest assured. Alakrita, my dick’s desire.) My juniors soon started to have trouble too. Mike, I was certain, jerked off in the toilet ahead of client meetings and claimed that this new passion was brought by an interpretation of some Enterprise training: a motivational guru had told him to ‘imagine and believe’, and that his mind would bring things on and make things happen. ‘It’s good exercise when you can’t get to the gym,’ he added as further justification, ‘as long as you can make sure to escape death by auto-erotic accident.’ At least he could have a sense of humour.
Even the PEN-ers needed to escape. Rahim had his protein shakes and his dictionary of gay names and Marene had her hair. Rich wrote music in secret in the office, using the toilet cistern as a writing desk.
But whatever we did it was not enough.
We were ALL losing ourselves, drifting into Enterprise. They were telling us what to believe, how to think, and act! Had we been good actors, we would have got into character and acted all of this, and then got out at the end of it. However, most of us didn’t just read from a script but actually got programmed, we yielded to that faith.
I promised to myself to dare at least to remain fortunate in the tools of my escapes: no drugs or other expensive indulgences, only my whiskey, my sitar and beautiful words floating in my head, flying me above my own ruined soul. Would words bring happiness right into my palm?
But unfortunately Enterprise was even robbing us of our own words.
The firm had a long history of careful attention to words. It minted new verbs and nouns and acronyms like banknotes in the Weimar Republic.
‘We’, they told us, ‘do not want business but vocational language. Language is important. It communicates the fundamental principles by which we make decisions.’
Perverse Trojan had joined the language police in our third year and fought to keep to Enterprise values with the zeal of a puritan. It was suddenly like the limits of our language would be the limits to our world.
‘We should not talk about money,’ that was his pet project.
What was wrong with this guy? Did he have a childhood trauma? Had his mother cleaned his arse with dollar bills?
‘Are you really telling me money is not important at Enterprise?’ I would argue with him passionately.
‘Not as much as the quality of the patient relationship, the strength of our work and thinking.’
We hated the word money so much that our invoices were as short and uninformative as possible, even when they ran into hundreds of thousands of pounds. No one wanted to dirty their hands asking for the stuff.
Yet we also abhorred with a vengeance any patient that had a negative attitude towards ‘a sensible level of billings’, which for us was sanctity.
‘We have to eat as well!’ Trojan would claim.
It was only fair and it was nothing to do with money. Our money was nothing to do with money.
Was it crazy? I was sure that it wasn’t like that at Goldman Sachs.
We were told our way was unique, and uniqueness paid.
‘Should I give a shit as long as I keep getting paid, progressing up to be with Peter-Moses?’ I questioned myself. I guess we all questioned ourselves, but did nothing.
And there was more from our language police. Our people were selected and elected but not promoted. We did not sell, hunt or pitch but we proposed, served and saved. We did not give discounts but built trust-based relationships. We did not build a business but a great Enterprise. We did not utilise but found right opportunities for our people. Candidates were not hired, they joined. We were not businessmen or employees but we were professionals, had a vocation, were men on a mission. We couldn’t fucking leave the office without a pocket dictionary!
In fact, Rahim committed to produce an Enterprise dictionary after he finished with his
book of gay names, with Cate’s help.
‘Who dictates these words?’ I wanted to know who was responsible for such dribble and they would be the first to be sacked as soon as I became Enterprise’s CEO, one day. I relished picking a fight with Trojan, though I knew it was madness.
According to Enterprise wisdom, having people not understand us put us at an advantage, it made us sound cleverer than we were.
Did no one out there think that we were mad?
How could we be so sure? Maybe we thought that others outside Enterprise looked at us full of admiration but it was a disguise and they pitied us! Had I been in my right mind I would have certainly pitied anybody who talked such crap.
Then there were the acronyms.
We were Enterprise Citizens (EC), Imparters of the Truth (ITTs), No Chain of Command (NCC). We did things like Developing Better Mankind (DBM), Living the Full Mission (LtFM), achieving Patient Salvation through Truth Solving (PS-tTS), being on Pool Time (PT). We had things like Acute Confère Shortage (ACS), Every Switch into One Branch (ESiOB), Personal enthUsiasm Boards (PUBs), Time Off Religion (TOR), Web Enterprise (WEE). We overused words like an ask, benchmarking, fact base, capacity, charge-code (though no money was ever charged), collaborating, convening, developing, disruptive innovation, ethics, exceptional, facilitation, Father (like our own fathers). Gap analysis, hubs, instruction, nurturing, quantum leap, reaching-out, right thing, storyboard, value map, vision, work stream... God knows what our word cloud said about us!
Our language was worse than that of the international elite that run our countries, one step further, our own Enterprise patois making us sound like la crème de la crème de le schmuck.
And about our titles, Confrère then Father, followed by Truth Leader, aspiring to Patriarch of this or that. Most of the time they did not change the fact that we were still President of fuck all. This was true of corporate titles mostly everywhere, in my experience, but especially at Enterprise, where nobody above Confrère reported to anybody other than God. You didn’t even need to worry about title nomenclature being smoke and mirrors, you just had to know that, other than Father and above, which gave you rights similar to a President from a banana republic, nothing else meant anything at all.