“I’m going to have to ask you to be patient for a little while,” he said. “Monsieur Dunker isn’t ready to see you yet.”
Of course. He was responding to my lateness by being even later. In France, time is an instrument of power.
Andrew invited me to have a seat on a red leather sofa. It stood in marked contrast to the perfectly white walls. One end of the spacious room was a waiting area for visitors; the other was Andrew’s office. Furnished in red leather that matched the sofa, the office was impeccably tidy.
“Would you like a coffee?” Andrew asked.
I was surprised by his question. Somehow I imagined that someone straight out of Buckingham Palace would offer me tea in a china cup.
He placed the coffee on the low table in front of me, then went back to his desk and became absorbed in reading a file. From time to time, he picked up a black lacquer pen and noted something in the margin, then put the pen down in exactly the same place, perfectly aligned with the edge of the desk.
Finally, Dunker’s office door flew open as if a SWAT team was bursting in, and the CEO propelled himself into the middle of the room.
“Who wrote this report?” he shouted in an accusing tone.
“It was Alice, sir,” Andrew replied evenly.
“It’s unbelievable!” stormed Dunker. “She makes mistakes bigger than her ass! Tell her to reread her notes before giving me this sort of crap!”
He threw down the document, scattering its pages all over his secretary’s desk. Andrew gathered them neatly into a pile.
I swallowed hard.
Dunker turned toward me and held out his hand, suddenly calm and smiling. “Hello, Alan.”
I followed him into his office, a vast space dominated by an imposing triangular desk positioned with a point turned toward the visitor. Dunker sat down behind it and waved me to a stylish but very uncomfortable armchair facing him.
Though the window was open, the noise from the street below seemed distant, as if it was not allowed to penetrate the top floor of the building. Looking out, I could see the tip of the Obélisque on the Place de la Concorde, and beyond that the top of the Arc de Triomphe.
“It’s a lovely view, isn’t it?” Dunker said, seeing my gaze lingering outside.
“Yes, it’s lovely. But it’s a shame the Avenue de l’Opéra has no trees,” I said to break the ice. “It would smell nice, having some greenery under your windows.”
“It’s the only avenue in Paris without any trees,” Dunker said. “Do you know why?”
I didn’t.
“When Haussmann built it at Napoleon the Third’s request, he gave in to the Opéra’s architect who didn’t want anything to intrude on the view of his work from the Tuileries Palace.”
A fly came through the window and buzzed around us.
“You wanted to see me,” Dunker said. “What can I do for you?”
“I wanted to tell you about a certain number of things we could improve in the company.”
He frowned imperceptibly.
“Improve?”
My strategy to convince him was to embrace his world by synchronizing with his values of efficiency and profitability. He was always talking about them. All his decisions boiled down to them. I was going to try to prove to him that my requests went along with his priorities.
“Yes,” I continued, “for the well-being of all, and with a view to increasing the firm’s profitability.”
“The two rarely go together,” Dunker said, affecting a slightly amused air.
“Unless an employee who feels better works better,” I countered.
The fly landed on his desk. He flicked it away with the back of his hand.
“If you don’t feel happy with us, Alan …”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Don’t get excited.”
“I’m not getting excited,” I said, trying to appear as calm as possible, despite already wanting to push him out the window. What if he was deliberately misunderstanding what I said, just to throw me off? Stop replying. Torture him with questions. Questions.
“Besides,” I went on, “what’s the link between my opinion that an employee who feels better works better and your hypothesis that I don’t feel happy in your company?”
Three seconds of silence.
“It’s obvious, isn’t it?”
“No. What do you mean?” I asked.
“Well, bad results can’t be excused by external causes,” said Dunker.
“Yet my …” Don’t justify yourself. Ask questions, calmly.
“Who has bad results?” I asked innocently.
An expression of annoyance crossed his face. The fly landed on his pen. He brushed it away again, then changed the subject.
“So tell me: What are your ideas about things that could be improved?”
I had just won the first round.
“Well, first of all, I think we should take on a second assistant in our department, to help Vanessa. She is constantly overstretched, and you can tell she’s really under stress. The new assistant could type up our reports for us. I’ve calculated that we consultants spend almost twenty percent of our time typing up reports on our interviews. Given our hourly rate, that’s not at all profitable for the firm. If we had a second assistant, she could take down in shorthand what we want to put in our reports and then type them up. We could use the time gained to do really useful things that we alone can do.”
“No, each consultant must type up his notes. It’s the rule.”
“It’s precisely that rule that I’m calling into question.”
“When you’re well organized, it doesn’t take all that much time.”
“But it’s logical that clerical work should be done by the person whose hourly pay is the lowest. It’s better for a consultant to spend his time on activities that are more profitable for the company.”
“Exactly. The appointment of an additional member of the department would bring down the department’s profitability,” Dunker said.
“On the contrary, I …” Stop arguing. Ask questions.
“How would it bring down the profitability?”
“It would increase the overall salary expenditure for the department, of course.”
“But since the consultants would free up time to look after customers and do more canvassing for new clients, it would increase turnover. In the end, we’d be winners.”
“I don’t think it would increase turnover.”
“What makes you think that?”
“Everyone knows that the less work you have to do, the less work you do,” Dunker said.
Ask questions. Gently …
“Everybody? Who exactly?”
He searched for words for a few seconds, his eyes moving from left to right. “At any rate, I know.”
“How do you know that?” I pressed him.
The fly landed on his nose. He batted it away, with a gesture of profound annoyance. “That’s what always happens, of course!”
“Oh, you’ve already experienced this?” I asked.
“Yes … well … no, but I know what happens.”
So that he couldn’t blame me for being aggressive in any way, I made sure to seem very naïve, almost the village idiot.
“How can you know, if you haven’t experienced it?”
Unless it was imagination, those were beads of sweat on his forehead. At any rate, he couldn’t come up with a satisfactory answer.
“Does that mean,” I went on, “that if you had less work to do, you’d start to do less and less?”
“I’m different,” he exploded, before getting a grip on himself. “Look, Alan, I’m beginning to find you rather arrogant!”
There we were at last. I took my time.
“Arrogant,” I mused, settling myself calmly in my armchair. “But the other day, you demonstrated in front of everyone that I was lacking in self-confidence.”
He froze. A cloud passed over the sun, and the office suddenly went dar
ker. In the distance, an ambulance was speeding by, its siren screaming.
Finally, Dunker had a flash of inspiration. “Look, Greenmor, let’s get back to the subject. Concerning your request for reorganization: Let the department meet its targets, and then we’ll talk again about appointing an assistant!”
“Yes, of course, of course,” I replied. “But suppose that appointment is the thing that would allow us to meet our targets?”
“You’re taking a very limited view of the problem,” he said, his tone condescending. “I’ve got a strategic view of the company’s development. And that vision prohibits me from increasing the budget for wages. You don’t have all the information to make a judgment, so you can’t understand.”
“Indeed, it’s difficult for me to take a position on the company’s strategic development, since the employees don’t really know what it is. But you know, I’m a great believer in common sense. And it seems to me that every business needs the means to develop. Isn’t that essential?”
“You’re forgetting something, Alan. Something major. Our business is listed on the stock exchange. The markets are watching us. We can’t do just anything.”
“Taking on staff to allow us to expand—is that just anything?”
The fly was buzzing around us. Dunker grabbed a glass of water on the desk and poured its contents into a potted plant, keeping the empty glass in his hand.
“The market can only predict the future by examining present results,” he said. “Investors won’t wait to see if appointments produce a positive effect in the long term. If we pay more wages, the share will drop in price. It’s automatic. We are under the looking glass. He’s watching,” he said, pointing to a newspaper clipping. It showed a photo of Fisherman, the journalist who was Dunker’s bête noire. The headline on the article referred to our shares: “Potential, But Must Do Better.”
The fly landed on the desk. In one swift movement, Dunker turned the glass over and dropped it over the fly. A sadistic little smile crossed his face.
“It seems as if we’re really slaves to the share price,” I said. “But what does it matter to the company if the share price goes up or down? We couldn’t care less, could we?”
“You can say that because you don’t own any shares!” Dunker snapped.
I pressed on. “But what matters, even for you shareholders, is that the price goes up in the end. If the business grows, the share price will necessarily go up sooner or later.”
“Yes, but you can’t allow the share price to go down, even if it’s only over the short term.”
“Why?”
“Because it puts us at risk of a takeover. You ought to know. You studied economics, didn’t you? Only a high share price protects you from a takeover bid by another company, because if the price is high, it would cost too much to acquire the number of shares needed to gain a controlling interest in our firm. That’s why it’s vital to have a share price that constantly goes up—and goes up faster than that of our competitors.”
“If there is the risk of a takeover, why go public?”
“To develop fast,” Dunker said. “As you know, when a company goes public, it immediately gets the money of all the people who want to buy in. That finances projects.”
“Yes, but if it then prevents you from making decisions that allow the company to develop, just because you have to keep the share price going up, then the result will be the opposite of what you want.”
“Those are simply constraints that have to be managed,” he said.
“But we’re not free anymore!” I protested. “Fausteri was saying that we couldn’t open the Brussels office this year because last year’s profits had to be distributed as a dividend to the shareholders, and we didn’t want to reduce the results of the year to come.”
“Yes, but distribution of dividends isn’t linked to the share price. It’s just a demand from our shareholders. Dividends are the return from their investment in the company.”
“But we could reinvest this year’s profits in our development and and then make profits again next year, couldn’t we?”
“We have two large groups of shareholders who demand that we make a profit of twelve percent each year and that we pay most of it to them as dividends.”
“Yes, I know. But if their demand for a dividend prevents the growth of the business they’ve invested in, surely they can be patient for a year or two, can’t they?”
“No,” said Dunker, “our difficulties are none of their business. They’ve invested in our company but not necessarily for the long term. They want a rapid return on their investment, and that’s their right.”
“But if that forces us to make decisions that are harmful to us …”
“That’s the way it is,” said Dunker. “We have no choice. The real bosses are the shareholders.”
“If their goal is solely financial and short-term, with the intention of selling their shares before long, it makes a mockery of the company’s destiny over time.”
“That’s part of the game.”
“A game? But it isn’t a game,” I protested. “It’s reality! There are real people working here! Their lives and their families’ lives depend in part on the health of this company. You call that a game?”
Dunker shrugged. “What can I say?”
“So, let me get this straight: Not only are we slaves to the share price but we’re subject to the absurd demands of shareholders who won’t even be shareholders for long. Doesn’t it all feel a little upside down? I really can’t see the advantage of the stock exchange flotation. You could have developed the company without it, just by each year reinvesting the profits from the year before.”
“Yes, but we wouldn’t grow as quickly,” Dunker said.
I remained perplexed, never having grasped our culture’s obsession with speed. Why always going faster? Where does it lead? People in a hurry are already dead.
“What’s the point in developing quickly?” I asked him.
“You have to establish yourself quickly and dominate the market before your competitors can take up a long-term position.”
“Because if you don’t?”
“If you don’t, it will be harder to take market share from them so we can increase our turnover.”
“But if healthy, slow development improves the quality of what we’re offering—our services—that will bring in new customers, won’t it?”
Silence. Had Dunker never asked himself that question?
“It would be slower,” was all he said.
“Where’s the problem with that? What’s to stop us from taking time to do the job well?”
He rolled his eyes. “Speaking of time, Alan, you’re taking up mine at the moment. I haven’t got time to spend philosophizing.”
He started rearranging the files on his desk, no longer paying attention to me.
“It seems to me,” I said, searching for my words, “that it’s always useful to step back a bit. To ask questions about the meaning of our actions.”
Dunker looked up. “The meaning?”
“Yes, why we do what we do, what the point is.”
The fly was buzzing around in its bell jar.
“You mustn’t look for meaning where there isn’t any,” he said dismissively. “You think that life has a meaning? The strongest and the cleverest win, that’s all. They get the power and the money. And when you’ve got power and money, you can have anything you want in life. It’s no more complicated than that, Greenmor. The rest is intellectual masturbation.”
I looked at him pensively. How could he believe for a single second that being rich and powerful was enough for a successful life? Who could lie to himself enough to believe he was happy just because he was driving a Porsche?
“Poor Alan,” he went on. “You’ll probably never know just how great a feeling power is!”
His words left me feeling as though I was from another planet. They almost made me curious to find out. Besides, hadn’t Dubreuil told m
e to get inside the skin of people to try and understand what they’re feeling?
“When you do all this, you feel powerful?” I asked him.
“Yes.”
“And if you didn’t, then you’d feel … ?”
Dunker blushed. I wanted to burst out laughing, although I hadn’t embarrassed him on purpose. But now my imagination was running a film of a businessman busying himself with his work to compensate for his sexual inadequacies.
“As far as the assistant is concerned,” Dunker said, “the answer is no. Did you have other requests?”
I presented my other ideas, but none got his okay. I wasn’t surprised, now that I understood how he worked and what the rules of his game were. All the same, I had one last request—for an explanation. “I’ve noticed that our firm is running a lot more ads in the press.”
“Yes, that’s right,” he said, visibly pleased with himself.
“But I’m not being given any more cases at the moment. Why’s that?”
“Trust me, I can guarantee you’re not being treated any differently than your colleagues. The work is being distributed fairly. Alan, I really must end this now. I have work to do.”
He underlined his words by picking up a file on the desk. I didn’t budge.
“But if the advertising is working, how can it be that I haven’t got more recruitment cases to work on? It’s not logical.”
“Oh, Alan, you always want to understand everything. You must realize that in a business the size of ours, there are some decisions you don’t shout from the rooftops. In this case, placing ads doesn’t necessarily mean that there are real vacancies to be filled.”
“You mean we’re placing false ads? False job openings?”
“False, false, big words!”
“But why?”
“Really, you’re totally lacking in strategic vision, Greenmor. I’ve been explaining to you for the last hour why it’s vital for the share price to go up day by day. You ought to know that the market doesn’t react just to objective results! There’s also an element of psychology, believe it or not. And seeing Dunker Consulting job openings in the papers is good for investors’ morale.”
The Man Who Risked It All Page 17