Learning Curves

by Gemma Townley

  “It’s Ms. Keller. You called me Mrs. Keller.”

  “Right. Right. Sorry about that.” You’d have thought she had more important things to worry about, he thought, wondering to himself how much longer he’d have to be here.

  “So, what sort of additional collateral are we talking about here?”

  “Oh, you know, property. Other valuables—the odd Grand Master tucked away, that sort of thing.” He looked at Harriet and mentally kicked himself. Bad time to be having a laugh, making little quips. No, keep it serious. Like an undertaker.

  “My house, I believe is . . .”

  “Already mortgaged, yes.”

  “And our revenues aren’t . . .”

  “Not enough to guarantee future repayments, Ms. Keller, no. That’s the problem we’ve got here. You see, banks aren’t like venture capitalists: They don’t benefit from your success. We just get our regular payments with interest. If you do twice as well as you expected, we get the same amount. We don’t like taking risks, that’s the thing. So unless you can find some alternative financing arrangement . . .”

  “You mean I have to sell my business?”

  The young man shifted uneasily. “Like I say, you’ve got a few days to decide what to do. You can sell up, or you can find someone to invest some money, or . . .” he trailed off. Or you can file for bankruptcy wasn’t something that just tripped off the tongue. “Only, if the decision is to pull,” he continued, deciding that there was no need to actually spell it out for Ms. Keller, “that won’t give you much time, so you’d be better off, you know, working out your options.”

  Harriet glowered at him and he shrank back slightly. “Please go now,” she said softly, and he grabbed his papers and crammed them in his briefcase, not caring that it wouldn’t shut properly, and then bolted for the door.

  Five minutes later, Harriet left her office and ran into the café across the road. As she came out, she wrapped her coat around her and clutched her free-trade organic coffee. She hadn’t been out of the Green Futures building during daylight in days, she realized—not even to buy a sandwich—and it was rather nice to have a cool breeze on her face.

  She looked up at her building and sighed. She didn’t feel like going back in, not just yet. She was too tired, too battle-weary. She felt like she had been singlehandedly fighting a war—and she didn’t know if she wanted to do it anymore.

  She turned round and walked down the road until she found a bench. How long had it been since she had just sat and watched people walk by? Far too long. Years, probably. There was always something pressing to do, always someone to talk to.

  She sat down and took a sip of her coffee, which was deliciously creamy.

  Then she frowned. There wasn’t always someone to talk to, actually, not when she thought about it. At work there was—people always wanted her time, her opinion, her vote of confidence. But increasingly she was finding that outside work she didn’t have many people to talk to at all. Jen was so difficult these days, so prickly all the time, and Paul kept disappearing off to talk to clients or whatever it was he did when he wasn’t with her.

  It was all George’s fault, she thought to herself bitterly. She should never have married him; should never have allowed him to convince her to fall in love with him.

  She closed her eyes and remembered with a shudder what it had been like being married to George. Never knowing when he would be jetting off on one of his business trips without even telling her. Never being taken seriously. And Jen, so in love with him. So convinced that he was wonderful. It had been too much to bear.

  Could anyone blame her for having an affair, for succumbing to the first person who gave her any attention?

  Harriet sighed. Of course they could blame her. She blamed herself. Had blamed herself ever since. That bastard Malcolm had used her. And when she’d found out what he was up to, George wouldn’t even listen to her. He chose Malcolm over me, she thought bitterly. He chose business and profit over love and ethics. And he was still doing it now.

  Well, she wouldn’t allow it, Harriet resolved. George would get his comeuppance if it was the last thing she did. And as his and Malcolm’s profit-obsessed businesses crumbled into the ground, Green Futures would be on the ascendancy once more. She was going to fight back. Somehow or other she was going to save her firm. There had to be some money somewhere; someone who’d give her a loan, tide her over for a little while.

  She gulped down her coffee and looked at her watch. Time to go back to the office.

  But as she was about to stand up, someone sat down next to her. She turned round and her eyes widened.

  “Malcolm. What . . . what are you doing here?”

  Malcolm Bray smiled. “Good to see you Harriet. I wonder, do you have a few minutes?”

  “Can I help you with anything?”

  Jen looked at the sales assistant vaguely and shook her head. She’d taken advantage of a free hour in her time-table to come to Books Etc. to have a look around, partly because it looked like she might have to finish her assignment now, and partly because she wanted to do something to irritate Daniel, even if he didn’t know about it. Frankly, she never wanted to go into another Wyman’s again. And when she’d written her assignment, she would send it to another bookseller, just to spite him. Someone had to implement the ideas they’d talked about, and if it wasn’t going to be him, he deserved his competitors getting one over on him.

  She wandered around aimlessly for a while, trying to think up good reasons why self-improvement books should be on the left-hand side of the store and cookery books on the right, but after a while she gave up. Perhaps it had been a little ambitious, she acknowledged, to think that she could focus on her stupid assignment when so much else was at stake. She’d planned and rejected a million times what she was going to say to her father. And every time she even thought about it, her heart started pounding madly in her chest. She looked at her watch. It was eleven A.M., which meant that she had three hours until the meeting. At eleven-thirty she had a lecture, which would hopefully keep her occupied until twelve-thirty P.M., and then she’d have to wait an hour and a half, her stomach in her mouth.

  Jen noticed the sales assistant looking at her oddly, and decided that it was probably time to leave. She could grab a coffee on her way and take a leisurely stroll back to Bell Towers. But as she turned to go, a book caught her eye. Or, rather, not a book but a book jacket. On it was a photograph of a man she recognized, a man whom, she realized after frowning in concentration for a couple of seconds, she’d seen with Paul Song at the charity dinner all those months ago.

  Quickly she walked over to what turned out to be the biography section, and picked up the book with interest. And then she started. The book she was holding was the biography of a successful entrepreneur. And his name was Malcolm Bray.

  27

  Jen made her way to her usual seat in the lecture hall, next to Lara and Alan who were talking quietly to each other.

  “How’s it going?” Lara asked with a grin and Jen smiled, relieved that she’d managed to stop herself from calling Lara the minute she’d decided to quit the MBA. She was gradually learning about restraint and not rushing into things, and now she didn’t have to explain why she was back at lectures, she thought, feeling very pleased with herself.

  At that moment, Jay walked in and everyone gradually hushed.

  “So,” he said dramatically. “I’m sorry to tell you that today, you get me. This section of the course is entitled ‘Conclusions,’ and this is the last series of lectures on strategic analysis. Next term you’ll be focusing on your electives and writing your dissertations. But right now I want you to ask yourselves: What conclusions can we draw from a strategic analysis? What conclusions have you drawn from the course? And what conclusions have you drawn about yourselves?” Jay looked around the room and silence descended.

  “Guys, guys, don’t shout out all at once,” he said playfully. “Okay, so no one wants to share their conclusions
. So let’s think about this for a moment, shall we? The thing about conclusions is that they are difficult to formulate and they’re also very changeable. Let me explain. You’ve done some analysis on a company—someone give me a company . . .”

  “Durex,” shouted out someone. “Mates,” shouted out someone else. Jay shrugged.

  “Well, I walked into that one, didn’t I? Okay, so we’ll take your precious condom company. So you’ve done your analysis, you think you understand its strengths and weaknesses, you’ve identified its opportunities and threats. You develop some strategic options, and then you come to your conclusions—or perhaps you might call it your recommendations. Either way, at this point you are basically putting yourself on the line. You’re saying ‘go this way’ or ‘go that way’ or ‘stand still’ or ‘stand on your head’—whatever it is, it’s the right thing to do in your opinion based on your analysis. And you might be right. You might have the perfect answer. But then what happens—the day after you’ve finalized your presentation, made it all pretty, given it to the managing director with a nice plastic cover, someone finds a cure for AIDS. Or someone invents a new barrier device that threatens to destroy the condom market. A competitor goes out of business. The managing director is fired for an impropriety and the new guy wants a whole new approach. Things happen. All the time. And the moment you have your conclusions ready, they’re out of date.

  “So what does this mean—that there’s no point coming to any conclusions? No point doing anything because everything’s going to change anyway? No. Not at all. Managing directors aren’t fired most days. People don’t find cures to terrible diseases most days. Mostly, you pick your course, you pick your lane, and you just do the best you can. But what you cannot afford to do is to think that your conclusions will necessarily still be valid next week, next month, or next year. People change, businesses change, environments change, customers change. You have to keep picking up your analysis and looking over it again—have you missed anything? Does it all still ring true? If not, do you need to tweak your strategy?

  “But, okay, that caveat understood, what are we looking for in our conclusions?”

  Jay looked around the room and Alan put up his hand. “An action plan?” he suggested.

  “Great,” said Jay. “But not always. Action plans might come later. What else?”

  “Recommendations,” shouted a guy at the back.

  “Exactly,” said Jay triumphantly. “I gave you a bit of a clue earlier, didn’t I? So, recommendations. What you’re saying is ‘this is the way things are, and I recommend that in order to build your brand, grow your profits, cheer your shareholders up, you buy company x or move into market y.’ No one wants a report that says ‘yeah, things are okay, and you’ve got a few options and they all look pretty good to me.’ No one will pay you for that. They want your advice. Sure, you put in as many caveats as you can—you’d be a fool to say ‘buy company x’ without listing all the assumptions you’ve made and the requirements of such a move. But don’t just sit on the fence. Too many consultants sit on the fence and it gives the profession a bad name. At Bell we want people who say what they mean, who aren’t afraid to pick a side. Okay?”

  Jen sat back and frowned. She certainly wasn’t afraid to pick a side. She just seemed to pick the wrong one on a regular basis.

  “And it isn’t always going to be clear-cut, either,” Jay was saying. “Maybe there will be two very different options on the table and both have strong advantages and a number of disadvantages. So how do you pick between them? Well, you weigh up. You assess the risks. You think about the people involved and consider which option they’ll do the best—sometimes you may choose the more risky option because you think that it’s best suited to the current top team. And every so often, when there’s really nothing to help you make a decision, you just have to look deep down inside yourself and see what your gut says. It isn’t particularly scientific, but gut feel is a powerful thing, not to be ignored.”

  Jen took a deep breath. Her gut feel couldn’t be more clear. Now she just had to do what her gut was telling her to do.

  At two P.M. on the dot, Jen arrived at her father’s office.

  “Jen,” he said as she walked in, and the two of them eyed each other warily.

  “Would you like to sit down?” he asked. Jen thought for a moment, trying to work out whether she’d feel more comfortable standing or sitting, and eventually took the seat her father offered her.

  “Thank you for my laptop and phone. And sorry I couldn’t be there in person—I had . . . well, things to take care of. I take it this is about the newspaper article,” George continued, dismissively. “And I have to admit, I was disappointed.”

  Jen looked at him sullenly. “Cut the bullshit,” she said, and then regretted it when she realized that she wasn’t Bruce Willis and that she sounded faintly ridiculous trying to sound all tough.

  George raised an eyebrow.

  “The newspaper leak wasn’t me, although I wish it was. I’m here because I saw the spreadsheet,” Jen said quickly. “The one with all the payments to Indonesia. You promised me you had nothing to do with it. . . .”

  Her voice was beginning to catch with stress and emotion, and she forced herself to swallow.

  “You looked at my personal files?” George asked, his voice cold.

  “Yes. Not on purpose, but I still saw them. I was doing some research on the Web and used your computer, and there was this file that I thought I might have downloaded . . .” Jen paused. Why was she defending herself? She wasn’t the one involved in a corruption ring.

  “It doesn’t matter how I found it,” she said firmly. “What matters is that you are a liar and a cheat and . . . how could you do it? How could you help that bastard Malcolm Bray win those contracts?”

  George looked at her for a moment, then looked away. “Jen, do you remember what I told you about trust? About how important it is to trust people?”

  Jen nodded silently.

  “Well, I think you should just trust me on this, don’t you?”

  Jen frowned. “Why should I? What have you done to win my trust? I know what I saw. . . .”

  “You saw a spreadsheet, Jen, and you have no idea what it means. I think it would be best for everyone if you left well enough alone.”

  “That’s it?” Jen asked indignantly. “You’re not going to tell me what’s going on? Apologize? You’re just expecting me to walk away and keep my mouth shut?”

  “That’s exactly what I expect. Now, is there anything else?” His voice had a warning note to it, and Jen found herself getting angry.

  She stared at her father, looked at his impenetrable blue eyes and searched for a flicker of something—guilt, perhaps—but there was nothing.

  “No,” she said eventually. “I think that covers it.” She walked out of his office, unsure whether to cross Number Two off her list. She had expected many things— an argument, threats, pleading—but not an evasive “you should trust me” platitude. And certainly to be told, in a patronizing tone, to keep out of his business.

  Well, sod that. She wasn’t going to keep quiet about this any more than her father was going to convince her that that money moving into Indonesia was anything other than bribes. She was going to crack on with her action plan. He’d regret dismissing her like that, she thought bitterly. George Bell was going to find out just what he was up against.

  Quickly she took out her mobile phone and called her mother’s number. Harriet had to listen to her this time— had to know the truth, not just about George, but also about Paul and his clandestine meeting with Malcolm Bray.

  “Hello, Harriet’s phone.”

  It was Hannah. “Hi, Hannah, it’s Jen here. I need to talk to Mum.”

  “Yeah, no can do, I’m afraid. She’s in a meeting and no one’s allowed to disturb her.”

  “What kind of meeting? Who with?”

  There was a pause. “Actually it’s a bit weird, Jen. This guy turned up wit
h her an hour ago and they’ve been in her office ever since. And Geoffrey says he recognizes him. Says he’s called Malcolm Braid or something. Poor Geoffrey keeps hovering around the door hoping your mum’ll invite him in to the meeting, but she’s just ignoring him. . . .”

  Jen took in a sharp intake of breath. “Are you sure? She’s with Malcolm Bray?”

  “Look, I dunno, do I? But that’s what Geoffrey says. Do you want to speak to him?”

  “No,” Jen said vaguely, her mind racing. What possible reason could her mother have for meeting with Malcolm Bray? What was going on? “No. But is Paul there?”

  “Paul Song? No, haven’t seen him all day.”

  “Fine,” Jen said decisively. “I’m going to come over.”

  “Suit yourself. Bye, Jen.”

  Jen shut off her phone and felt someone’s eyes on her back. She turned round to see her father, who’d come out of his office and was frowning at her.

  “What now?” she asked irritably.

  “Jen, I’m sorry, I wanted to . . . did I just hear you mention Malcolm Bray?”

  Jen looked at her father with disgust. “Yes, you did. He’s in a meeting with Mum for some bizarre reason. I tell you, if she gets mixed up in anything because of you, I will never forgive you.”

  “We need to get over there,” George said urgently.

  “What do you mean ‘we’?” Jen asked. “I think you’ve done enough.”

  “Jen, this is important. We’ll take my car—if that’s okay with you?”

  Jen frowned. Her father looked more agitated than she’d ever seen him before—but what was worrying him? Was he worried about Harriet, or, more likely, was he worried that Malcolm might be telling her more than he’d like? Either way, there was only one way to find out.

  “Fine,” she said haughtily. “But I think we’d better get a move on, don’t you?”

  28

  Harriet looked out through the glass walls of her office. She used to get a kick out of the view out over the open plan, seeing her staff working, her dreams becoming a reality. But now all she saw was the beginning of the end. Malcolm had given her an hour to make a decision—the time it took him to go and buy himself a coffee and read the newspaper. Two mundane acts which had now been completed, and she was here deciding the future of her firm.