by Iain Banks
Always looking for ways to cut costs, we've carried out trials which involve abandoning this practice for specific times and in certain places, intending to give it up entirely if the trials prove successful, but the results have always persuaded us that the benefits outweigh the costs.
Of course, corruption is always possible, and probably inevitable. A company worry has always been that one of our number might siphon off very small amounts of money over a long period and use that as seed capital for transactions which — though they exist outside the Business — are only possible thanks to the contacts, trust and information that person's membership of the company has brought and which grow exponentially until they distort the relationship between the apparent and real economic effect that person produces.
This sort of scam has been tried by various individuals in the past, but as a rule such perpetrators are discovered; unless they intend to bury their gains in the ground they have to do something with the profits, and an executive living significantly beyond their so easily checkable means has always been a sure sign some sort of chicanery has been going on. If somebody plays the long game of building up a big cash fund somewhere we can't see while continuing to live relatively modestly, and then retires early, suddenly seriously moneyed, to their own Caribbean island, we are not above indulging in our own style of chicanery to try and recover the funds we reckon belong to us. We aren't the Mafia and as far as I know we don't blow anybody's legs off, but it's surprising what you can do when you have your own Swiss bank and you're owed favours that go back in some cases for centuries. Actually, maybe it's not surprising at all.
Still, it is possible to beat the system, big time. In the late nineteenth century a certain Monsieur Couffable, one of our senior French executives, made a sizeable independent fortune on the Paris Bourse, which we didn't know about until he died. He'd spent every centime buying Dutch old masters, which he kept in a secret art gallery beneath his Loire château. So there you are; you do have to bury your money in the ground.
We never did get our hands on those paintings, despite having some very capable lawyers and the co-operation of the late Monsieur Couffable's widow (they were childless, he'd willed the secret collection to his mistress). Anyway, this practice has now become known as Couffabling. As a business, we try very hard not to get Couffabled.
Usually what's ours stays ours. A legitimately made fortune is never entirely personal in the Business, and specifically it is impossible to bequeath all you've made to your offspring or, indeed, anybody else who isn't one of us. The higher a person rises within our company, the greater becomes the proportion of their income paid in the form of stock options, pension rights, travel and other perks and so on.
So far so normal; lots of corporations limit the personal tax exposure of their senior people by giving them access to and often unlimited use of cars and drivers, apartments, mansions, aircraft and yachts. The Lear jet might belong to the company and be shown as a tax-liable item on the corporate books, but it's at the exclusive disposal of the CEO, who can use it to go shopping or golfing if he damn well pleases. In the same way, it's the company that pays for the box at the opera or the ball game, and the membership of the yacht or country club.
We do the same sort of thing, except perhaps more so.
The difference between us and others lies in the disposability of the assets that are nominally the property of the executive involved. Most of these can be sold back only to others in the Business, and even then there is a strict ranking of how much one can own according to one's hierarchical level.
What this means is that dynasties are difficult to establish and almost impossible to maintain; no matter how doting a father in the Business may be, he cannot pass on all his power and money to a favourite son just because he wants to. The father can make the son rich by most people's standards and he can attempt to further his boy's career in the company, but he cannot make Junior as rich as he has been or ensure that he too achieves the organisation's summit.
The vast majority of senior execs are quite happy with this arrangement, as they're usually the sort of people who believe that hard work and brains are the keys to success and have formed a dim view of any privilege which has been inherited rather than earned. This sort of attitude can actually be seen more clearly outside the Business, where quite a few very rich and successful fathers who've been in total charge of their own companies have left their children an only modest provision in their wills, not through general or specific vindictiveness but just to ensure that their offspring don't start out spoiled, and so that they too will know that if they do achieve anything it has at least partially been due to their own abilities rather than the sheer good luck of having a rich daddy.
Naturally, all this changes if the individual in the company invents something or has patents to their name. Take Uncle Freddy, for example. An Associate Level Two, he would probably only be a Level Five or Six but for the fact that he invented the chilpTM. The chilpTM is the technical name (Uncle Freddy's own; I think he's a trifle sad it never caught on) for those little containers of whitish liquid that you get in tourist class in aircraft or in cafés, service stations and not very good hotels instead of a proper jug of milk.
The original things were those ghastly little pots with aluminium covers that it took both hands to open, if you were lucky, and which — even if you opened them carefully — usually splattered their contents over you. It was Uncle Freddy who came up with the much neater modern version, which opens cleanly and can be worked one-handed; one of those things most of us look at and think, Why didn't anybody think of that before? or, I could have thought of that…Except that Uncle Freddy actually did.
ChilpsTM are, literally, tiny things, but they're produced by the billion every year; the tiniest royalty on each one soon builds up to a very considerable fortune indeed, and as Uncle F invented the thing, he's got the patent and so he gets all the money; his promotion to Level Two in the Business was honorary. That kind of thing can throw out our system a bit, but somehow we manage to accommodate even the Uncle Freddies of the world. A better solution for us as a company, of course, would have been to have owned the patents corporately, and there are a few lucrative ones which we do own, and a few more we are cautiously optimistic about.
An example is the IncanTM. This is a tube made from aluminium, plastic or even waxed paper, designed to deliver two measured doses of finely ground powder into the nasal passages. It's registered with every major patent office in the world as a way to deliver either snuff or some sort of medicinal draught into the user's nose, but nobody who knows about it is under any illusions about its real role and we have no intentions of letting it be used for such a mundane purpose.
It's a cocaine-delivery device for when, eventually, the stuff is legalised. You'll buy a pack of IncansTM no bigger than a pack of long cigarettes from wherever is licensed to sell them (by which time, of course, you may not be able to purchase legally a pack of tobacco cigarettes), pop the tab off one, snort, snort, and bingo! No chopping, cutting and ploughing into stupid little lines on a mirror or the top of a toilet cistern, unless you're so into ritual you regard that as the best bit.
I've tried them at our labs in Miami; they work. (Best of all for us, they work only once; unless you're some sort of Unabomber-style micro-engineer you can't easily refill them.) The aluminium ones are very sleek and sexy and will be the original, premium product. They look a little like silver rifle-shell cases. We may do steel gold-plated versions for the luxury and exclusive gift end of the market. The plastic version is more mass-market, more blue collar. The wax paper ones are aimed at the more environmentally aware consumer and are biodegradable.
We have high hopes for the IncanTM.
Back to the subject of corruption, racketeering, bribery, blackmail and other common business practices. Even though our organisation has always been tolerant of such victimless 'crimes' as prostitution, blasphemy, drug-taking, belonging to a trade union, sex a
nd/or procreation outside marriage, homosexuality and so on, the societies in which we have to live and with which we have to trade have usually had other ideas, so secrecy and blackmail have never been entirely off the menu.
We are, above all, pragmatists. Corruption is frowned upon not because it is intrinsically evil but because it acts like a short-circuit in the machinery of business, or a parasite on the body corporate. The point is to reduce such behaviour to a tolerable level, not to attempt seriously to eradicate it utterly, which would call for a regime so strict and confining it would limit the abilities of the organisation to change and adapt, and stifle its natural enterprise even more severely than widespread corruption would. Even so, what we regard as a tolerable level of internal corruption is — thanks to our rules on financial transparency — positively microscopic compared to that in just about every other organisation we do business with, and it is a matter of considerable pride for us that in any given transaction or deal we will almost without exception be the most honest and principled party involved.
We're quite happy to deal with corrupt regimes and people, so long as the figures are all above board at our end. In many cultures a degree of what is termed corruption in the West has long been a respectable and accepted part of the way business is done, and we are ready, willing and able to accommodate this. (In the West, of course, it is just as common. It's just not respectable. Or publicised.) In all this, of course, we're just the same as any other business or state. It's just that we've been doing it longer and are less hypocritical about it, so we're better at it. Practice makes perfect, even the practice of corruption. It ought to be one of our mottoes: Corruption — we deal with it.
Voting for your immediate superiors usually strikes outsiders as the most bizarre of our business practices. Manual and clerical workers tend to find the concept unlikely and bizarre, while those higher up have been known to react with outraged disbelief: how can it possibly work?
It works, I guess, because people generally are not stupid, and. we do our best to recruit people who are smarter than most. It works, also, because we are used to taking, and are able to take, a long-term view, and perhaps because the practice does not extend into every other organisation we deal with and undertake joint operations with.
We have had several expensive but unpublished studies performed by highly respected universities and business colleges, which have tended to support our belief that letting people vote for their bosses means that a greater proportion of able and gifted people flourish and rise using this method than any other. The more usual system, where people are picked out from above, does have certain advantages — talented people can often rise more quickly, skipping several layers of management at once — but it is our firm belief that this leads to more problems than it solves, producing a culture where those on any given level within a company are constantly trying to find ways to flatter those above them, sabotage the careers of their colleagues on the same corporate rung, exploit, oppress and denigrate those on the levels beneath them and generally spend far too much time frivolously furthering their own selfish ends and their status within the company when they ought rightfully to be engaged in the far more serious and productive pursuit of making all concerned more money.
Our system doesn't put an end to all office politics, of course, nor does it reliably weed out every plausible rogue, gifted bully or lucky idiot, but it does make them easier to spot, control and ditch before they get too far. Gaining promotion by fooling your boss, especially one prone to flattery or sexual favours, can be relatively easy. Gaining the trust of those who work with you every day and will have to take orders from you if you are promoted is a lot more difficult.
The usual objection to all this is: Don't people tend to vote for people who'll give them an easy ride?
Sometimes they do, and a division of our company might suffer because there is a natural-born vacillator in charge, but people can be demoted by those immediately below them, too, or pensioned off, and — worst case — an entire department can be closed down from above, its structure dismantled, its duties redistributed and its personnel dispersed.
This almost never happens. People would rather elect to put somebody in charge over them who knows what they're doing and whom they respect — even if they know that some of that person's later decisions will be disagreeable — than work under somebody who will damage all their interests by taking either no decisions or only easy ones.
We have works councils, too, in most of our wholly owned subsidiaries, though those tend to be at the sort of levels I'm not terribly familiar with.
None of this means that management is powerless: it's just that the spread of any given individual's power is different, tending to spread more upwards and less downwards compared to the standard model. It's still possible for senior people to encourage the careers of juniors and it's still possible for juniors to make themselves known to seniors and benefit thereby, it's just that neither can act without the tacit consent of those who will have to live with the effects of those actions.
We run, generally, a happy ship.
So why have you never heard of us, until now? We are not conspiratorial, or even particularly secretive. We don't believe in advertising ourselves, but we're sufficiently convinced of our own probity to be relaxed about any publicity that happens to come our way.
The most sinister reason given for our relative obscurity is that because we practise financial transparency and internal democracy while frowning upon conventional familial inheritance, the world's media — generally run by people for whom any one of these ideas is anathema — regard it as profoundly in their own interests to give us as little exposure as possible.
Another reason is that we undertake many more joint ventures than we do wholly owned ones, and in such situations we always let our partner company take the credit and deal with the exposure. We are a holding company, mostly, our interests lying in other companies rather than physically manufacturing products or providing services direct to the public. So we're partly invisible. Also, we have a variety of different company names and corporate identities for each individual branch of the business, all accrued naturally over the centuries, and so have no single name — apart from the Business, of course, which is so bland, general and vague it is almost a form of invisibility in itself. We do sometimes get confused with the CIA, though, which is silly; they're the Company. Besides, they're much more open than we are: there's no sign on the DC Beltway or anywhere else pointing to our HQ.
When somebody — sometimes a journalist, more usually a competitor — does start to investigate one of our concerns, they find that the ownership trail leads (sometimes straight, sometimes only after the sort of Byzantine flourishes and convolutions which are a good creative accountant's artistic signature) to one of those places that act as the commercial world's equivalent of black holes, into which public information might fall but from which none ever emerges: the Cayman Islands, Liechtenstein, or our very own Great Inagua.
We are not, however, totally invisible. There are articles about us occasionally in magazines and newspapers, sometimes there are television programmes that touch upon our interests, and every now and again a business book will mention us. The conspiracy theories are the most fun. There have been a couple of books and a number of articles, but the true home of those who would be our nemesis was the Net and now is the Web.
We have dozens of paranoid Websites dedicated to us. According to which one you choose to believe, we are either:
(a) the major force behind the New World Order (which appears to be what Americans too stupid to realise that the Cold War is over, they won, and the world is theirs, have adopted as the new bogey monster now that Ronnie's Evil Empire has a GNP a little less than Disney Corp.);
(b) an even more extreme, hideous and sinister branch of the International Zionist Conspiracy (in other words, the Jews);
(c) a long-term deep-entryist group of dedicated cadres charged by the Executi
ve Council of the Fourth International to bring down the entire capitalist system from within by gaining control of lots of shares and then selling them all at once to produce a crash (which is the one I find most amusing);
(d) a well-funded cabal of the little-known Worshippers of Nostradamus cult intent on bringing about the end of the financial world through a roughly similar strategy to that of the International Marxists (which may or may not imply a rethink for this plucky group of theorists if we do all make it past the millennium);
(e) the militant commercial wing of the Roman Catholic Church (as if, given the antics of the Banco Ambrosio and the Black Friars, they needed one);
(f) a similarly extremist Islamic syndicate sworn to out-perform, out-deal and out-haggle the Jews (probably the least plausible so far);
(g) a zombie-like remnant of the Holy Roman Empire, which has risen from the grave, unspeakably putrid but grotesquely powerful, to re-impose European dominance over the New World in general and the USA in particular through sneaky cosmopolitan business practices and the introduction of the Euro (top prize for invention, I feel);
(h) the front for a cartel of Jewish Negro financiers intent on enslaving the White Race (I confess I'm still waiting for my first introduction to a Jewish Negro financier, but maybe I just move in the wrong circles…except I don't);