Learning Curve

by Michael S. Malone

  He took a deep breath that seemed to revive him. What have I got to lose now, but everything? The hyperbole of the words made him chuckle out loud. Still, it was true—and the words were somehow liberating. If he was going to fail anyway, then why not go down fighting for what he believed in?

  But what did he believe in? Dan was astonished—his jaw actually dropped—to realize that he already knew: he still believed in Validator Software. Even more amazing, he would willingly die to make it a success again… a company that bore the name of the man who had just betrayed him.

  And also, he realized—with far less surprise—there was something else he would die for.

  v. 6.2

  It was late, and the line of headlights across the Bay Bridge had thinned enough for the cars to drive at the speed limit. Alison could just make them out in the reflection of herself standing at the whiteboard in the nearly empty conference room. It’s a good thing there’s nothing fourteen stories tall between here and the Bay, she thought, because what I’m writing could make somebody quite rich.

  There was a magnum bottle of Two-Buck Chuck merlot on the counter by the sink, along with a toppled stack of Styrofoam cups. She poured herself a half-cup and sat down at the chair that she’d placed ten feet in front of the whiteboard. She took a sip—God, this is terrible stuff, she thought—then sat back and studied what she’d written.

  Emerging from the pentimento of a half-dozen failed attempts and erasures was half of an organization chart. Manufacturing, customer service, sales, marketing, and marketing communications were in place—but not yet R&D, finance, or HR. Most important, the upper levels of management, and the people to fill them, were done. She had worked on those first.

  She studied the titles and names in the upper regions of the chart. An understanding had been quietly growing in her over the last few weeks that having most of the eTernity start-up team quit—so painful at first—was going to be a blessing in disguise. All those newly-emptied slots had freed her to raise to those executive positions a new group of stronger and more experienced managers. Most of them would never have survived the disorganization and improvisation of eTernity’s early days. But all were perfectly suited for the rough and tumble of global competition and corporate politics. If she could hold them together, they’d make a potent team.

  She took another drink of bad wine. Here I come, Cosmo…

  v. 6.3

  Primroses had been planted along the walk from the driveway to the house. And there was now an elegant little fountain in the center of the koi pond in front of the guest house. Dan was disheveled and his head was bowed, but he registered each change as he passed. Each was a reminder of how long he’d been gone. How much life had been lived here without his presence?

  He climbed the front steps. A line of new ceramic pots, each filled with a different lily, ran up the steps beside him. In the entryway, a new teak bench had replaced the old wrought iron one they’d bought at an antique shop in SoHo before Aiden was born. He paused on the threshold, caught his breath, straightened his hair and tie, then rang the doorbell.

  After a few moments, the handle clicked and the door opened. Annabelle, in her gardening clothes and wearing a scarf, was as beautiful as Dan had ever seen her. She looked surprised to see him. She brightened with recognition, then caught herself. “Don’t you still have a key?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Dan said, “but I felt I needed your permission to enter. I have something I want to say to you.”

  v. 7.0

  The swelling and waning of the roar of the crowd on the far side of the curtains reminded Alison of waves on a shingle beach. Tony D. was standing beside her. He was the new eTernity VP of Sales, and he would be introduced to the shareholders today.

  He raised a fist. “Reminds me of an Apple event.”

  “Great,” said Alison. “As long as they aren’t expecting me to be Steve Jobs.”

  He grinned. “You’ve got much better legs.”

  She forced a grim smile. She’d been warned that suffering through Tony D.’s banter would be the cost of getting a great sales director—and sticking it in Validator’s eye.

  She looked around. Backstage was filled with excited young people, all of them eTernity employees. Only a few of them had been with the company more than four months. They all knew how lucky they were to be part of the most exciting company of the moment… and all felt that they more than deserved it.

  It was so different from just a year ago. The team was all amateurs then, smart but inexperienced, and making it up as they went along. Now most of them were gone, taking their riches and heading off to live out their dreams. This is my dream, isn’t it? Alison asked herself.

  She studied the backstage crowd. All of them were pros; there wasn’t a neophyte in the group… well, thought Alison, except maybe me. She spotted a woman—slim, crisply dressed in a business suit, short blonde hair—holding a clipboard in one hand and a stopwatch in the other. She was the event organizer, the best in the business, they said, and her job was to organize the entertainment and set the schedule, and then to make sure that schedule was followed to the minute.

  The woman, who probably knew where Alison was at every moment, caught her eye for instant, nodded, then studiously looked away. She’s probably been told not to speak directly to me, Alison realized.

  Alison found it all a bit unsettling. But then, wasn’t that what big successful companies did? They found strength in their size and their organization, and they timed their actions to the second.

  She heard music, and the roar of the audience swelled again: the five-minute slide show prelude had begun. How they found that much content for a company this young remained a mystery to her. But Alison also knew that it didn’t much matter. This crowd had come to celebrate, and nothing was going to divert them. And, in fact, the cheers had already begun.

  And why not? The stock had climbed 700 percent since the IPO, which had not only made those shareholders out there a lot of money, but also gave them the social cachet of being able to say they’d been with eTernity from the start. That made them brilliant investors—and there was nothing better in tech than to be perceived as a genius.

  The folks standing about chatting and laughing backstage were delirious, too. For sheer social power, the only thing that trumped investing in the hottest company of the decade was to work for that company. Whatever the future brought, the employees knew that to have this era’s eTernity on their resumé would put a fine glow on the rest of their careers. The world would assume they were the best in their profession, that they were smart and clever… and most of all, that they were lucky.

  None of them would notice—not yet at least, because the information was still internal—but there was already a lot that kept Alison awake even more than usual at night.

  The core product line was still as strong and popular as ever. But several of the add-on applications had been met with mixed reviews from both reviewers and customers. Meanwhile, Version 2.0, which was promised for introduction six months from now, had already begun to slip. There was real doubt they’d hit even that intentionally generous delivery date; they might be as much as three months late.

  Rumors of that fact had in turn begun to worry company vendors. After all, they had dropped their safe, proven Validator partnerships to take the risk of adopting the popular new eTernity standard their customers had demanded. They weren’t freaking out yet, but Alison sensed they were beginning to wonder if they’d made a dangerous mistake. Perhaps the word was getting out too, because the torrid pace of the stock price had begun to slow. Most analysts thought it was temporary, but maybe it was more.

  And that was just the product. Alison knew there were some internal problems at eTernity. So did the rest of the company, though most of them dismissed it as ‘growing pains’ that Prue and her team would fix. One vice-president, formerly a well
-regarded lab director at a Fortune 50 company, had joined eTernity… and quit two months later to go back his old employer. The official story was that the giant company had offered him a king’s ransom to return. But Alison knew how much salary and stock she’d offered to get him to join eTernity—and she knew he would have stayed if he’d felt comfortable working at the new company.

  Even worse, she’d decided that the costs of success might be outweighing the costs of failure. She thought back to that night when she’d sat at that whiteboard and reorganized the company. Like a good technologist, she had focused on the part of the company that designed and sold and serviced the company’s products. Why had she assumed that Human Resources would take care of itself? Why hadn’t she made hiring of the rank-and-file of the company as much of a priority as her own recruiting of senior management?

  Now she had a mess on her hands. Like every hot tech company—and these days eTernity was a supernova—it had initially been buried in thousands of job applications. HR had managed to hire the best and brightest (and youngest) of these applicants, but it had taken too damn long. In fact, the hiring was still going on.

  And that was only the start. Once those legions of newcomers arrived at eTernity, they soon discovered that HR had almost no place to put them, much less assimilate them into the company’s culture. New hires camped out in offices with no furniture, taking jobs that as yet had no description. Much more dangerous, these new hires had naturally filled the cultural void with the one they had brought from their last employer.

  In an older company with established patterns and a body of corporate legends, that wouldn’t have been too bad, but in a young company like eTernity, with a fragile and still incomplete sense of itself, the organization quickly began to divide into different camps—the Validator crowd (the product of successful raids on that company’s former sales staff), the Twillium crowd, and the very dangerous Google crowd. They were all pulling the company in different directions to impose their own personality on the organization.

  The problem would be fixed eventually. Alison had fired the HR director. It had been the first major firing of her career, and it would have gone worse if she hadn’t kept Arthur Bellflower’s words in her head. The woman had walked out of the company with $10 million in her pocket for five months of incompetence—thanks to Alison’s mistake of giving her vested shares on hiring. But at least she was gone. And the new HR director, a veteran from Hewlett-Packard, had already begun to assert control. Fortunately, those HP guys really knew corporate culture and new employee orientation.

  But there were still pockets of competing cultures, nowhere more than in the newly created sales force. Alison had been told that Tony D. was an oversized personality, but that wasn’t the half of it. Unconstrained, he’d formed the sales department in his own image, one very different from the rest of the company.

  She glanced over at Tony D. He caught the glance and grinned. “They’re pissing on themselves out there. This is going to be a goddamn coronation.”

  She smiled, nodded, and turned away. We’ll cross the Tony D. bridge when we come to it.

  There was a tap on her shoulder. She turned to see the event organizer standing beside her. “One minute, Ms. Prue,” the woman said. Alison nodded. The woman remained beside her, looking down at the stopwatch—now attached to the clipboard—and adjusting her earpiece.

  Enjoy this, Alison told herself. Who knows when it will be this great again? I just need to emphasize the profits. A great profit margin means money in the bank—and that money can cover a lot of mistakes. It’s a cushion for hard times. It’ll enable us to hire more codewriters to get that damn 2.0 version out on time. And the stock market loves cash. Just keep talking about that—the rest will take care of itself.

  The woman flicked the switch on the battery pack attached to the small of Alison’s back, then stepped in front of her to grab the edge of the curtain. “Three,” she said, “Two… One…”

  Tony D. gave her a hearty thumbs up. The curtains were pulled back. Alison saw a sea of faces and brilliant lights. The crowd roared.

  v. 7.1

  Dan poked his head into the office doorway of his COO, Bert Hamlin. “How did she do?” he asked. “I had a conference call.”

  Bert looked up from his computer screen. He had the face of confident raptor. “Not over yet, but I think she’s done.”

  “And… ?”

  “Not bad. Not great. She was visibly nervous at the beginning.” He fluttered his hands in front of his face. “She did a lot of stuff with her hands for the first half of the speech, but she finally got that under control.”

  Dan nodded. “Anything else?”

  “No verbal gaffes. No big surprises—other than yet another confirmation that their follow-up product is running late.”

  “She admitted that?”

  “Not exactly. It was more of a case of omission. She stopped talking about delivery dates a month ago—and if she was going to set a new date, this would have been the moment to do so.”

  “Did she take questions?”

  “No. The crowd was too big for that kind of thing. But they would have softballed it anyway. By all the applause and cheering, it was obvious that everybody was on her side. If someone had even tried a tough question, they probably would have gotten lynched right there on the spot.”

  “Must be nice,” Dan said. “Any sign of Tony D.?”

  “Yep. He was the same as always—which was kind of weird with that crowd. Kind of like your rich, white-shoed uncle trying to be hip in a room full of twenty-somethings. Which is basically what it was. That’s probably why they only gave him a couple minutes and got him off the stage fast.”

  “Poor Tony.”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” Bert said. “He’s got the best sales job in tech. He’s going to be richer than he already is. And he gave the impression of being in charge—and a grown-up—which may not have worked with the crowd, but you can damn well bet it comforted all those institutional investors out there.”

  “So, in summary,” Dan said, “Prue survived. But she doesn’t look like a confident corporate chief executive yet. The shareholders are still wildly enthusiastic. Sales look healthy and the salesforce is under experienced management, but that department’s style is nearly antithetical to the rest of the company. And the big follow-up product may be slipping. Does that about cover it?”

  “You got it.”

  “I think we can work with that,” said Dan. “Don’t you?”

  Bert smiled. “Yes, I do. I don’t think we can beat them yet. But if that product slips by more than three months, I think we might catch them.”

  v. 7.2

  Alison groaned, kicked off her shoes, and lay back on her office couch. Thank God that’s over, she thought. Her feet hurt, her back hurt, and the three Advils she’d taken were only beginning to dampen her splitting headache.

  It hadn’t gone too badly. She’d lapsed into her usual nervous hands thing, but caught it early and stopped. And she’d very nearly lost it when the demonstration program had failed to boot up on the first try. Luckily, she’d kept her composure, vamped, even told a lame joke—and, just in time, the file successfully opened.

  It must have worked, she told herself, because the crowd was still chanting and cheering as much at the end of her speech as they had been at the beginning. Better yet, the stock had held steady all day, even closing up a dollar per share…

  “Ms. Prue?”

  She opened her eyes to see James, her new secretary, standing over her. The light in the room had changed since she closed her eyes. “Ma’am. It’s six o’clock. I believe you have an engagement this evening.”

  Alison sat up slowly. Her back throbbed, and now her neck was stiff. “I must have dozed off.”

  “You looked very tired, ma’am. So I’m sure you needed it
.”

  “Anybody try to contact me?”

  “Quite a few people, but mostly to offer congratulations. Same with the emails. You got a very nice one from Mr. Bellflower, which I’ve tagged for you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Otherwise, I basically told everybody you were doing media interviews.”

  “Well done, James,” she said. His face brightened. “Now go home. You’ve had a long day.”

  “Thank you, Ma’am. I’ve put the name of the gentleman and the address of the restaurant on a post-it note on your desk.”

  An hour later, she had refreshed her make-up and lipstick and brushed her hair, but was still wearing her work clothes. She was sitting across from “Fredrick, but please call me Fred”—a stockbroker with a loud voice and a receding hairline—at a table in Alfred’s. It was an old steakhouse with white tablecloths and red walls, old paintings, and tuck-and-rolled booth backs.

  “… Yeah, one of the perquisites of being a Yalie is that I get to stay at the various Harvard-Yale clubs around the world—or, if not that, in one of the other university clubs that have a reciprocal relationship with mine. It’s the only way to go. You went to Stanford, right? I think I read that on your Wikipedia page.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, the Farm is sort of like an Ivy League school, now, isn’t it? I bet they’ve got clubs too. You ought to look into it.”

  “I will,” she said.

  “So I saw that you had your annual meeting today. Sounds like it went really well.”

  “I think so.”

  “And I read the transcripts from your analyst phone call.”

  “Did you? I thought you specialized in semiconductors.”

  “Oh, I do. But you know. I knew we were going to meet tonight, and so I thought I’d do a little client research, if you know what I mean.”