The master engineer and the master salesman did not like each other, but today Niels seemed to be paying Gregor no attention. Gregor grimaced as Niels bent his gel-slicked head over the small notepad that he carried around in his front pocket. He found the mere existence of Niels’ notepad an insult to the advances of technology and word processing software.
Gregor had disliked Anahata’s new head of advertising from the instant he spotted him on campus, a plastic smile fixed on his face, fancy designer suit falling from his shoulders like a second skin. With his wingtips pointed sharply in the direction of his target, Niels had approached Gregor to suggest the engineering team fix the advertising system interface so that Anahata’s advertisers could more easily place their ads online. Gregor quickly informed Niels that Anahata was about its users first and foremost, and that its users — and just as important, Anahata’s engineers — did not care about an improved advertising system. Implicit in his explanation was the unwritten philosophical hierarchy of Anahata: Engineers at the top, then users, and then, long after that, cheerleaders, janitors, creationists, and, finally, the Anahata sales team.
But Niels was slow on the uptake. He kept pushing for the change, eventually escalating the issue to Bobby. Bobby, in turn, sent Gregor and Niels an email asking them to speak to each other and not bother him with such small problems. Six years later, the two men still had not managed to do so. They only met in Bobby’s management meetings, where they sat on opposite ends of the table and took opposing stances in almost any argument.
“Haaaaaaaaaa…Haaaaaaaaaa…Haaaaaaa…Ha! Ha! Ha!”
Suddenly, Bobby was on his feet, arms outstretched.
“Our minds are clear,” he said, opening his eyes and bowing to his management team. Bobby sat down on top of the table, crossing his legs in the lotus position. “Let us begin.”
Just then, the door opened and a man entered, wearing an enormous grin.
Gregor thought he recognized this short, swarthy man, but he could not place him. The intruder also seemed confused: He scanned the room, past Gregor, past Niels, and landed on Bobby. His eyes bulged, the grin vanished, and he took a step back. His hand fiddled with the doorknob.
“Wait,” said Bobby, looking him over. “Clearly you must be smart to have found me like this. I am elusive, you know. A bit like a panther — if panthers were also progressive Buddhists.” Bobby pawed the air with his claws.
The man nodded vigorously.
Gregor’s tongue roamed his mouth, searching for particles of stray food. He always brushed his teeth after lunch, but today he had lost track of time while troubleshooting a server issue with the infrastructure team. The lack of order in his mouth was mildly distressing — just like this intruder, who he wished would leave. Where had he seen him before?
“I suppose you have joined us because you know of our open-door meeting policy,” said Bobby, referring to a core Anahata principle that Gregor and the rest of the management team all actually hated.
“What is your name?” Bobby asked.
“Arsyen Aimo,” the man said.
“Join us, Arsyen.”
“But, Bobby, ” said Fischer, the CFCAO, “we have confidential things to discuss.”
“Trust is the cornerstone of truth. If we cannot trust our employees, our house will fall upon itself.” Bobby turned to Arsyen and gestured at a seat at the table.
Arsyen took the chair closest to the door, gripping its arms oddly, rigidly, as if he were sitting on a throne. Suddenly Gregor recalled where he had seen him. This was the product manager candidate Roni had pointed out, the one from Galt. They had decided to hire him just to bleed Galt of some of its top talent. Over the past month, Anahata had lost several of its best engineers to the startup.
Gregor gave Arsyen another look. He was still panting a bit; dark hairs peeked out from a very wet collar. He did not seem like an exceptional human being. Still…
“What’s up first?” asked Bobby, turning to his assistant. She was in attendance that day as part of what Bobby called “radical transparency,” a philosophy that, while often cited by Bobby, seemed to be in effect only every third Thursday. His assistant leaned over and showed him a list — and some generous cleavage.
“Okay, everyone,” said Bobby, nodding at her breasts. “Let’s show Arsyen what innovation looks like!”
Bobby’s assistant opened the door, and a product manager and his engineering team shuffled toward the table in an awkward, heaving lump. They kept their heads down, shooting furtive glances at Bobby as they prepared to present their work.
The product manager coughed. “When, um, we set out to design the new interface for Rovix, we had, uh, three goals in mind.”
“Why do you need a presentation to tell me your goals?” Old Al barked. “Keep things simple. You don’t need two hundred slides to tell me what you’re going to do.”
“It’s just a few slides,” the product manager mumbled.
“Al’s right,” Fischer said. “If you can’t tell us your idea in thirty seconds, it’s not an idea. It’s a presentation.”
The product manager closed his computer.
“So, uh, there were three goals. First, to simplify the user interface. Second, to make it easier for people to share content across all of our products. And third, to ensure we had the right structure in place to eventually run ads next to the content — if,” his eyes darted over at Gregor, “we ever decided that was something we would want to do.”
Gregor’s radar shot to attention. Had they actually just suggested putting advertising on this product? Niels’ team must have lobbied for it.
“Let me tell you something,” said Old Al, shaking his finger at the team. “Bobby invented the concept of cloud computing on a high school cafeteria napkin twenty years ago. Big ideas should be simple. Napkinable.”
“Here,” said Fischer, pulling a napkin out of his takeaway carton. “Use this. Show us Rovix on a napkin.”
The product manager fumbled with his backpack and pulled out a pen. He began to draw on Fischer’s napkin. Soon, the napkin had various arrows and bullet points scattered across it, in addition to a small glob of mayonnaise.
Bobby glanced at the drawing and frowned. “Arsyen, take a look and tell us what you would do.”
The napkin made its way down the table to Arsyen. His nose wrinkled as his fingers daintily pinched the clean edge.
“Speak up!” shouted Old Al as he adjusted his hearing aid.
“Throw it away,” said Arsyen, pushing the napkin toward the middle of the table.
Bobby’s eyes lit up, and he turned to the Rovix team.
“You heard Arsyen. There’s clearly something wrong with your product — I’ll leave you all to figure out what that is. But remember: Big ideas have simple solutions.
“Also remember: Solutionize. Iterate. Solutionize. Iterate.
“And really remember: Sometimes failure is success, and other times success is failure.”
“Thank you,” said the product manager, inclining slightly in a half-bow. He glanced at Old Al and then Gregor, likely hoping for additional feedback or some indication of whether the meeting had gone well. But Gregor wasn’t in the mood to give feedback, and Old Al had fallen asleep.
The assistant shut the door behind them, and Fischer belched noisily.
Gregor rolled his eyes. He found the whole lot of them to be idiots, minus Bobby and occasionally Old Al. But then he caught a similar disgust on Niels’ face and recoiled. He would not permit himself to share an emotion with that man.
“Are we done?” Gregor asked. He needed to talk to Bobby, and no productive dialog could take place as long as The Salesman was around.
Bobby’s assistant consulted the agenda. “We have a proposal from Niels,” she said.
Niels flashed the assistant his best grin, then launched into his pitch.
“We have a huge, untapped opportunity before us,” he began. “I’m talking about the chan
ce to make over a billion dollars in the first year alone just by — ”
“Niels, stop right there!” Bobby yelped. “Don’t you see who is in the room? Arsyen!”
Everyone turned in his direction.
The weight of the group’s gaze seemed to sink Arsyen even lower in his chair — an observation that did not displease Gregor. This Arsyen seemed to be a rather unremarkable individual. What had Galt seen in him? Had Gregor and Roni made a mistake in hiring him?
“It is inevitable that the rest of us must discuss it, but I don’t know if our engineer should hear this kind of talk. You are an engineer, right?”
Arsyen nodded.
Gregor shook his head but didn’t say anything. Product managers were such frauds, always trying to pretend they were real engineers instead of MBAs with a few coding classes under their belts.
“You see, Arsyen,” continued Bobby, “we’re going to talk about money. Or more specifically, advertising.” Barry spit out the last word like a piece of rotten food.
That’ll show him, thought Gregor, shooting a smug glance at Niels.
But Niels only smiled in response. His confidence enraged Gregor — and fed his self-doubt. What if Bobby didn’t really hate advertising or Niels? What if his disgust was just an act?
“Bobby, you make an excellent point, as always,” Niels said. “But I think it would be good for engineers like Arsyen to understand how the sales team funds their innovations.”
“Fine with me,” Gregor said. “It’s a chance for our new employee to understand who really runs this company.”
Gregor looked to Bobby, but the founder said nothing. He seemed to be distracted by some dirt underneath his fingernails.
Niels introduced his proposal — a project in which Anahata would run ads on Moodify bracelets. Within minutes, Gregor was on the attack. No matter what revenue projection or partnership expansion Niels raised, Gregor countered with the Anahata commandment to never hurt the user experience in the name of revenue.
Despite his reputation, Gregor was not actually opposed to advertising. He knew the company needed to make money, and, like Bobby, he himself was a very rich man thanks to Anahata’s online ads. But Gregor was willing to put additional material gain aside in the name of thwarting his nemesis.
After an extensive back-and-forth — and a lengthy digression from Old Al, who had woken from his nap to explain how advertising had worked back before the internet was invented — the battle finally puttered to a halt. Gregor wasn’t sure he had won — Bobby had refused to make a decision and then closed his eyes to meditate — but the frustrated look on Niels’ face was satisfaction enough.
Fischer offered a temporary détente by raising an issue they had discussed the previous week: a newly released Galt productivity tool that reduced people’s lengthy business presentations into a four-sentence sales pitch, thereby shortening business meetings and helping society advance capitalism at three times the current rate. It was nearly identical to a project Anahata was set to launch the following month. That Galt had beaten Anahata to market was no surprise: The startup had lured away two of Anahata’s best productivity engineers the previous fall. In fact, it seemed that all of Anahata’s work and thinking had made it into the final Galt tool.
“I always said we would lose those engineers to Galt,” growled Old Al, shaking a finger at HR Paul. “We knew they were getting calls from the recruiters every week, and we did nothing to stop it.”
“That’s not true Al, and I don’t feel like you are speaking to me in a productive manner,” Paul said. “We gave them strong counteroffers, and even took one of their mothers on a hot-air balloon ride. But in the end, both said Galt was scrappier and less bureaucratic.”
“We should sue Galt and show them they can’t keep doing this,” Old Al retorted. “They’ve already poached several of our top engineers, and now they’re beating us to the market with products. We can’t just sit by and let them do this. You know, back when I was at Bell Labs, we had a policy that — ”
“My team,” said Bobby, raising his palm to silence the group. Gregor glared at Niels across the room as Bobby counted aloud to five.
Bobby opened his eyes. “When a duck grows big, people forget about its webbed feet. They forget that it can swim.”
Gregor tried to remember whether Bobby had used this aphorism before.
Bobby waited another minute for someone to respond, but Gregor didn’t seem to be the only one who was lost. No one said anything. Finally, Bobby sighed loudly.
“The fundamental issue here is Galt,” he said. “Our engineers are leaving us for Galt because they think it’s faster and more innovative. Just look at Arsyen.”
All heads swiveled toward Arsyen, and the little man sunk lower in his chair.
“Arsyen, look up again for us. Good. Do you all see that — the fear in his eyes? Watching us, watching the Rovix team just now, he has clearly been asking himself why he is working at Anahata. Isn’t that right, Arsyen?”
Arsyen nodded vigorously.
Gregor still wasn’t convinced the guy was that remarkable, but at least Arsyen was smart enough to know to agree with Bobby. Bobby was always right in the long run.
“We could add more of those organic juicers to each building?” offered HR Paul. “Or a pet hedgehog? Once you bond with them, you’ll find it much harder to leave the company.”
“This isn’t about giving them more amenities,” groaned Niels, rolling his eyes. “Our engineers are spoiled enough as it is. You’ll notice that none of the sales team has defected to Galt — despite their recruiters trying to ambush my guys in the parking lots. It’s because we run a tight ship in sales. We’re not out there handing out free jet packs every day like engineering does. The only freebie I hand out is my book of master negotiator tips.”
Niels waved a shiny copy of the red manual he issued to all sales employees.
“The reason you haven’t lost many people to Galt is that sales will be the last to go,” Gregor said. “The innovative minds go first. If ten percent of our sales workforce had gone to Galt — instead of our engineering staff — we wouldn’t even be having this conversation right now.”
Niels looked to HR Paul for support, but his colleague nodded in agreement with Gregor.
Niels turned to Bobby.
“We need to create more of a war mentality here. Wars are very productive for unity. Every Anahata employee should want nothing more than to kill Galt and rip their little startup hearts out. People need enemies. Enemies drive us forward.”
Niels scanned the room, stopping on Gregor. His eyes narrowed to lizard slits.
“Wrong,” said Gregor, not breaking Niels’ gaze. “Bobby’s point is that if we want to remain the world’s most innovative company, we have to keep our engineers. And to do that, we have to be fast. We have to let the engineers work on exciting projects, and in an environment where they and their projects are isolated from the temptations of Galt.”
“Very realistic,” Niels said. “Let’s just put them on an island then. Get them some fruity cocktails.”
Fischer and HR Paul chuckled at the far end of the table. Bobby picked at the flap of his sandal.
“An island is obviously inappropriate. For one, fresh water would be an issue,” Gregor said. “But rest assured we have a plan.”
Gregor shifted in his chair to face Arsyen.
“Soon there will be no reason for you or any other engineer to ever want to leave Anahata.”
L egend had it that Bobby reserved his most important discussions for the bathroom because he was convinced that Galt had bugged all the Anahata meeting rooms.
While an outsider might have thought it odd, Roni knew it was simply more evidence of the founder’s cunning. He was sure Bobby chose the bathroom — with its occasional disagreeable smells and sounds and the eventual, inevitable intrusion by an outsider — to keep the length of any meeting to a minimum
. This allowed him more time in his day to think of greater things. It was the mark of an exceptional leader.
Roni often recalled his first and only bathroom meeting with Bobby. Eight other employees had been present, each jockeying for position. They all wanted to stand next to him, near the hand dryer, but Roni beat them to it. Although the meeting lasted just four minutes and Bobby uttered only one sentence, they were a very long four minutes, and it was one very important sentence.
Ever since that day, Roni favored that same Building 3, southwest corner bathroom. Its gentle pale-blue walls and piped-in ocean sounds were the perfect setting for his daily hour-long meditation sessions.
With the stall door closed and his patchouli candle lit, Roni would lean back on the heated Japanese toilet seat, press the soles of his Crocs against the wall, close his eyes, and insert his finger into his nose. The dry Northern California air lent itself to large, easily removable finds, particularly during the days when the region was hit by the Diablo winds.
But today no amount of nostril exploration could ease the mild anxiety building within him.
When Roni first started at Anahata, he was one of its superstars, leading a project to do real-time monitoring of all of the world’s nuclear hazards. People on campus called him “Radioactive Roni,” and someone even organized a Chernobyl-themed party in his honor.
He was now into his seventh year at Anahata. Roni was making a ton of money; all his needs were met. But he no longer felt a part of the in-crowd, privy to the hottest projects or latest internal gossip. He increasingly felt like the heart of the company was beating elsewhere. It was only a vague sense, but one akin to that of the young dragon slayer approaching the bridge, one careful step after another, the fog slowly clearing before him to reveal…
The Big Disruption Page 4