Next was another man in a bland suit for the projections, possible futures for each division and the organization as a whole. Fuck, he must have thought he was smooth up there, with his endlessly colourful array of charts and statistics, again and again hard-selling how every aspect of business was going to improve, and if no improvement was forecast then quickly proposing adjustments that would make it all better, then predicting further improvements based on these adjustments. And yet as I listened I couldn’t hear even a smudge of reality in his approach, in his economic ontology, in his pure spun computer models of pure fantasy, where only money mattered and everything else was either a resource or an obstacle. All he talked about was the future and there was no future. There would be no future if people like this, language like this, was in charge.
A sentence caught my ear and I wrote it down in the small notebook I’d brought along, not his exact words but something like: “On our current trajectory we project a three-fold increase in primary markets, with slight discrepancies for profit margins during periods of political instability.” And I thought, on our current trajectory I predict war, famine, general human misery and eventual extinction. Or I thought, yes, political instability, by which he might mean war, famine, general human misery and eventual extinction. But people have been predicting apocalypse from the beginning of time. It’s a prediction that leads nowhere. Some kind of wishful thinking. Some day a real rain will come and wash all the scum from these streets. I cannot be that rain. I can only kill one man. One miserable death that I dream will have many positive resonances far into the future. There is no use worrying about extinction. I return my attention to the presentations at the front of the room.
But I have already missed something. They are announcing the man in charge, the man I came here to see. He is already walking on stage, and I feel nothing; no anger, no sadness, no violence. He is just a man, almost a joke or self-parody. The way he speaks is likable and friendly, but of course I do not like him. He knows how to work the crowd. They have laughed at three of his jokes and he’s barely started. I know he did not write those jokes himself. He even admits in his book that he’s not naturally funny. He explains that he’ll keep his remarks brief so there will be plenty of time for questions, and that his colleagues have already done such a good job of telling us everything we need to know. He says he has never been so good with facts, with projections, with technical details. For that he hires the best people in the business and leaves them alone to do their thing. (Though he also mentions that none of his top executives ever forget their ongoing responsibility to the shareholders.) What he has always been best at is vision, expanding, taking risks, risks that result in success and profit. I can imagine him under investigation, claiming he didn’t know this or that technical detail and therefore cannot be held accountable. And then the usual bullshit about how no corporation exists without vision, that a business must not be a faceless, soulless entity but instead must be visionary. I’m not counting, but I think he says vision or visionary at least a dozen times.
During the questions I notice a subtle shift in his persona. I can’t quite fix it. It’s like every answer he gives comes along with a subtext, the message he’s trying to convey: this company is not about me but about you. While during his introductory remarks it was all vision and ego, now it is like he has carefully locked his ego in the backroom, all his charm focused on making the individual asking the question feel important. I see his skill and talent, the masterful manipulation, and feel lost and alone. I am the only one in this giant room able to see him for what he is. To a question about global health risks implicit in biotechnology, he answers that without taking genuine risks, without scientific curiosity, there can be no progress. And while they are always careful to take into account the health and safety of the consumer, it is also important never to be so careful that one fails to question the prevailing wisdom, because if no one had ever done so, we might still think the sun revolves around the earth. And then I realize someone in the audience actually asked something, challenged the implicit validity of one of the divisions, and in some ways the spell is broken. There are others willing to challenge him. In some small way I feel a bit less alone.
1.
The scapegoat department, that party joke I hooked onto for a few golden hours, never came to be. But the basic principle was sound: always have an escape, some way out. This principle has informed all my seemingly unsustainable risks over the years and, within the top tiers of my colleagues, has come to be known either as a ‘limited hangout’ or as ‘positive dominoes.’
A limited hangout is a white lie designed to lead seamlessly into another white lie, which in turn logically evolves into another misleading statement, etc. It is where you hang out, but only for a while, just until you can escape into the next useful half-truth. It is a way of controlling the narrative virtually forever. As soon as one hangout starts to thin, there is always another you can conveniently step into or towards. You are therefore never trapped and never painted into a corner. Positive dominoes works in a similar way: as each domino topples it sets off the next.
What is most important about a limited hangout or positive domino is that you always remember it is only a hangout or domino, never start to believe that it is an actual fact or reality. As you can imagine, at times this leads to certain confusions or even difficulties. One might wonder why I am so forthcoming with trade secrets that might be seen to compromise essential facets of our business procedure, and perhaps also make me appear not so sharp from an ethical standpoint. Let me address these concerns in a few different ways. Firstly, I plan to retire soon. I’m proud of my achievements and certainly not ashamed of my shortcomings. Business is business; it is tough and one must possess almost infinite guile in order to prevail. With everything I’ve done, I am cognizant of the fact that there are others out there doing far worse. More importantly, these revelations (and others you will find in this book) are in and of themselves a kind of limited hangout. They are the things I tell you to distract from other things I may not be revealing. (Or maybe there is nothing else. That is the point: it is impossible to know.) Since what are a few small lies, a few small dominoes, in a global business environment of perpetual scandal and corruption. I firmly believe that, when history compares my habits to the rest, we will come out relatively spotless.
I often judge my top executives by carefully watching how they manoeuvre their way from one domino to the next. In this Emmett was the absolute best. To watch him slip out from an official position and effortlessly slide into the next, even when the contradictions between the two were glaring, with a joke for every step of the way, the room always filled with laughter, was a spectacle of great beauty. One time we were in some nautical mess concerning oil. In the panic of the moment, counting as one of the more severe errors in judgment we have made over the years, we too quickly and clumsily decided that the first domino would be the fact that the captain was drunk. When the captain threatened to sue, and it quickly became obvious it was a lawsuit he could easily win, leaving us wide open to a series of much more expensive litigations, a brief period of public relations chaos ensued, and it was only the quick wits of Emmett, while looking through the list of casualties, that realized all we needed to do was find the highest ranking member of the crew who was both dead and had no immediate relatives. Miraculously this turned out to be the captain’s first assistant, and it was fairly easy for us to admit that at first we had made an unfortunate mistake, that it was actually the assistant who had drunkenly steered the tanker into the rocks.