Name the steps you are taking to create seamless, integrated, and streamlined business manners. In response, they got a chorus of shrugged shoulders, bit lips, nervous chuckles, and befuddled expressions. Work at the plant ground to a standstill.
By 9:15, the five chemists who had worked on the polymer were located and herded into the small conference room upstairs. They mustered around the long table, were sternly ordered to sit, and step two commenced.
A glowering executive from the Capitol Group stood at the head of the table and threatened to fire them on the spot unless they immediately signed thick nondisclosure agreements protecting CG’s intellectual property rights. The six men looked horrified. They exchanged back-and-forth looks of confusion; Arvan Chemicals had always operated on integrity. Perry had never thought to force or even mildly encourage them to sign a vow of silence. Trust had always been good enough.
The executive, a lawyer naturally, went on a bit about what their new employer would do to anybody who refused to sign-firing would be immediate, and loaded in his briefcase was an expandable folder filled with devastating lawsuits and injunctions he would file that very day. Fill in a name and fire away. As only a lawyer can do, he threatened, cajoled, and bullied until the last terrified man scrawled his signature.
By ten, all documents pertaining to the polymer were collected in a large safe and a guard was posted.
Also by ten, Perry had signed the contract, a forty-page document loaded with legalese, clauses and subclauses, conditions piled on top of conditions. In return for his hundred million, among many other things, he agreed to relinquish all proprietary ownership rights, to abide by a strict vow of silence, and to never set foot in the factory he had built and nurtured and groomed for over forty years. He vainly tried to insert a few clauses, mainly protections for his workforce, but CG’s negotiators crossed their arms, scowled, and stonewalled.
Perry had already consigned himself to surrender anyway. The negotiators had been through this a hundred times, the last-minute guilt of the conquered. But why, on the cusp of victory, allow him to burden them with troublesome conditions? Just sign the agreement, they flatly insisted, just get this over with, and eventually Perry caved completely.
At eleven, four burly guards with Capitol Group patches on their thick arms helped Perry out of his chair and escorted him downstairs, then across the factory floor and out the broad double doors, straight to his car. A large group of horrified workers tried to approach him, but the guards pushed and barreled through like an NFL offensive line. The uniformed quartet stood with grim smiles and watched him climb in and start the engine. He gave one long pathetic look at the plant, one look at what had been his life’s work, then slowly he eased out of the parking lot.
They watched until Perry’s car disappeared into the streets of Trenton.
Reinforcements arrived promptly at noon. Another bus pulled up and disgorged a squad of CG chemists and metallurgists, technical experts brought in to assess Arvan’s breakthrough and decide on the fastest, most efficient way to kick it into production. They crowded into the small conference room and began studying the blueprints for the precious polymer. They had been given three principal questions to answer: How much of the polymer should be manufactured here? How much could be shifted to other plants, in other states, in order to build broader political support? How fast could it be jammed into mass production?
Meanwhile, the consultants on the shop floor began breaking the production teams into new units, breaking apart teams that had operated together for years. It was all part of the standard shock treatment. Sow confusion and fear, upend the old ways, disorient the workers, humiliate the supervisors, divide and conquer.
By close of business they would know who to lay off; by dawn the next day, a squad of guards would be posted at the doors, gripping clipboards with the names of those who would be allowed to enter and those who would be coldly sent home, permanently.
The hatchet men from human resources were given a fairly light objective: eliminate fifty percent of the workers and ninety percent of the supervisors, who were considered too set in the old ways.
Of course, not a dime would be paid to those they dismissed. Not a cent of the promised severance packages.
Of course, this would incite the usual flood of lawsuits and occasional picketing over broken promises.
And of course, CG’s lawyers would employ their usual tactics to drag out the cases for years, filing motions, pushing extensions, stonewalling for all they were worth.
Eventually, CG would settle for half of three months’ pay to anybody financially able or stubborn enough to cling on that long. But statistically, they knew only four out of ten employees had the resources to hire a lawyer; only one out of those four had the angry persistence to battle it out to the bitter end.
Day three, one of CG’s many former senior government officials would be dispatched on a fast trip to Trenton for a pointed, one-sided chat with the mayor and city council. The economics of keeping the plant in Trenton looked dire, he would warn them with an appropriately grim and regrettable look. Poor schools, high personal and business taxes, dangerous streets. Not a good combination, he would say, frowning tightly.
The Capitol Group also happened to own another chemical company, a recently modernized plant with plenty of room for expansion, one situated in a nice, lovely, leafy community with first-rate schools and safe streets. It was located in Tennessee, where the politicians were friendly to businesses and understood the need for generosity.
The business logic of shuttering the archaic Trenton plant and shifting the entire operation to shinier Tennessee was nearly irresistible. A war was being waged back at headquarters. The accountants were well armed, loud, and pitiless. Their main concern, really their only concern, was with the numbers. The financial logic screamed for consolidation; it would reap a thousand economies and savings. The senior leaders of CG were humanists, though, and horrified at the thought of heaping more damage on an already depressed town, though they found it hard to argue against the numbers.
If, on the other hand, the city fathers could find it in their hearts to cough up a few generous tax concessions, perhaps the carnage could be avoided. The humanists needed something, a weapon to curb the hard appetites of the number crunchers.
A complete tax holiday for five years would go a long way.
Further, he would warn them, there would be some necessary personnel “dislocation”-as polite a way as possible to say mass firings-and CG expected the local politicians to ignore the complaints.
Agnes Carruthers was the first casualty. She was seated behind her desk, in the same lumpy old chair she had occupied for thirty-two years, through good times and bad, tending to her boss’s every whim and need. She knew the company inside and out. She knew all the suppliers and all the customers, could nearly recite from memory the birthdate of every employee. She prided herself on being a mother figure, figuratively and literally, as all three of her children now worked at Arvan. Lawrence, her husband, had as well, before he passed ten years before, God bless him.
A courier walked in, dropped an unmarked envelope on her desk, and briskly departed. Agnes took a long sip of her tea and opened it: “You remember yesterday when I asked you, Do you know who I am? I’ll tell you. I’m the new owner of this company. Collect your things and get out. You’re fired.”
The takeover was a godsend for Mitch Walters. For two days he was a hit on all the business shows, who were enchanted with the concept of a thin coat of paint that could deflect a rocket. Mitch was hazy on the particulars-frankly, he had no idea how the polymer worked-but huffed and bluffed his way through.
A telephonic board meeting was held four days after the takeover to confirm the purchase and plot the next steps.
Walters plunged into the call with an overly generous narrative about how his personal intervention “defanged an unexpected Hail Mary pass by Perry Arvan” and “salvaged the deal that nearly slipped out of Wiley’s grip.” He was vague on the details. Nobody bothered to ask him to elaborate. In Walters’s case, it was better not to ask, they all knew.
He was followed up by the chief financial officer, a thickset, brainy accountant named Alex Ringold, with a serious manner and droll voice, who bluntly confessed the bad news. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had slowed into grinding contests. From their very profitable starts they had bottomed out into slow-motion battles of attrition that were dramatically eroding the company’s earnings. Few of CG’s defense companies had any upward momentum-Humvees were still selling briskly to replace those that were blown up, as were select electronic products-but the month before the Pentagon had canceled a large artillery program, as well as an order for three additional battleships. And now a big-ticket future fighter program for the flyboys was hanging in doubt. CG was the lead contractor on two of the three programs, and a healthy contributor on the third.
