The Social Animal (39 page)

Day after day, she would push Raymond: “We’ve got to do something! We can’t just sit here talking.” Finally he agreed, to a point.

Raymond was eating the tongue sandwich he brought every day, with a Dr. Brown’s cream soda. He agreed they would put together a proposal, a different set of strategies the company might explore. But Raymond had a few stipulations: “First, no covert ops. We do everything aboveboard and out in the open. Second, no coup. We are not targeting personnel. We are offering suggestions about policy. Third, always helpful. We will never challenge anybody’s ability. We will just try to provide them with constructive alternatives.”

Erica thought he was making a distinction without a difference. It was inconceivable Taggert could turn into the sort of person who could adopt the sort of policies Raymond would come up with. Changing policy would mean changing personnel. But if Raymond had to have these stipulations so he could stay true to some ancient loyalty code, then that was fine with Erica.

They began putting together a group of proposals to save the company. They did it right there in the open, in the cafeteria, as members of what they came to call the Brunch Club, in honor of Raymond’s early dining schedule.

They worked on their proposals for several weeks, and Erica was fascinated by how Raymond led the group. First, he seemed to spend most of his time talking about what he was not good at. “Sorry, I don’t handle distraction very well,” he would say as he turned off his cell phone before every discussion. The fact is, no human brain handles distraction very well, but Raymond was wise enough to know it. “Sorry, I’m not real good with generalizations,” he interrupted one day. The fact is, most minds are more supple at handling visual images than abstract concepts, but Raymond was sensible enough to acknowledge it. “Could we lay out an agenda here?” he would say. “My mind is just wandering from subject to subject.” The fact is, most people can hold a thought for only about ten seconds at a time, but Raymond was smart enough to see that he needed an external structure to keep himself on track. At the start of each lunch he’d write down a list of things to talk about, and he’d keep glancing down at the list.

Raymond’s knowledge of his own shortcomings was encyclopedic. He knew he had trouble comparing more than two options at a time. If you gave him three, he got confused, so he would build brackets and move from one binary comparison to the next. He knew he liked hearing evidence that confirmed his own opinions, so he asked Erica and the others to give him the counterevidence first, and not bury it away. He knew he had a bias for the cautious course in any situation, so he would always force himself to summarize the case for the riskiest course before making the argument for the cautious one.

The Brunch Club’s plan was to come up with eight or ten policy proposals that they could present to the board and the executive team. They worked on one proposal at a time. They’d sit around at lunch talking about it. Most of their time was not really spent coming up with new ideas. As Raymond explained to Erica one evening after a long day, most business meetings aren’t about creating new plans, they are about maneuvering a group of managers so that they buy into a basic approach.

“Does this feel wrong to anyone?” Raymond asked once while they were talking about a new hiring procedure. The fact is, the mind is good at detecting its own errors. In the early 1990s Michael Falkenstein of the University of Dortmund in Germany noticed that when a test subject pressed the wrong key on a keyboard, the electrical potentials in his frontal lobe dropped by about ten microvolts. Patrick Rabbitt of the University of Manchester found that typing mistakes are made with slightly less pressure than correct strokes, as if the mind is trying to unconsciously hold back at the last second. In other words, through a complex of feedback mechanisms, the brain can recognize mistakes even as it is making them. This may be why it is generally a good idea to change your answers on a test if you have an inkling that the one you gave is wrong. A pile of research has found that people who go back and change doubtful answers improve their score. Raymond was asking people to be alert to these subtle warning signals that burble up inside them.

Sometimes Erica would get immensely frustrated with him. The group generally set themselves a timetable. Three days for each proposal. They’d be in the middle of the third day of discussion, hammering out one of the proposals, and suddenly Raymond would switch sides, and argue for an entirely different approach than the one they had just agreed upon. “You just made the exact opposite point,” Erica would cry out in exasperation.

“I know. Part of me believes that. Part of me believes this. I just want all my schizo personalities to have a say,” he would joke. In fact, researchers have found that people who engage in what they call “dialectical bootstrapping” often think better than people who don’t. That means engaging in internal debates, pitting one impulse against another.

Finally, when every argument had been made, the Brunch Club would have a vote. When a proposal was approved, Raymond would invariably hold up the sheet of paper and announce with a big smile, “Well, this is a noble failure!”

The first time he said this, Erica didn’t know what he meant, so Raymond explained: “The great business sage Peter Drucker said that about a third of the business decisions he observed turned out to have been right, another third turned out to be minimally effective, and another third were outright failures. In other words, there is at least a two-thirds chance that what we have done is wrong or largely wrong. We believe this is great, because we want to believe we are great. We want to preserve our own egos, so we’re spinning ourselves. But the truth is life is about producing failure. We only progress through a series of regulated errors. Every move is a partial failure to be corrected by the next one. Think of it as walking. You shift your weight off balance with every step, and then you throw your other leg forward to compensate.”

At night, Erica would come home and tell Harold about what Raymond had done that day. Harold had met him only a couple of times, at a barbecue and at a company party, but he thought Raymond reminded him of a guy he had once known who worked as a carpenter for a theater company downtown. The guy had always wanted to be in the theater, but he never really had any desire to be an actor. He’d tried it in high school, and being onstage just made him uncomfortable. So he’d become a stagehand. He enjoyed the esprit de corps of the theater troupe. He enjoyed contributing something to the whole production, and he enjoyed the knowledge that he often knew more about theater than the directors and the stars who were blinded by their own egos. Harold’s theory was that Raymond was the kind of guy who just loved making things work. But Harold suspected that when the time came to make a move, he’d never actually want to challenge Taggert. He’d never actually want to get onstage and play a starring role in the drama of saving the company.

Erica wasn’t so sure. Every day she saw how people gathered around him in the cafeteria. He was a weird mix of traits. He was extremely modest, but he could also be extremely willful. People assumed that humble people must also be pushovers, but sometimes there was a fierce stubbornness inside Raymond. He built his expertise upon an acute awareness of his own ignorance, but he was pretty self-confident.

The discussions around the Brunch Club were followed attentively by mid-level people around the company. Many employees looked at Raymond and Erica longingly, hoping these dissidents would save them from the downward slide. Taggert and his crew looked at them contemptuously when they considered them at all. They were just an unruly rabble of losers and flameouts.

Erica’s main problem at this point was that she lacked an opening. The group had finished crafting their suggestions. They had composed a twenty-five-page memo encapsulating their collective wisdom. But there was no good way to present it. She could just send it up the decision chain, but it would get lost and buried. She could leak it to a trade journal, but that violated Raymond’s “no covert ops” rule.

Fortunately, the Lord provided. One day, Jim Cramer, a
CNBC
talk-show host screamed out that Intercom was going down the toilet. He actually took one of their cable boxes, smashed it on the air and tried to flush it, piece by piece, down a toilet he had on the set.

These sorts of displays didn’t always produce gigantic movements in the stock price. But this one touched a nerve. The next day, everybody was selling. The stock price, which had been as high as 73 a few years ago, dropped in one day from 23 to 14.

Taggert felt he had to get out in front of this storm, and concluded, naturally enough, that a public presentation of himself would be enough to restore confidence. He announced what he called an “Opportunity Summit.” He invited the executive committee and members of the board and had it webcast so that Wall Street analysts could listen in. “We want to talk but also listen,” Taggert said while announcing the meeting. “We want to present our plans, but also hear your concerns and ideas. This is a learning organization, and we will go forward together.” This was all the invitation Erica needed. She told Raymond that he would stand up at this meeting and present their suggestions. Raymond, who was either scared or clever, said he would do it only if Erica stood up, too, and helped him.

The meeting took place in a theater downtown. Taggert and his team sat bathed in light onstage and everyone else sat in darkness down below. This was their idea of a listening campaign. “I want you to know that I am very excited about where this company is right now,” Taggert began. “I’ve always had a very good sense of how growth happens, and I am confident that this company is on the verge of exponential growth. We have the best management team in the United States, the best workers, and the best product line! So I am bringing a lot of passion to my job every day.

“One of the things I set out to do when I took over is make this a top-tier growth company. I realized that the old methods would no longer work. We had to rip up the old rule book, pursue constant change and achieve game-changing breakthrough growth. That meant revolutionizing the value chain, and shaking up standard operating procedures. We no longer had the luxury of sitting back and learning from others.

“When we embarked on this daring course, we knew all along that from the outside it might be hard to understand the strategy. We knew there might be outside metrics that would be misleading to those who didn’t understand the course we were undertaking. There might be well-intentioned critics who just couldn’t see the long-term path from their vantage point. But we set up our own metrics, and I’m here to tell you today that we have met or surpassed every single metric we created. We are changing faster than we thought. We are innovating better. We have left no stone unturned. We have thrown everything we had at the problems facing this company. We have tried everything in an intense wave of activity. We are on the verge of explosive growth.

“I’ve always been good at reading what other people are thinking, and I know some of you are concerned. But I’m here to tell you that when this revolution is complete, you will see how careful the planning has been. Soon we will be taking another series of steps that will take us deeper into programming, deeper into growth markets and social networking. These acquisitions will revolutionize this company. We immediately double our contact with viewers and customers. We leapfrog over recent technology and put ourselves in a position to transform our industry. We will embark on a dramatic effort to restructure our company and reshape our identity.”

He went on in this vein for a while, then a few members of his deference committee got up and presented some projections and growth numbers.

When the presentation was finished, nobody knew what to think. Everybody had heard these promises before. They had been taken to the mountaintop before. And yet good things had not come. And yet people wanted to believe. Taggert was charismatic. The members of his team were smart. The audience was not sold on the vision he had laid out, but it was not hostile either. It was uncertain.

Raymond stood up at one of the microphones in the aisles. “Excuse me, could we make some suggestions?”

“Of course, Ray,” Taggert replied. Raymond never went by “Ray.”

“Could I do it from up there?” Raymond pointed to the podium on stage.

“Of course.”

Raymond gestured to Erica to join him onstage. Erica was seized by an awful wave of impostor syndrome, but walked up.

“As I think you know, Mr. Taggert, some of us old-timers and some of the young turks have been sitting around over the past few weeks trying to think of ways we might be helpful to your work. We don’t have access to a lot of the information you have, so perhaps our ideas are unwise or unworkable. Probably, you’ve already considered each and every one of them.

“But one of the thoughts was that we wanted to get a clearer idea of what this company is about. It used to be a cable company. We laid cable. We put it in the ground and connected it to people’s homes. We were a bunch of mechanical guys. We built new technologies and we made stuff work. That was our identity. It made us proud to work here and provided us with an unwritten code of conduct. I’m not sure that identity is so clear now. We seem to do a thousand different things, with a thousand different cultures. When I started here, the goal was to optimize our performance as cable providers, not maximize our growth, as measured on the revenue statement. I’m not sure that’s the same either.

“I know I sound like an old duffer nostalgic for times gone by. But I started work here under John Koch. Many of you didn’t know him, but I did, even though I was a junior guy at the time. He came out of the company instead of being appointed on top of it. The car he drove, the way he dressed and spoke—they were all similar to the cars we drove, the way we dressed and spoke. He made more than anybody else, sure, but he was part of the same pay scale the rest of us were on, not part of some
CEO
scale a galaxy removed from normal workers. You had the sense, talking with Koch, that he reacted to things the way you would react if you were in his job. He had a sense of the way the crews out in the streets worked and couldn’t work.