DigiCom’s Malaysia operation was only a year old, and it was manufacturing the company’s new CD-ROM players-units rather like an audio CD player, but intended for computers. It was widely agreed in the business that all information was soon going to be digital, and much of it was going to be stored on these compact disks. Computer programs, databases, even books and magazineseverything was going to be on disk.
The reason it hadn’t already happened was that CD-ROMs were notoriously slow. Users were obliged to wait in front of blank screens while the drives whirred and clicked-and computer users didn’t like waiting. In an industry where speeds reliably doubled every eighteen months, CD-ROMs had improved much less in the last five years. DigiCom’s SpeedStar technology addressed that problem, with a new generation of drives code-named Twinkle (for “Twinkle, twinkle, little SpeedStar”). Twinkle drives were twice as fast as any in the world. Twinkle was packaged as a small, stand-alone multimedia player with its own screen. You could carry it in your hand, and use it on a bus or a train. It was going to be revolutionary. But now the Malaysia plant was having trouble manufacturing the new fast drives.
Benedict sipped his coffee. “Is it true you’re the only division manager who isn’t an engineer?”
Sanders smiled. “That’s right. I’m originally from marketing.”
“Isn’t that pretty unusual?” Benedict said.
“Not really. In marketing, we used to spend a lot of time figuring out what the features of the new products were, and most of us couldn’t talk to the engineers. I could. I don’t know why. I don’t have a technical background, but I could talk to the guys. I knew just enough so they couldn’t bullshit me. So pretty soon, I was the one who talked to the engineers. Then eight years ago, Garvin asked me if I’d run a division for him. And here I am.”
The call rang through. Sanders glanced at his watch. It was almost midnight in Kuala Lumpur. He hoped Arthur Kahn would still be awake. A moment later there was a click, and a groggy voice said, “Uh. Hello.”
“Arthur, it’s Tom.”
Arthur Kahn gave a gravelly cough. “Oh, Tom. Good.” Another cough. “You got my fax?”
“Yes, I got it.”
“Then you know. I don’t understand what’s going on,” Kahn said. “And I spent all day on the line. I had to, with Jafar gone.”
Mohammed Jafar was the line foreman of the Malaysia plant, a very capable young man. “Jafar is gone? Why?”
There was a crackle of static. “He was cursed.”
“I didn’t get that.”
“Jafar was cursed by his cousin, so he left.”
“What?”
“Yeah, if you can believe that. He says his cousin’s sister in Johore hired a sorcerer to cast a spell on him, and he ran off to the Orang Ash witch doctors for a counter-spell. The aborigines run a hospital at Kuala Tingit, in the jungle about three hours outside of KL. It’s very famous. A lot of politicians go out there when they get sick. Jafar went out there for a cure.”
“How long will that take?”
“Beats me. The other workers tell me it’ll probably be a week.”
“And what’s wrong with the line, Arthur?”
“I don’t know,” Kahn said. “I’m not sure anything’s wrong with the line. But the units coming off are very slow. When we pull units for IP checks, we consistently get seek times above the hundred-millisecond specs. We don’t know why they’re slow, and we don’t know why there’s a variation. But the engineers here are guessing that there’s a compatibility problem with the controller chip that positions the split optics, and the CD-driver software.”
You think the controller chips are bad?” The controller chips were made in Singapore and trucked across the border to the factory in Malaysia.
“Don’t know. Either they’re bad, or there’s a bug in the driver code.”
“What about the screen flicker?”
Kahn coughed. “I think it’s a design problem, Tom. We just can’t build it. The hinge connectors that carry current to the screen are mounted inside the plastic housing. They’re supposed to maintain electrical contact no matter how you move the screen. But the current cuts in and out. You move the hinge, and the screen flashes on and off.”
Sanders frowned as he listened. “This is a pretty standard design, Arthur. Every damn laptop in the world has the same hinge design. It’s been that way for the last ten years.”
“I know it,” Kahn said. “But ours isn’t working. It’s making me crazy.
“You better send me some units.”
“I already have, DHL. You’ll get them late today, tomorrow at the latest.”
“Okay,” Sanders said. He paused. “What’s your best guess, Arthur?”
“About the run? Well, at the moment we can’t make our production quotas, and we’re turning out a product thirty to fifty percent slower than specs. Not good news. This isn’t a hot CD player, Tom. It’s only incrementally better than what Toshiba and Sony already have on the market. They’re making theirs a lot cheaper. So we have major problems.”
“We talking a week, a month, what?”
“A month, if it’s not a redesign. If it’s a redesign, say four months. If it’s a chip, it could be a year.”
Sanders sighed. “Great.”
“That’s the situation. It isn’t working, and we don’t know why.”
Sanders said, “Who else have you told?”
“Nobody. This one’s all vours, my friend.”
“Thanks a lot.”
Kahn coughed. “You going to bury this until after the merger, or what?”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure I can.”
“Well, I’ll be quiet at this end. I can tell you that. Anybody asks me, I don’t have a clue. Because I don’t.”
“Okay. Thanks, Arthur. I’ll talk to you later.”
Sanders hung up. Twinkle definitely presented a political problem for the impending merger with Conley-White. Sanders wasn’t sure how to handle it. But he would have to deal with it soon enough; the ferry whistle blew, and up ahead, he saw the black pilings of Colman Dock and the skyscrapers of downtown Seattle.
DigiCom was located in three different buildings around historic Pioneer Square, in downtown Seattle. Pioneer Square was actually shaped like a triangle, and had at its center a small park, dominated by a wrought-iron pergola, with antique clocks mounted above. Around Pioneer Square were low-rise red-brick buildings built in the early years of the century, with sculpted facades and chiseled dates; these buildings now housed trendy architects, graphic design firms, and a cluster of hightech companies that included Aldus, Advance Holo- and DigiCom. Originally, DigiCom had occupied the Hazzard Building, on the south side of the square. As the company grew, it expanded into three floors of the adjacent Western Building, and later, to the Gorham Tower on James Street. But the executive offices were still on the top three floors of the Hazzard Building, overlooking the square. Sanders’s office was on the fourth floor, though he expected later in the week to move up to the fifth.
He got to the fourth floor at nine in the morning, and immediately sensed that something was wrong. There was a buzz in the hallways, an electric tension in the air. Staff people clustered at the laser printers and whispered at the coffee machines; they turned away or stopped talking when he walked by.
He thought, Uh-oh.
But as a division head, he could hardly stop to ask an assistant what was happening. Sanders walked on, swearing under his breath, angry with himself that he had arrived late on this important day.
Through the glass walls of the fourth-floor conference room, he saw Mark Lewyn, the thirty-three-year-old head of Product Design, briefing some of the Conley-White people. It made a striking scene: Lewyn, young, handsome, and imperious, wearing black jeans and a black Armani T-shirt, pacing back and forth and talking animatedly to the blue-suited Conley-White staffers, who sat rigidly before the product mock-ups on the table, and took notes.
When Lewyn saw Sanders he waved, and came over to the door of the conference room and stuck his head out.
“Hey, guy,” Lewyn said.
“Hi, Mark. Listen-”
“I have just one thing to say to you,” Lewyn said, interrupting. “Fuck ’em. Fuck Garvin. Fuck Phil. Fuck the merger. Fuck ’em all. This reorg sucks. I’m with you on this one, guy.”
“Listen, Mark, can you”
“I’m in the middle of something here.” Lewyn jerked his head toward the Conley people in the room. “But I wanted you to know how I feel. It’s not right, what they’re doing. We’ll talk later, okay? Chin up, guy,” Lewyn said. “Keep your powder dry.” And he went back into the conference room.
The Conley-White people were all staring at Sanders through the glass. He turned away and walked quickly toward his office, with a sense of deepening unease. Lewyn was notorious for his tendency to exaggerate, but even so, the –
It’s not right, what they’re doing.
There didn’t seem to be much doubt what that meant. Sanders wasn’t going to get a promotion. He broke into a light sweat and felt suddenly dizzy as he walked along the corridor. He leaned against the wall for a moment. He wiped his forehead with his hand and blinked his eyes rapidly. He took a deep breath and shook his head to clear it.
No promotion. Christ. He took another deep breath, and walked on.
Instead of the promotion he expected, there was apparently going to be some kind of reorganization. And apparently it was related to the merger.
The technical divisions had just gone through a major reorganization nine months earlier, which had revised all the lines of authority, upsetting the hell out of everybody in Seattle. Staff people didn’t know who to requisition for laser-printer paper, or to degauss a monitor. There had been months of uproar; only in the last few weeks had the tech groups settled down into some semblance of good working routines. Now . . . to reorganize again? It didn’t make any sense at all.
Yet it was last year’s reorganization that placed Sanders in line to assume leadership of the tech divisions now. That reorganization had structured the Advanced Products Group into four subdivisions Product Design, Programming, Data Telecommunications, and Manufacturing-all under the direction of a division general manager, not yet appointed. In recent months, Tom Sanders had informally taken over as DGM, largely because as head of manufacturing, he was the person most concerned with coordinating the work of all the other divisions.
But now, with still another reorganization . . . who knew what might happen? Sanders might be broken back to simply managing DigiCom’s production lines around the world. Or worse for weeks, there had been persistent rumors that company headquarters in Cupertino was going to take back all control of manufacturing from Seattle, turning it over to the individual product managers in California. Sanders hadn’t paid any attention to those rumors, because they didn’t make a lot of sense; the product managers had enough to do just pushing the products, without also worrying about their manufacture.
But now he was obliged to consider the possibility that the rumors were true. Because if they were true, Sanders might be facing more than a demotion. He might be out of a job.
Christ: out of a job?
He found himself thinking of some of the things Dave Benedict had said to him on the ferry earlier that morning. Benedict chased rumors, and he had seemed to know a lot. Maybe even more than he had been saying.
Is it true you’re the only division manager who isn’t an engineer?
And then, pointedly:
Isn’t that pretty unusual?
Christ, he thought. He began to sweat again. He forced himself to take another deep breath. He reached the end of the fourth-floor corridor and came to his office, expecting to find Stephanie Kaplan, the CFO, waiting there for him. Kaplan could tell him what was going on. But his office was empty. He turned to his assistant, Cindy Wolfe, who was busy at the filing cabinets. “Where’s Stephanie?”
“She’s not coming.”
“Why not?”
“They canceled your nine-thirty meeting because of all the personnel changes,” Cindy said.
“What changes?” Sanders said. “What’s going on?”
“There’s been some kind of reorganization,” Cindy said. She avoided meeting his eyes, and looked down at the call book on her desk. “They just scheduled a private lunch with all the division heads in the main conference room for twelve-thirty today, and Phil Blackburn is on his way down to talk to you. He should be here any minute. Let’s see, what else? DHL is delivering drives from Kuala Lumpur this afternoon. Gary Bosak wants to meet with you at ten-thirty.” She ran her finger down the call book. “Don Cherry called twice about the Corridor, and you just got a rush call from Eddie in Austin.”
“Call him back.” Eddie Larson was the production supervisor in the Austin plant, which made cellular telephones. Cindy placed the call; a moment later he heard the familiar voice with the Texas twang.
“Hey there, Tommy boy.”
“Hi, Eddie. What’s up?”
“Little problem on the line. You got a minute?”
“Yes, sure.”
“Are congratulations on a new job in order?”
“I haven’t heard anything yet,” Sanders said.
“Uh-huh. But it’s going to happen?”
“I haven’t heard anything, Eddie.”
“Is it true they’re going to shut down the Austin plant?”
Sanders was so startled, he burst out laughing. “What?”
“Hey, that’s what they’re saying down here, Tommy boy. Conley-White is going to buy the company and then shut us down.”
“Hell,” Sanders said. “Nobody’s buying anything, and nobody’s selling anything, Eddie. The Austin line is an industry standard. And it’s very profitable.”
He paused. “You’d tell me if you knew, wouldn’t you, Tommy boy?” “Yes, I would,” Sanders said. “But it’s just a rumor, Eddie. So forget it. Now, what’s the line problem?”
“Diddly stuff. The women on the production line are demanding that we clean out the pinups in the men’s locker room. They say it’s offensive to them. You ask me, I think it’s bull,” Larson said. “Because women never go into the men’s locker room.”
“Then how do they know about the pinups?”
“The night cleanup crews have women on ’em. So now the women working the line want the pinups removed.”
Sanders sighed. “We don’t need any complaints about being unresponsive on sex issues. Get the pinups out.”
“Even if the women have pinups in their locker room?”
“Just do it, Eddie.”
“You ask me, it’s caving in to a lot of feminist bullshit.” There was a knock on the door. Sanders looked up and saw Phil Blackburn, the company lawyer, standing there. “Eddie, I have to go.” “Okay,” Eddie said, “but I’m telling you-” “Eddie, I’m sorry. I have to go. Call me if anything changes.” Sanders hung up the phone, and Blackburn came into the room. Sanders’s first impression was that the lawyer was smiling too broadly, behaving too cheerfully. It was a bad sign.
Philip Blackburn, the chief legal counsel for DigiCom, was a slender man of forty six wearing a dark green Hugo Boss suit. Like Sanders, Blackburn had been with DigiCom for over a decade, which meant that he was one of the “old guys,” one of those who had “gotten in at the beginning.” When Sanders first met him, Blackburn was a brash, bearded young civil rights lawyer from Berkeley. But Blackburn had long since abandoned protest for profits, which he pursued with singleminded intensity-while carefully emphasizing the new corporate issues of diversity and equal opportunity. Blackburn’s embrace of the latest fashions in clothing and correctness made “PC Phil” a figure of fun in some quarters of the company. As one executive put it, “Phil’s finger is chapped from wetting it and holding it to the wind.” He was the first with Birkenstocks, the first with bell-bottoms, the first with sideburns off, and the first with diversity.
Many of the jokes focused on his mannerisms. Fussy, preoccupied with appearances, Blackburn was always running his hands over himself, touching his hair, his face, his suit, seeming to caress himself, to smooth out the wrinkles in his suit. This, combined with his unfortunate tendency to rub, touch, and pick his nose, was the source of much humor. But it was humor with an edge: Blackburn was mistrusted as a moralistic hatchet man.
Blackburn could be charismatic in his speeches, and in private could convey a convincing impression of intellectual honesty for short periods. But within the company he was seen for what he was: a gun for hire, a man with no convictions of his own, and hence the perfect person to be Garvin’s executioner.
In earlier years, Sanders and Blackburn had been close friends; not only had they grown up with the company, but their lives were intertwined personally as well: when Blackburn went through his bitter divorce in 1982, he lived for a while in Sanders’s bachelor apartment in
Sunnyvale. A few years later, Blackburn had been best man at Sanders’s own wedding to a young Seattle attorney, Susan Handler.
But when Blackburn remarried in 1989, Sanders was not invited to the wedding, for by then, their relationship had become strained. Some in the company saw it as inevitable: Blackburn was a part of the inner power circle in Cupertino, to which Sanders, based in Seattle, no longer belonged. In addition, the two men had had sharp disputes about setting up the production lines in Ireland and Malaysia. Sanders felt that Blackburn ignored the inevitable realities of production in foreign countries.
Typical was Blackburn’s demand that half the workers on the new line in Kuala Lumpur should be women, and that they should be intermingled with the men; the Malay managers wanted the women segregated, allowed to work only on certain parts of the line, away from the men. Phil strenuously objected. Sanders kept telling him, “It’s a Muslim country, Phil.”
“I don’t give a damn,” Phil said. “DigiCom stands for equality.”
“Phil, it’s their country. They’re Muslim.”
“So what? It’s our factory.”
Their disagreements went on and on. The Malaysian government didn’t want local Chinese hired as supervisors, although they were the best-qualified; it was the policy of the Malaysian government to train Malays for supervisory jobs. Sanders disagreed with this blatantly discriminatory policy, because he wanted the best supervisors he could get for the plant. But Phil, an outspoken opponent of discrimination in America, immediately acquiesced to the Malay government’s discriminatory policy, saying that DigiCom should embrace a true multicultural perspective. At the last minute, Sanders had had to fly to Kuala Lumpur and meet with the Sultans of Selangor and Pahang, to agree to their demands. Phil then announced that Sanders had “toadied up to the extremists.”
It was just one of the many controversies that surrounded Sanders’s handling of the new Malaysia factory.
Now, Sanders and Blackburn greeted each other with the wariness of former friends who had long since ceased to be anything but superficially cordial. Sanders shook Blackburn’s hand as the company lawyer stepped into the office. “What’s going on, Phil?”
“Big day,” Blackburn said, slipping into the chair facing Sanders’s desk. “Lot of surprises. I don’t know what you’ve heard.”
“I’ve heard Garvin has made a decision about the restructuring.”
“Yes, he has. Several decisions.”
There was a pause. Blackburn shifted in his chair and looked at his hands. “1 know that Bob wanted to fill you in himself about all this. He came by earlier this morning to talk to everyone in the division.”
“I wasn’t here.”
“Uh-huh. We were all kind of surprised that you were late today.”