create an industrial power infinitely greater than the sum of its parts.
To my eyes, as an analyst of capital, Trianon was a masterpiece–the
Sistine Chapel of corporate design.
Within a matter of months, word of my statistical prowess had reached
the head of the department for which I worked, Monsieur Arteaux. He was
an older gentleman, a man of few hobbies and a near total devotion to
Menard’s vision. Some of my coworkers found me cold, but not Monsieur
Arteaux. With us, conversation flowed as if between two sports fans. We
could discuss the relative advantages of internal capital markets or
alternate measurements of equity risk premiums, and do so for hours.
Matters that would stupefy most men, but which involved the architecture
of capital itself ~rationalizing the decisions of where to invest and
reinvest, how risk was best to be apportioned. Arteaux, who was nearing
retirement, put everything on the line by arranging for me to be
introduced to the great man himself, catapulting me over endless
managerial layers. Menard, amused by my obvious youth, asked me a few
condescending questions. I replied with rather serious and rather
provocative responses in truth, responses that verged on rudeness.
Arteaux himself was appalled. And Menard was, so it seems, captivated.
An unusual response, but it was, in capsule form, an explanation of his
own greatness. He told me later that my combination of insolence and
thoughtfulness reminded him of no one so much as himself. A magnificent
egotist, he was, but it was an earned egotism. My own arrogance for
even as a child I was tagged with that attribute was perhaps not
unfounded, either. Humility was a fine thing for men of the cloth. But
rationality decreed that one be sensible to one’s own capabilities. I
had considerable expertise in the techniques of valuation. Why
shouldn’t it logically extend to the valuation of oneself? My own
father was, I believed, handicapped by a deferential manner; he esteemed
his own gifts too little, and persuaded others to undervalue them in
turn. That would not be my mistake.
I became, in a matter of weeks, Menard’s personal assistant. I
accompanied him absolutely everywhere. No one knew whether I was an
amanuensis or a counselor. And in truth I moved, smoothly, from playing
the first role to playing the second. The great man treated me far more
like an adopted son than a paid employee. I was his only protege, the
sole acolyte who seemed worthy of his example. I would make proposals,
sometimes bold ones, occasionally proposals that reversed years of
planning. I suggested, for example, that we sell off an oil-exploration
division that his managers had spent years in developing. I suggested
massive investments in still unproven technologies. Yet when he heeded
my advice, he almost invariably found himself pleased by the results.
L’ombre de Menard the shadow of Menard became my nickname in the early
1950s. And even as he fought the disease, the lymphoma, that would
ultimately claim his life, he and Trianon came to rely increasingly upon
my judgment. My ideas were bold, unheard of, seemingly mad and soon
widely mimicked. Menard studied me as much as I studied him, with both
detachment and genuine affection. We were men in whom such qualities
enjoyed an easy coexistence.
Yet for all the privileges he granted me, I had sensed, for a while,
that there was one final sanctum to which I had not been granted entry.
There were trips he made without explanation, corporate allocations I
could not make sense of and about which he would brook no discussion.
Then the day came when he decided that I would be inducted into a
society I knew nothing about, an organization you know as Sigma.
I was still Menard’s wunderkind, still the corporate prodigy, still in
my early twenties, and utterly unprepared for what I was to see at the
first meeting I attended. It was at a chateau in rural Switzerland, a
magnificent ancient castle situated on a vast and isolated tract of land
owned by one of the principals. The security there was extraordinary:
even the landscaping, the trees and shrubbery surrounding the property,
was designed to permit the clandestine arrival and departure of various
individuals. So on my first visit, I was in no position to see the
others arrive. And no form of surveillance equipment could have
survived the high-intensity blasts of high and low electromagnetic
pulses, the latest technology in those days. All items made of metal
were required to be deposited in containers made of dense osmium;
otherwise, even a simple wristwatch would have been stopped dead by the
pulses. Menard and I came there in the evening, and were escorted
directly to our rooms, he to a magnificent suite overlooking a small
glacial lake, I to an adjoining chamber, less grand but exceedingly
comfortable.
The meetings began the next morning. About what was said then, I
actually remember little. Conversations continued from earlier ones of
which I knew nothing it was difficult for a newcomer to orient himself.
But I knew the faces of the men around the table, and it was a genuinely
surreal experience, something a fantasist might have tried to stage.
Menard was a man who had few peers, with respect to his own wealth, his
corporate power, or his vision. But what peers he had were there in the
room. The heads of two warring, mighty steel conglomerates. The head
of America’s leading electrical equipment manufacturers. Heavy
industry. Petrochemicals. Technology. The men responsible for the
so-called American century. Their counterparts from Europe. The most
famous press baron in the world. The chief executives of wildly
diversified portfolio companies. Men who, in combination, wielded
control over assets that exceeded the gross domestic product of most of
the countries in the world put together.
My worldview was shattered that day, then and forever.
Children, in history classes, are taught the names, the faces of
political and military leaders. Here is Winston Churchill, here is
Dwight Eisenhower, here is Franco and De Gaulle, Atlee and Macmillan.
These men did matter. But they were, really, little more than
spokesmen. They were, in an exalted sense, press secretaries,
employees. And Sigma made sure of it. The men who truly had their
hands on the levers of power were sitting around that long mahogany
table. They were the true marionette masters.
As the hours passed, and we drank coffee and nibbled on pastries, I
realized what I was witness to: a meeting of the board of directors of a
massive single corporation that controlled all other corporations.
A board of directors in charge of Western history itself!
It was their attitude, their perspective, that stayed with me, far more
than any actual words that were uttered. For these were professional
managers who had no time for useless emotion or irrational sentiments.
They believed in the development of productivity, in the promulgation of
order, in the rational concentration of capital They believed, in plain
English, that history the very destiny of the human race~ was simply too
important to repose in the hands of the masses. The upheavals of two
world wars had taught them that. History had to be managed. Decisions
had to be made by dispassionate professionals. And the chaos threatened
by communism the turmoil, the redistribution of wealth it augured, made
their project a matter of genuine and immediate urgency. It was a
present danger to be averted, not some Utopian scheme.
They assured each other of the need to create a planet where the true
spirit of enterprise would ever be safe from the envy and avarice of the
masses. After all, was a world purulent with communism and fascism a
world any of us wished to bequeath to our children? Modern capital
showed us the way but the future of the industrial state had to be
protected, sheltered from the storms. That was the vision. And though
the origins of this vision lay in the global depression that preceded
the war, the vision became infinitely more compelling in the wake of the
destruction wreaked by the war itself.
I said little that day, not because I was by nature taciturn, but
because I was quite literally speechless. I was a pygmy among giants. I
was a peasant supping with emperors. I was beside myself, and all the
while it was the most I could do to maintain a look of dispassion, in
emulation of my great mentor. Those were the first hours I spent in the
company of Sigma, and my life would never be the same again. The daily
fodder of the newspapers– a labor strike here, a party assembly there,
an assassination somewhere else–was no longer a record of random
events. Behind these events could now be discerned a pattern–the
complex and intricate machinations of a complex and intricate machine.
To be sure, the founders, the principals, profited immensely. Their
corporations, in every instance, thrived, while so many others, not