Power Play: A Novel (2 page)

Harding thought the meeting ridiculous and had complained about coming in. He had been retired from his own job for the past five years, but was still a powerful chairman, and on several other boards. He was going to be obliged to retire as chairman of NTA’s board by the end of the year, when he would turn seventy, unless they voted to overturn the rule about mandatory retirement age for a board member, but no one had done so so far. She was looking forward to his leaving at the end of the year, in seven months. And she had to deal with him constructively until then. It was an effort she always made, and had for the past six years, since she had come to NTA as CEO.

And she had known for the past six years, since she took the job, that Harding Williams said she was a woman of loose morals and a bitch. He had been at NTA, on the board, long before she got there,
and they had crossed paths before, in her youth, at Harvard Business School, where he taught a class during her first year. He had formed his opinion of her then and never changed it since.

Fiona would have been a beautiful woman with very little effort, which she chose not to make. She didn’t spend time worrying about being attractive to the men she met through her work. Her only interest was in guiding the company and its hundred thousand employees to ever greater heights. She had long since adopted the style of women in the corporate world. She was tall and thin, with a good figure, she wore her long blond hair in a neat bun, and she had big green eyes. She wore no jewelry, no frills. Her nails were always impeccably manicured, with colorless polish. She was the epitome of a successful, powerful female executive. She was the iron hand in the velvet glove. A strong woman, she did not abuse her power but was willing to make all the tough decisions that came with the job, and she accepted the criticism and problems that came with it. No one could ever see her own concerns about her decisions, her fear that things might go wrong, her regrets when they had to close a plant that eliminated thousands of jobs. She lay awake thinking about it on many nights. But at work she always seemed calm, cool, fearless, intelligent, compassionate, and polite. Her gentler side, and there was one, never showed at work. She couldn’t afford to express it here; it would have been dangerous to do so in her job. She had to be their fearless leader, and she was aware of it at all times.

Fiona waited until all the board members were seated, and Harding Williams called the meeting to order, and then he turned to her with a sarcastic look, which she ignored.

“You wanted this meeting, Fiona. Tell us what you want, and I
hope it was worth getting everyone to drop what they were doing and show up for a meeting that wasn’t planned. I don’t see why you couldn’t send us all a memo. I have better things to do than run in here every time you get a new idea, and I’m sure my fellow board members do too.” So did she, but she refrained from pointing it out to him. And she’d had good reason to bring them together, and she knew that Harding knew it too. He was just giving her a bad time, as he always did. He never missed a chance to put her down. She always felt like a student with him, and one who was failing the course, which was certainly not the case. But nothing showed.

Harding had let slip more than once over the years that he didn’t think women should run major corporations, nor were capable of it, and he was convinced that Fiona was no exception. He hated the powerful positions women had today, and it always irked him. He had been married himself for forty-four years to a woman who had gone to Vassar, had a master’s in art history from Radcliffe, and never worked. They had no children, and Marjorie Williams lived entirely in his shadow, waiting to do as she was told. It suited Harding to perfection, and he always bragged about the length of their marriage, particularly when he heard about other marriages that had failed. There was nothing modest or humble about Harding, and his arrogance made him disliked by many. Fiona was top of that list.

“I called the meeting today,” Fiona said quietly, sitting up straight in her chair. Despite her calm voice, she had a delivery style that people listened to, and she could electrify every person in the room, when she shared some of her more innovative ideas. “Because I want to discuss the recent leak in the press.” They all knew about it, and every member of the board was concerned. “I think we all agree that it puts us in an awkward position. The closing of the Larksberry
plant is going to impact thousands of our employees, who will be laid off. It’s an announcement that will need to be made with extreme caution. How we deliver that message, and how we handle it thereafter, if managed badly, could have a very serious negative effect on our stock, and could even cause panic in the market. And there’s no question, even though we voted on it in our last meeting, that announcing it to the public, our stockholders, or our employees is still premature. Now we need time to put damage control measures in place, and I’ve been working on that full time since we last met. I think we have some very good plans to take at least some of the sting out of it. We
have
to close that plant, for the health of the company, but the last thing any of us wanted was for that to be leaked to the press before we had the details settled. And as you all know, it came out two weeks ago in
The Wall Street Journal
and then
The New York Times
. I’ve been doing nothing but clean-up ever since. And I think we’re all in agreement that the most disturbing thing about this is not just the timing, but that clearly, it was leaked by someone on the board. The information that appeared in the press is only known by us, in this room. Some of it has never been in writing, and there is just no way for the press to know any of it, unless someone in this room talked.”

There was a heavy silence, as Fiona looked from one to the other with an intense and serious gaze. Her expression let no one off the hook. “It’s unthinkable that that should happen here. It’s the first time in my six years at NTA, and I have never had a leak from the boardroom in my entire career. I know it happens, but this is a first for me, and probably for some of you too.” She looked at each of them again, and they all nodded. None of them looked guilty to her, and Harding looked seriously annoyed, as though she were wasting
their time, which they all knew she wasn’t. Clearly someone on the board was leaking information, and Fiona intended to find out who it was. She wanted to know as soon as possible, and to get the errant member off the board. It was far too serious an offense to take lightly or ignore.

“I think we all deserve to know who violated the confidentiality of the board, and so far you all deny responsibility for it. That’s not good enough,” she said severely with fire flashing in her green eyes. “There’s too much at stake here, the health of our company, the stability of our stock. We have a responsibility to our stockholders, and our employees. I want to know who talked to the press, and so should you.” Everyone nodded, and Harding looked bored.

“Get to the point, Fiona,” Harding Williams cut in rudely. “What are you suggesting? Lie detector tests for the board? Fine, you can start with me. Let’s get this over with, without a ridiculous amount of fuss. There was a leak, we seem to have survived it, and maybe it gives the employees we’re laying off and the public a little warning. I’m not excusing what happened, but maybe it was not an entirely bad thing.”

“I don’t agree with you. And I think it’s important that we know who did it, and see to it that it doesn’t happen again.”

“Fine. You can have your witch hunt, but I’m warning you that I won’t agree to any illegal methods to determine that. We all know what happened at Hewlett-Packard a few years ago, over the same kind of issue. It nearly tore the company apart, made a spectacle of the board in the press, and its members had no idea illegal methods were being used to investigate them, and the chairman nearly wound up in prison when it was discovered. I’m warning you, Fiona. I don’t intend to go to prison for you or your witch hunt. You can conduct
some kind of investigation, but every single procedure had better be legal and aboveboard.”

“I can assure you it will be,” she said coolly. “I share your concerns. I don’t want a replay of the HP problems either. I contacted several investigative firms, and will submit their names to all of you today. I want a straightforward, entirely legal investigation of all our board members, and myself as well, to discover who is responsible for the leak, since no one is willing to admit to it.”

“Does it really matter?” he asked, looking bored again. “The word is out, you said you’re doing damage control. It’s not going to change anything if you find out who talked. It might even have been a very clever reporter who figured it out some other way.”

“That’s not possible, and you know it. And I want to be absolutely certain it won’t happen again. What occurred is completely counter to all our rules of governance, how we run this company and this board,” Fiona said, and the chairman rolled his eyes as soon as she did.

“For God’s sake, Fiona, it takes more than ‘governance’ to run a board. We all know what the rules are. We waste half our time discussing procedures and inventing new ones to slow us down. I’m amazed you find time to run the company at all. I never wasted all that time during my entire career. We made good decisions and followed through on them. We didn’t fritter away our time making up new rules about how to do it.”

“You can’t run a corporation like a dictatorship anymore,” she said firmly. “Those days are over. And our stockholders wouldn’t put up with it, as well they shouldn’t. We all have to live by the rules, and stockholders are much better informed and far more demanding than they were twenty or thirty years ago,” she said, and
he knew it was true. Fiona was a modern CEO, and lived by all those rules that Harding thought were a waste of time. He criticized Fiona often for it.

“I’d like a vote on an investigation to find out who the source of the leak was, using legal methods only to get that information.” Fiona turned to the board with her request, and Harding was the first to vote the motion in, just to get it over with, although he made it obvious that he thought it was foolish and a waste of NTA’s money, but he made no opposition to her request. Everyone voted for the investigation of the leak.

“Satisfied?” he asked her as they left the boardroom together.

“Yes, thank you, Harding.”

“And what are you going to do when you find out who it was?” he asked with a mocking look. “Spank them? We have better things to do with our time.”

“I’ll ask them to resign from the board,” she said in a firm voice and looked him in the eye, and what she saw there was the same contempt she had seen in his eyes for twenty-five years, since Harvard Business School. She knew that in her entire lifetime she would never win his respect and didn’t care. Her career had been phenomenal, no matter what he thought of her.

The root of Harding’s dislike for her was an old story. She thought of it again after she left him and hurried back to her office, for an afternoon of meetings, that she had to rush for now. The emergency board meeting had taken longer than planned, with their discussions of the investigation, and Harding’s interruptions and caustic comments.

In Fiona’s first year of Harvard Business School, she had felt inadequate and in over her head, and thought about dropping out many
times. She felt less capable than almost all her classmates, most of whom were men, and seemed a great deal more sure of themselves. All she’d had was ambition, and a love of business, which didn’t seem like enough to her, particularly that first year. It had been a hard time for her. Both of her parents had died in a car accident the year before, and she felt completely lost and devastated without them. Her father had encouraged her to do anything she wanted, and she had followed through on her plans to get an MBA even after he and her mother died. Her only support system had been her older sister, who was doing her residency in psychiatry at Stanford, three thousand miles away. Fiona had been frightened and alone at school in Cambridge, and many of her male classmates had been aggressive and hostile to her. And her professors had been indifferent to her.

Harding had taken a sabbatical from his career that year, and had been talked into teaching at the business school by a classmate of his from Princeton, and Harding had given Fiona a nearly failing grade. Her only reassurance had come from Harding’s old friend Jed Ivory, who had a reputation for doing all he could to help and mentor his students. And he had been incredibly kind to her, and had become her only friend.

Jed had been separated from his wife then, in a stormy marriage. She had originally been one of his students, and both had been cheating and having affairs for years. He had been quietly negotiating a divorce with her, while separated, when he began helping Fiona, and within a month, they were sleeping with each other, and Fiona fell madly in love with him. She wasn’t aware of it, but it wasn’t unfamiliar ground to him. But it caused talk around the business school nonetheless. And Fiona was remotely aware that
Harding strongly disapproved. Later, he blamed her for the end of Jed’s marriage, which she had very little if anything to do with. And her affair with Jed ended abruptly at the end of her first year when he was forced to admit to her that he had been involved with another graduate student, in another field, had gotten her pregnant, and had agreed to marry her in June. Fiona was devastated, and spent the summer crying over him.

In September, when she went back to school, she met David, the man she would eventually marry. And somewhat on the rebound, they got engaged at Christmas, and married when they graduated, and she moved to San Francisco with him, where he was from. It seemed like the right thing to do at the time. But the affair with Jed Ivory had left her bruised.

It had been awkward running into Jed during her second year at Harvard. He tried to rekindle their relationship several times, although he was married and had an infant son by then, and Fiona managed to avoid him, and never took a class from him again. By then, she knew that his affairs with his students were business school legend, and he had taken advantage of her youth and vulnerability. She had never seen or heard from him again after she graduated, but she knew from others that he had married twice since, always to much younger women. In spite of that, Harding seemed to think he walked on water, and chose to disregard his reputation for having affairs with his students. Harding’s view of Fiona as seductress had never wavered, although she had been the victim and not the culprit. In his old boy mentality, always partial to men, he still believed that she had broken up Jed’s marriage, and had treated her like a slut ever since. He never hesitated to hint darkly at her previously
“racy” reputation while at Harvard, and Fiona offered no explanation. She didn’t feel she owed anyone that, and had long since come to view her affair with Jed Ivory as an unfortunate accident that happened during her student days, in the ghastly year after her parents died, which he had taken full advantage of as well.