“Soon it will all be no more than a bad memory,” he went on. “Even cyclones don’t stop the grass from growing back. The truth is that our company is in full development and our strategy is winning.”
He went on in this self-satisfied way, asserting the validity of each of his strategic choices, going through them in detail and expressing his desire to continue them in the future.
He finished to the applause of the directors and the guests, soon followed by a fair share of those in the hall. Dunker waited until they were silent and then continued speaking in a relaxed tone. “It turns out that we have a last-minute candidate for CEO. A slightly fanciful candidate, shall we say.”
I sank down in my chair.
“The candidate is a young man who happens to be an employee of our company. A young recruit, I ought to say, since he’s only been with us for a few months. He joined our firm directly from the classroom.”
Laughter in the hall. I sank down a little farther.
“I nearly dissuaded him, to avoid wasting your time, then I said to myself that after going through these difficult moments on the stock exchange together, it would do us good to be able to smile together.”
Snickering could be heard in the hall, as Dunker calmly returned to his seat, wearing a satisfied smile.
I was appalled at his shameful remarks. It was lousy of him.
He slowly turned his head in my direction, briefly giving me a contemptuous look.
Dunker had barely sat down when the finance director took the microphone and said, “So now I invite our second candidate for the position of CEO, Monsieur Alan Greenmor, to speak.”
I swallowed hard while my stomach tightened as never before. I felt weighted down in my seat, cast in a block of cement.
Go on. You must. You’ve no choice. Get up!
I made a titanic effort to stand up. All the directors had turned in my direction, some of them with mocking smiles. The guests were staring at me as well. I felt alone, terribly alone, so oppressed I found it hard to breathe.
My first steps to the podium were the most painful. Carrying the sheets of paper with my speech, I crossed the stage toward the vast audience. If only they would turn off the lights in the hall, leaving just the footlights. Then I wouldn’t be able to see the thousands of unknown, mocking faces looking at me as if I were an animal at the zoo.
I reached the podium at last. As I placed my speech on the lectern and adjusted the height of the microphone, my hand was shaking, and my heart was beating as if it was ready to burst. I could feel the blood rushing to my temples. I absolutely had to refocus before I started.
Breathe. Breathe.
I mentally reread the first sentences of my speech. Suddenly it seemed bad, unsuitable, off balance.
Far off in the rows of spectators, right up at the top, a voice shouted, “Come on kid, out with it!” immediately followed by hundreds of scattered snickers.
It’s painful when two or three people make fun of you. When there are 300 or 400 of them with 15,000 witnesses, it’s unbearable. It had to be stopped. In a wild desire to survive, I gathered my strength and threw myself into the water.
“Good afternoon.”
My voice, powerfully amplified by the loudspeakers, seemed hollow.
“My name is Alan Greenmor.”
“Tell us more,” a wit called out, setting off another wave of laughter, louder than the first. The problem was spreading.
“I am a consultant in recruitment, which is the core of Dunker Consulting’s business. I have come here today to introduce myself as a candidate … “
No good. It doesn’t sound right.
“ … for the post of chief executive officer. I am aware of the heavy responsibilities that go with the position.”
On my left, a mocking voice called out, “You already look crushed!” A new outburst of laughter. The machine was speeding up. Prepared in a Machiavellian way by Dunker’s derisive words, egged on with his tacit permission and given his blessing, the small investors were being unleashed. I had been thrown to them; they were going to make mincemeat of me.
To be the laughingstock of the audience was the worst thing that could happen to me. The worst. It destroyed my credibility, crushed all hope. I would have preferred hostility to mockery. Hostility pushes you to react, mockery to run away. I wanted to disappear, to be anywhere else, but I absolutely had to stop this. Immediately! Anything, as long as they stopped making fun of me.
Impelled by the gravity of the situation, which was getting worse by the second, terrified at the idea of being booed by the whole audience, and gripped by shame, I forgot my speech, my notes, even my own best interests and looked up at the tiers of faces where the laughter was multiplying in response to my silence. I looked straight at this audience totally devoid of compassion. Meeting the mocking eyes, I finally brought my lips so close to the microphone that they touched the cold metal.
“I’m the one who told the press about Dunker’s malpractices!”
My voice resounded impressively in this temple of mockery, and silence fell instantly. Total silence, absolute, deafening. The amazing silence of a hall of 15,000 people. Mockery gave way to stupefaction. The clown onstage was suddenly no longer a clown. He was an enemy, a dangerous enemy who had wiped out their savings.
Igor Dubrovski’s words came back to me, no longer a technique to be applied but a philosophy to be adopted:
Embrace your neighbor’s world, and he will open himself up to you.
Embrace your neighbor’s world.
We weren’t individuals fighting each other; we were human beings linked by the same aspirations, the same desire to live a better life. What set us apart was, at bottom, only a tiny detail, compared to what brought us together. But how was I to share this with them? How was I to explain it? And how would I find the strength to express myself?
The image of Speech-Masters passed before my eyes, allowing me to reexperience the wonderful feeling of that occasion. I possessed, somewhere deep within me, the necessary resources. I was capable, if I dared, of going toward these people and speaking to them from the bottom of my heart.
The rostrum now seemed like a barrier, a hindrance. I reached out and removed the microphone from its stand, and, leaving my notes behind, walked toward the crowd, alone and unarmed, offering my vulnerability. I walked slowly, carried along by a sincere wish for peace. I was afraid, but my fear gradually gave way to a new feeling, a feeling of confidence.
I reached the front of the stage. I could make out the grave expressions of the people nearest to me. Farther away, the faces faded until they became the vague, colored brushstrokes of an Impressionist painting. But I could feel all eyes on me, in the heavy and intense silence.
It was obvious that I couldn’t deliver my prepared speech. Written a week earlier, it was disconnected from the present, dissociated from the emotions of the moment. I had to be content with the words that came to mind. “You speak with your heart,” Étienne had said.
I looked at all these people gathered around me. Their sense of helplessness and their anger were palpable. I could feel them vibrating in my body.
I brought the microphone to my lips.
“I know what you’re feeling at this moment,” I said. My voice resounded in the gigantic space, assuming an unsuspected and impressive sonority. “I can feel your concern. You invested your money in our company’s shares. My revelations to the press made the share price fall, and you’re furious with me. You see me as a vile person, a traitor, a bastard.”
Not a murmur in the crowd.
“That’s what I would think, too, if I were in your place.”
The entire hall remained in absolute silence—a tense, electric silence.
“Your hopes of financial gain have been disappointed. Perhaps you needed that money to improve your standard of living, your purchasing power, or to improve your pension, or to grow the capital you will leave to your children. Whatever your concerns, I understand them, and I respect them.
“Perhaps you think I gave this information to the press out of hatred for Marc Dunker, out of a desire for personal vengeance. It could have been the case, given all that he has inflicted on me. And yet, no, that is not the reason. I published the information with the precise goal of making the share price drop.”
Some insults could be heard. I went on, “Of making the share price drop and thereby making you come to the annual meeting, so that I could speak to you face-to-face.”
The tension was at its maximum, and I could feel the audience totally concentrated on my words, burning to discover my thoughts, to give a meaning to my actions.
“When it was founded, the stock exchange’s purpose was to allow businesses to collect money from the public to finance their development. Those who chose to invest, whatever the amount, placed their confidence in a company and trusted its ability to develop over time. They believed in its plan. Then the lure of gain made some invest for ever-shorter periods, moving their capital from one company to another to try and tap short-term gains and thereby maximize their income. This speculation became widespread, and bankers invented financial tools that allow all sorts of betting on share movement, including betting on a falling market. The person who speculates on the share price going down makes money when the business starts to be in difficulty. That’s a bit like profiting from a decline in your neighbor’s health. Imagine: Your neighbor has cancer. You bet a thousand dollars that his health will decline dramatically in the next six months. Three months later, the cancer metastasizes. Great! Your investment is up twenty percent. Of course, you think there’s no link between this example and the market—your neighbor is a person and not a company. But this is the heart of the problem. Since the stock exchange has become a casino, we have forgotten its prime function, and especially we’ve forgotten that behind the names of the companies we gamble on like we’re playing roulette, there are people—living, flesh-and-blood people, who work in these companies and devote much of their lives to the company’s development.
“The price of your shares is directly linked to the prospect of short-term gains. For the share price to go up, the company must publish excellent results each quarter. But a company is a little like a person in another way: its health has ups and downs, and that’s quite normal. And sometimes, just as it does in a human being, an illness allows the company to step back a bit, see things differently, adjust its trajectory, and then set off again with a new equilibrium, stronger than before. As a shareholder, you have to be patient. If you deny the reality that a company’s health goes up and down, then the company will deny its difficulties—it will lie to you or make decisions that will generate positive results in the short term. By publishing bogus job vacancies or by deliberately canvassing insolvent companies, Marc Dunker simply responded to the demands of a game whose rules are intolerable.
“This requirement for share-price growth brings with it enormous pressure on everyone, from the CEO to the most recent hire. It prevents people from working properly, calmly. It encourages short-term management that’s good for neither the business nor the employees nor the company’s suppliers who, squeezed hard, will reflect that pressure back on their own employees and suppliers. We end up with companies in good health laying people off just to maintain or improve their profitability. This threat now hovers over each one of us, pushing us into an individualism that affects the atmosphere between colleagues.
“In the end, we all find ourselves living under stress. Work is no longer a pleasure, yet I am convinced it ought to be.”
A deadly silence continued to reign in the hall. We were a long way from the stimulating laughter I had experienced at Speech-Masters. But I felt carried along by my own sincerity. I was just expressing what I believed deep down. I wasn’t claiming to possess the truth, but I believed wholeheartedly in what I was saying, and that gave me the strength to carry on.
“We won’t remake the world today, my friends. Then again, I learned recently that Gandhi used to say, ‘We must be the change that we want to see in the world.’ And it’s true that the world is nothing more than the sum of each one of us.
“If you want your shares to return rapidly to the price they were a few weeks ago and continue on a steep upward curve, then I advise you to reelect the man who leads the company today. If you choose to put me at the head of the company, I will not make any promises on that score. It’s even probable that the share will stay low for a time. What I
do
promise, on the other hand, is to make Dunker Consulting a more humane company. I would like everyone to be happy to get up in the morning with the thought that they are coming to work to express their talent, whatever their position. I would like our managers to be responsible for creating the conditions for the fulfillment and success of each member of their team, making sure that everyone can continue to develop their abilities.
“And I am convinced that in such an atmosphere everyone will give their best, not with the goal of meeting a target dictated by external demands but for the pleasure of feeling competent, of mastering their craft, of excelling. I want to build a company in which the results are the fruit of the passion we put into our work, rather than the consequence of pressure that destroys our pleasure and equilibrium.
“I also promise total transparency in the management and results of the company. No more propaganda and misinformation. If we temporarily have bad results, why should we hide them? To keep you from selling your shares? But why would you, if you are signed on to a long-term plan? We all catch a cold or flu that puts us in bed for a week. Do you hide it from your partner for fear that they’ll leave you? I am convinced that a company whose operation is based on healthy values absolutely can grow and generate profits. But those profits must not be pursued obsessively, like a drug addict after his fix. Profits are the natural fruit of healthy and harmonious management.”
Igor’s words came back to me:
You can’t change people, you know. You can only show them a path, then make them want to go down it.