No Way Back (3 page)

But not that much, apparently. This job is bottom of the barrel: almost no chance of success, three thousand miles from my home in Silicon Valley, geographically undesirable, and, for any other
man, a sure résumé killer.

I suppose Tad thought that, given my own colourful résumé – my alcohol and drug addictions, my gambling problem, my twenty-one-day stint in the Mountain Vista Recovery Centre
– a gig at Tao might be a step up. He was right. I’m a bit of a restart project myself.

I say to the assembly: ‘Does anyone have any questions?’

No one does.

‘All right,’ I say. ‘I have a question for
you
.’ I look at my watch. ‘It’s 9.15 on a Monday morning. I counted a dozen cars in the parking lot. My
question to you is: where the hell
is
everyone?’

No one volunteers an answer. I notice a familiar face in the crowd. It’s the Hispanic woman whom I last observed giving herself a manicure at her desk. She’s attractive, a bit
overweight. I look to her and say: ‘You. I’m sorry, I don’t know your name.’

‘Rosita.’

‘Nice to meet you, Rosita. What do you do here at Tao?’

‘Customer service.’

‘OK, Rosita, please tell me. How many employees are there at Tao?’

‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘Eighty, I think.’

I know the exact answer is eighty-five, but I don’t correct her. Instead, I say, ‘And how many people are in this room?’

She looks around, does a quick count. ‘Maybe twenty?’

‘Maybe twenty,’ I repeat. ‘So that means that even though the workday has started, sixty employees haven’t bothered to show up. Maybe that’s the reason we’re
having problems. What do you think, Rosita?’

She’s noncommittal. ‘Maybe.’

I lift my hand to my eyes and look around the room, like a man who has misplaced his car in the multiplex parking lot. ‘Are there any VPs here? Tao has five Vice Presidents, if I remember
correctly. How many of them are here?’

David Paris, the elfin Marketing Vice President, waves a bony finger. ‘I’m here, Jim. David Paris, VP of Marketing—’

I cut him off. ‘Yes, I know. David’s here. Anyone else?’

A man pushes his way into the lunchroom. He’s carrying a brown paper bag, neatly folded. He was on his way to the refrigerator to deposit it. He realizes that he’s being talked
about.

He says, ‘I’m Randy Williams. VP of Engineering.’ He’s in his late thirties, with a round Midwestern face and a doughy gut. He has blond hair cut in a spiky style
that’s too young for him, and skin the colour of milk. He smiles, revealing a gap in his two front teeth, wide enough to ride a pony through.

I say: ‘You’re late.’

He bristles. He wasn’t expecting a public reprimand. He stutters, ‘Sorry, yes. Sorry. I know. I didn’t think that—’

I cut him off mercilessly. This is where I establish that it’s not business as usual any more. Time to light a few fires, burn the place down. I say: ‘Randy, I expect everyone to
arrive at nine o’clock. Not 9.01, not 9.02, and certainly not 9.15. If and when this company turns profitable, we can loosen things up. Until then, nine a.m. sharp. No exceptions.’

I pause. I look at Randy. ‘Understand?’

He can’t believe he’s being publicly humiliated. His face turns cinnamon. ‘Yes,’ he says quietly.

‘Now then,’ I say. ‘Where’s our VP of Sales?’

I look around the room. At first no one answers. Then Rosita pipes up. She’s smiling now, clearly enjoying this dressing down of the VPs. ‘That’s Dom Vanderbeek. He’s not
here.’

I hear laughter and gasps of pleasure from the edge of the room. People are looking forward to my tearing the VP of Sales a new asshole. I won’t disappoint them.

Amanda is at the far side of the room, near the door. She says, ‘Dom works from home on Mondays and Tuesdays.’

‘Oh does he?’ I say. ‘Amanda, get him on the phone.’ I point to a phone mounted on the nearby wall.

‘That phone?’ she asks.

‘On speaker, please.’

She shrugs – couldn’t give a shit – walks over to the phone, dials nimbly. In a moment, we hear ringing on the speaker. A voice answers. It’s staccato, clipped.
‘Yeah, this is Dom.’ I’ve heard that voice a thousand times: the former athlete, the macho sales guy, the company blowhard.

‘Dom,’ I say into the phone. ‘This is Jim Thane. I’m the new CEO at Tao.’

‘Jim, how are you.’ He says this like a statement of fact, not a question. The reason it doesn’t
sound
like a question is because it’s not. He couldn’t
care less.

‘I have you on speakerphone, Dom. We’re all in the lunchroom, at the all-hands meeting, and we’re wondering why you’re not here. Since you probably have hands. And since
you’re the VP of Sales.’

Silence on the line. He’s measuring me now, trying to figure out if this is a joke, or if I’m a lunatic. Finally, he decides on a course of action: he’ll be friendly and
patient, try to get the new guy up to speed.

‘OK, Jim. Well on Mondays and Tuesdays, I usually work from home. It’s easier to make sales calls from here.’

‘The thing is, Dom, the sales team isn’t exactly lighting the world on fire. So I want everyone working from the office. Every day. That includes you.’

Silence again. I look at the faces in the lunchroom. Most of the people here are low-level employees, and they’ve never heard executives argue. A girl titters nervously.

‘All right,’ Dom says, finally. ‘I’ll be there first thing tomorrow.’

I shake my head, for the benefit of my audience. I say: ‘Now.’

‘What?’

‘Now, Dom.’

‘Listen, at this hour, traffic is nuts. I wasn’t planning on—’

‘Start planning. I want you here. Now.’

More silence. The room is quiet. People are titillated. They know there’s a chance that this conversation could spiral out of control, that Dom Vanderbeek could take my bait.

Everyone waits. There’s a moment when I think Dom Vanderbeek might say something sharp to me, but instead he backs down. Now I have a sense of him: he’s wily, knows not to fight when
he’s at a disadvantage. He’ll wait until circumstances are in his favour.

‘All right, Jim,’ Dom says pleasantly. ‘I’ll be on the road in ten minutes.’

‘Looking forward to meeting you, Dom,’ I say.

‘Me too,’ he says, and hangs up.

A corporate turnaround is like a murder investigation. The first thing you do is interview the suspects.

I ask Amanda where is the most convenient place to hold a series of private meetings. She points to the conference room right across from the reception area.

At first, I think the engraved plaque on the door – the one that proclaims ‘Boardroom’ – is an ironic joke, a small-company jibe at big-company pretension. But once I
enter, I realize no irony was intended. Like every other space at Tao, the room is overwrought, designed to impress. There’s a long black table, twelve Aeron chairs, a sideboard that may or
may not hide a wet bar. Everything in the room is state of the art: two flat-panel video screens on opposite walls, remote-controlled halogen lighting, recessed audio speakers built into panelling,
a huge whiteboard with coloured dry-erase markers.

I station myself at the centre of the table, on the long side of the oval. My message here – by not taking one of the two power seats at the ends – is that I’m just a regular
guy who wants to shoot the breeze. Which isn’t true, of course, but it’s a CEO’s job to be aware of appearances.

Each meeting lasts twenty minutes, and each follows roughly the same format. First, five minutes of pleasantries. A little friendly laughter on my part, to show that I am not an inhuman monster
and that I have a heart, or at least that I can superficially simulate this fact. Then, the important question, which I ask gently, as if afraid of causing offence: What, exactly, do you
do
here at Tao?

Perhaps not surprisingly, no one who works at this sinking ship can give me a simple and straightforward answer. Randy Williams, VP of Engineering, tells me his job is to make sure ‘great
software gets built’. Since Tao’s new software version is nine months late, and nowhere near completion, I’m tempted to ask him if he has a second job somewhere else where he puts
that skill to use.

Dmitri Sustev, VP of Quality Assurance, tells me through Coke-bottle glasses and a thick Bulgarian accent that his job is ‘to make it all very very good, very very solid’.

Kathleen Rossi, the VP of Human Resources, tells me her job is to make sure Tao is a great place for people to come to work. I think, but do not say aloud, that her job will soon become making
sure that Tao is a great place for people to leave work.

And David Paris, the elfin VP of Marketing, refuses to answer my question directly, but instead asks if he can take a moment to describe his ‘strategic vision for Tao’. When I say
indeed he can, he rises from his chair, circles the table, and approaches me. At first, I think he’s coming to give me a hug, but at the last moment, he grabs a dry-erase marker from the
whiteboard just behind my head and begins sketching a diagram. By the time he’s done, fifteen minutes later, he has either laid out a startling strategic vision for our company, or he has
sketched a nickel defense for the San Francisco 49ers. In either case, he has managed to convince me that he is worthless, and so I thank him, and shoo him from the room.

My most important meeting of the morning is with Joan Leggett. Joan is (according to the organizational chart I keep in front of me) ‘Acting Controller’ of Tao Software. Which means
that Joan knows the one critical fact that I must now learn: how much cash is left in the bank.

Joan Leggett is a petite woman, dressed in one of those sharp Donna Karan outfits that you usually see on ambitious female go-getters on the rise. But the lines etched in her face, her
once-blonde – now grey and mousy – hair, and the freckles that have melted into age spots betray her: the only thing Joan is going and getting is older.

Joan is the first person I’ve met at Tao who is competent and organized. She greets me crisply, sits down across the table, and slides a packet of information that she has prepared
specifically for this meeting. She walks me through it.

It’s a twenty-minute business presentation, but – as Joan catalogues the company’s financial problems – it feels more like a two-hour horror movie. The kind of movie
where you want to walk out in the middle and ask for your money back.

‘Revenue growth over the past three quarters has been negligible,’ Joan says. ‘We hired a lot of people at the beginning of the year, to get ready for the new product launch.
But the product is late. So now we have the people, and the burn rate, but no product. Which is expensive.’

‘How expensive?’

‘We’re burning $1.4 million every month. We have $3 million in the bank. No other liquid assets.’

‘So we have enough cash for two months,’ I say.

‘Seven weeks.’

The answer, then. Seven weeks of cash. I have seven weeks to turn around Tao. At the end of those seven weeks, I will either succeed, or I will slink back to Silicon Valley, a failure once
again, having proven everyone’s predictions – including my own – correct.

Joan says, ‘Maybe you can convince our VCs to give us more time.’

She means I should ask Tad Billups and Bedrock Ventures for more money. I had the same thought, and it lasted approximately five seconds. I could barely convince Tad to pay for my coach flight
on Air Trans. The chance of his sinking another five or ten mil into this shit hole is remote indeed. But I say: ‘Yes, of course that’s always a possibility.’

‘Page eight,’ she says. She waits for me to turn to the page. Now I see a pie chart. It’s labelled: ‘Expense by Department’.

Joan says: ‘Speaking of burn rate, here’s where all the cash goes. Four hundred thousand per month to Engineering. Two to Sales. Three to G&A. Four to Marketing. One to
QA—’

‘Wait,’ I say. ‘Back up. Four
hundred thousand dollars
each month for
marketing
?’

Joan looks at me coolly. If she disapproves of this spending, she doesn’t show it. ‘That’s correct.’

‘What the heck are we spending money on? Super Bowl ads?’

‘David has very elaborate marketing plans,’ Joan says. Her tone is without judgement. ‘I assume he went over the details with you.’

‘No,’ I say. ‘He discussed his...
strategic vision
.’ I point to the diagram on the whiteboard behind me. Joan regards it thoughtfully. She has the sharp look of
a museum curator trying to determine a new piece’s provenance. Finally, she says: ‘If you like, I can print an itemized transaction report. You can see where the money actually
goes.’

‘That would be very helpful.’ I like Joan already. Super-competent, quiet, authoritative. I say, ‘You’re good, Joan.’ What I want to ask is: How did you wind up in
a place like this? But it’s a question that could easily be thrown back at me. And one I’d rather not answer. So I say instead: ‘Why only “Acting Controller”? Why not
CFO? Or VP of Finance?’

She presses her thin freckled lips together and looks down. This is apparently a sore subject. She says, ‘There was a CFO. Ellison Jeffries. He left a few months ago. It was all very
sudden. I never found out why. Charles was going to hire a replacement, but he never got around to it. So I took over the CFO responsibilities, just not his title.’

‘Well then,’ I say. ‘Congratulations. You’re the new CFO of Tao Software.’

She studies me, trying to decide if I’m joking. When she realizes I’m not, her face brightens. ‘Really?’

Sure, I think silently, why the hell not? Enjoy it while it lasts – seven weeks. But I say aloud: ‘Absolutely. Congratulations. No pay raise, though. Not right now.’

‘I understand. Thank you,’ she says. She stands suddenly. She leans over the table, holds out her hand awkwardly. ‘Thank you,’ she says again.

I take her hand. ‘Work hard,’ I say, trying to sound dour and serious. I don’t want anyone at the company to think I’m a softy.

‘OK,’ she says, and nods grimly, ‘I will.’

She gathers her papers, stacks them into a neat pile, and turns to leave.