No Way Back (4 page)

As she heads to the door, I say, ‘Joan?’

She stops, with her hand on the knob, and turns to me.

I’m not sure what prompts my next question. Maybe it was Joan’s remark about the Chief Financial Officer, whose role at Tao she assumed when he suddenly departed the company. Or
maybe it’s my sketchy knowledge about the CEO who preceded me, and his own sudden disappearance. That’s a lot of mysterious departures, for one tiny company.

In fact, I know very little about the company I now run. I was so relieved to be given this job, I didn’t ask many questions. A restart job in West Florida? Sure, why the hell not, I
said.

What was my alternative? Running down the last six months of my and Libby’s savings? Taking out a third mortgage on our Palo Alto house? Continuing my daily routine of flipping through old
business cards, dialling lost friends and begging for second chances? No. They could have offered me a position in the seventh ring of hell, acting as chief bean counter for Satan, and I would have
said yes.

But now that I’m here – and the job is mine, for better or worse – I might as well learn what I’ve gotten myself into. I say to Joan: ‘What happened to Charles
Adams?’

Joan’s response is surprising. Her smile disappears. She looks down at the floor. Her face turns dark and troubled, as if I’ve brought up an uncomfortable topic, like masturbation or
necrophilia.

I know almost nothing about Charles Adams, or about his disappearance. I know only the broad outlines, as related to me by Tad Billups the day I signed my employment contract: one Wednesday
morning, nine weeks ago, Charles Adams, CEO of Tao Software, vanished.

That’s how Tad described it – he ‘vanished’.

‘Vanished?’ I asked Tad.

Yes, vanished, Tad said. He left his car idling in his suburban driveway, its driver-side door open. He left his house unlocked. He never showed up for work. He left no note. He literally
vanished from the face of the earth.

Now, back in the boardroom, whatever warmth I stoked in Joan when I promoted her to CFO thirty seconds earlier has dissipated, as if I’ve wrenched open a window to a gust of wintry
December air. She looks at me warily. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Well,’ I say. I think: Isn’t my question clear enough?
What happened to Charles Adams?
I try to think of a different way to restate it. I come up with nothing better
than: ‘What do you think happened to Charles Adams?’

‘He didn’t show up for work.’

‘Right,’ I say. ‘Got that part.’

‘I don’t know,’ she says. She takes one step towards me, as if to sit once again. She decides against it, and instead remains halfway across the room, an awkward distance for
an intimate conversation. Maybe that’s the point.

She says: ‘The police came around at first, interviewed everyone. I answered their questions. But they haven’t been back in a while. I don’t even know if they’re still
looking for Charles. Last I heard, they seemed to think he ran away.’

‘Ran away?’ I think to myself: Teenagers run away. Young girls who aren’t allowed to date their boyfriends run away. High school students abused by stepfathers run away. Chief
Executive Officers at technology firms do not run away. ‘Ran away from what?’

‘I don’t know,’ Joan says. But her expression indicates otherwise.

I try a different tack. ‘Joan, I’m on your team. I just want to know what’s going on. Any information you have could be really useful.’ I add: ‘Haven’t I
already shown you a little good faith?’

This last, not-so-subtle reminder of Joan’s recent promotion does the trick. She sighs. ‘Look,’ she says, ‘Charles Adams had... problems.’

‘What kind of problems?’

She shakes her head and sighs. ‘He was a weak man,’ she says finally. ‘A nice guy, deep down – heart of gold – but he was weak. He had a personal tragedy in his
family, and then... ’ She stops.

‘And then... ?’

She looks thoughtfully at me, as if deciding whether she can trust me. At last she says: ‘Things went downhill pretty fast. He got involved with bad people.’

My expression must be blank, because she adds, ‘Not
software
people.’

‘Ah,’ I say.

‘Tough men,’ she continues. ‘You know, out of place at a company like Tao. They’d come into reception, and wait for him to show up. They wore suits, but it was obvious
they didn’t fit. Like they were costumes. Charles would come out and greet them, and then he’d leave with them, into the parking lot. And they’d drive off somewhere. He’d
come back hours later.’

A familiar-sounding story. Something I had the pleasure of experiencing first-hand, back in my gambling days. ‘Did they hurt him?’

‘Not that I could see. But when he came back, he was always very pale and very quiet. He’d lock himself into his office, and he wouldn’t come out until the end of the day.
Sometimes, when I’d leave the office at eight o’clock, he’d still be in there. I knocked once and asked if he was all right. He wouldn’t open up. He just shouted through the
door, and said he was fine. That he was working.’

‘What did he get himself involved in?’

‘I really don’t know.’

She’s telling the truth. I see that. ‘Well,’ I say. ‘Thanks for telling me.’ She turns to the door. She stops again, with her hand on the knob, and looks at me.
‘My turn to ask
you
a question?’

‘Shoot.’

‘What are the chances of turning this place around?’

I think about it. My first instinct is to play hero – to sit straight in my chair, puff my chest, and say forcefully, ‘Excellent. We’re going to do it!’ That’s what
the restart executive needs to do: show confidence – everywhere, all the time, to everyone. To make them believe. To hypnotize them with his own will.

But I can’t do that. Not to her. I say, more quietly than I mean to: ‘Not very good. But we’re going to try. I have a lot riding on this, personally. I really have to make it
work. I don’t have a choice.’

I’m thankful when she doesn’t ask what I mean, but instead just nods and says, ‘Yes,’ as if what I told her were perfectly obvious.

I spend the rest of the day walking around, getting a feel for the place. I introduce myself to people at random, catching them as they pass through the bullpen, or dropping by
unexpectedly at their desks, or even – in one case – stopping them as they finish their business at the urinal. My introduction is always the same. ‘Hi, I’m Jim,’ I
say, with a smile and an outstretched hand. (I neglect this last bit when I meet the kid at the urinal.) ‘What’s your name? What do you do here?’ And then they tell me. And then I
respond that I’m pleased to meet them, that I’m excited to be at Tao, and that together we’re going to make the company succeed.

Despite my enthusiasm, their responses range from indifference to fear. The indifferent ones tend to be older – corporate veterans. They’re outwardly friendly enough, but I can read
their faces: they’ve seen turnaround attempts before, the parachuting CEO
du jour
, the grandiose announcements, the high hopes that never pan out. No doubt these are the ones
surreptitiously crafting their résumés on Tao workstations, keeping an eye over their shoulder in case management should pass behind them. I don’t resent this. As someone with a
dim view of managerial competence myself, I’d probably be firing up the word processor too if I were in their shoes. It’s my job to prove them wrong.

Around lunch time, I wander over to Randy Williams’s cube. His desk is on the ‘engineering side’ of the building, near the foosball table and the Ms. Pac-Man arcade game. I ask
him to arrange a product demonstration for me.

‘A what?’ Randy asks.

‘A demonstration. Of our product.’

Randy looks at me, suspicious. Am I unaware of the company’s plight, or am I cleverly testing him? He answers carefully. ‘Jim,’ he says, slowly, as if tiptoeing across a career
minefield. ‘The product isn’t...
finished
yet.’

‘I know it’s not finished yet,’ I say, affably. ‘If it was finished, I wouldn’t be here. Right?’

Randy smiles at this very reasonable answer, but then realizes that we’re talking about his own incompetence, and so he shouldn’t grin. His smiles fades. ‘Right,’ he
says.

‘But I would like to see what we
do
have. Even if it’s not completely done.’

Randy sighs. He pushes back his chair, stands up. He calls to someone sitting in the next cubicle over. His lieutenant, no doubt. ‘Darryl,’ he says.

There’s no answer. From my vantage point, I can’t see into Darryl’s cube. Frustration clouds Randy’s face. He leans over the cube wall, plunks his hand down. When he
lifts it, he’s clutching an empty pair of headphones.

‘Hey!’ a disembodied voice shouts. ‘What the fuck?’

Randy says into the cube: ‘Jim wants to see a demo. Can you set something up?’

The voice snorts. ‘A demo? Of our piece of shit product? That man is one stupid motherfucker!’

Randy’s smile peels from his face like old paint. ‘Jim’s right here,’ he says quietly.

‘Oh.’ Chair casters squeak, and a head pops over the cube like a prairie dog from a burrow. A kid – he can’t be older than twenty-three, I guess – with long,
stringy hair, and pale skin that indicates time spent mostly indoors, looks at me and smiles. ‘You want a demo?’

‘That would be nice,’ I say.

‘Give me ten.’ With that, he’s off, bounding across the cubicle farm with a merry step.

Randy looks at me. ‘He’s a good programmer,’ he explains.

‘I hope so,’ I say.

Ten minutes later, Randy, Darryl, and I are crowded into a small room with no windows. There’s a barnyard funk in the air, which I suspect emanates from Darryl.

We face a long wooden table pushed against the wall. At the centre is an old, unimpressive Dell computer, an LCD monitor, and a dusty keyboard.

The three of us stare at the screen, watching in silence as the computer chugs through the interminable Microsoft Windows start-up process.

‘You ever think,’ Darryl says, ‘how much time we spend, watching computers boot? I mean, as a society.’

Randy shoots Darryl a look.

‘Hundreds of man-years,’ Darryl continues. ‘Wasted. Watching the boot-up screen. We could have built a cathedral in the same amount of time. Or cured cancer. Or put a man on
Mars.’

‘I’m sure Jim doesn’t want to hear your thoughts about this, Darryl.’ From his tone, Randy has a clear idea whom he wants to volunteer for that first manned mission to
Mars.

Darryl shrugs. ‘Just saying.’

After what seems like eternity, the computer plays a friendly tone to indicate it is ready for use.

‘All right,’ Darryl says. ‘May I?’ He rubs his hands together, steps up to the keyboard, and cracks his knuckles like a concert pianist.

He types. A window appears on the screen. It’s grey, undecorated, without the professional finish that adorns commercial software programs. In plain block letters it says: ‘TAO
SOFTWARE – GENERATION 2.0 – P-SCAN SERVICE – ALPHA RELEASE – SVN BUILD 1262.’

Darryl explains, ‘So this is it. At first, we called it Passive Image Scanning Service. David spent like twenty grand on the brochures, but then someone realized the acronym spelled
P.I.S.S., so we had to throw those out and reprint them. We changed the name, too.’

‘Smart,’ I say.

‘We call it P-Scan now,’ Darryl says. ‘Want me to show you how it works?’

Randy puts his hand on Darryl’s shoulder and squeezes, in what surely is an attempt to tell his protégé to pause, and to allow Randy to take it from here. But Darryl is
oblivious to subtlety. The younger man almost shouts, ‘Hey, dude, you’re squeezing too tight!’

Randy ignores this. Still gripping Darryl, but looking straight at me, Randy says: ‘I just want to go on record and say this is a very early alpha release. It’s not fully functional,
and it probably won’t even work.’

‘Understood, Randy,’ I say.

Randy pauses, considering whether another round of ass-covering and expectation-lowering is required. He decides not. He nods at Darryl and says, ‘Go ahead.’

‘OK,’ Darryl says. He speaks quickly, excitedly. ‘Like I said, this is generation two. Generation one was released two years ago, and it was pretty good.’ He stops,
realizes something. He turns to me. ‘Hey, Jim, you know what the software does, right?’

Not really. It may surprise you to learn that a turnaround executive seldom cares about the product his company makes. He’s not a technologist; he’s not a programmer; he’s not
a salesperson. His speciality – the products he cares about – are companies. By the time a turnaround CEO arrives, the problem is larger than any single product, or any software
release, or any botched sales effort. The problem is the company itself. It’s like being a doctor for a patient whose body is riddled by cancers. Concentrating on any single organ is useless.
More important is to improve the remaining days, to try to make the whole last longer.

I lie: ‘I know what the product does. But why don’t you tell me, in your own words.’

Asking a programmer to describe software in his own words is like asking a salty old admiral to describe his favourite sea battle: surely, an account of the enemy’s maritime manoeuvres, of
the position of the sun in the sky, of the wind in the rigging, is fascinating only to one person in the room.

So allow me to summarize Darryl’s speech.

Tao’s product belongs to a software category called ‘passive image recognition’. That’s a fancy way of saying what it really does, which is quite simple. It recognizes
faces. The idea is: you show it a photograph, and it tells you who is in it.

Simple enough. Tao Software, and its venture capital sugar daddies, have spent over twenty-two million dollars to build P-Scan. Even after this vast amount of money, the product still suffers
from two main problems.

The first is technical. It doesn’t work. Well, to be more exact, it
kind of
works...
sometimes
. At least, that’s how Darryl describes it. He doesn’t go into
detail about what ‘sometimes’ means, or how software can ‘kind of’ work, but I take the general gist to be that P-Scan’s accuracy depends a lot on the quality of the
photograph fed into it. Give it a good photo, clear and in-focus, and it will return accurate results. But blurry photographs, or photos taken at anything other than a head-on angle, or with a
shaky hand, and poor lighting, will be less accurately identified. In other words, the vast majority of photos taken by actual human beings on planet Earth will not be processed correctly. This,
Darryl concedes, might possibly be a flaw.