Northgate Integrated Partners occupied the fourth floor of a glass building on the east side of Columbus. The elevator opened onto a lobby wall painted with one enormous word in brushed silver letters.
SYNERGY.
"Oh, no," said Bev.
"Oh, yes," I said.
Underneath, in smaller letters, someone had added the company mission: Integrating People, Process & Possibility. None of us knew what that meant. I suspect, after nineteen years, neither did Northgate.
Bev and I had driven down at six in the morning. I wore the velvet jacket because it was the only jacket I owned that said professional. It also said 1997, but you can't have everything. Bev brought sunflower seeds, the brass clicker, and a tote bag containing my pocket watch, a small pillow, and a thermos of chamomile tea.
"The tea is for Ingrid," she said.
"Ingrid drinks coffee."
"Not today she doesn't."
The all-hands took place in a large open area the company called the Commons. It had beanbag chairs that nobody sat in and a ping-pong table that nobody played. About a hundred and forty employees stood around holding coffee mugs. Every single one of them turned to look at me when I walked in.
I have performed for drunk conventioneers in Reno. I have performed on a cruise ship in a typhoon. Nothing prepared me for a hundred and forty consultants looking at me like I'd dented their car.
Ingrid stood near the front, next to Gordon. She wore a gray suit and an expression like a closed bank vault. Her calculator was in her hand. I had a feeling she'd been holding it since 7:02.
Kevin stood on a small platform by the windows with a wireless microphone. He had clearly not slept. His lanyard had only seven badges. I wondered where the other two had gone, and whether they were all right.
"Good morning, everyone," Kevin said. "Thanks for coming to this, um, emergency alignment session."
Somebody at the back snickered. Kevin pressed on.
"As many of you know, our CFO had an experience at Friday's summit. It has continued."
He swallowed hard. "So, effective immediately, we are retiring a certain word from all company communications. Spoken, written, and in slide decks."
A hand went up. "Which word?"
Kevin closed his eyes. "The S-word."
"Strategy?"
"No."
"Stakeholder?"
"The other S-word," said Kevin, in pain.
A woman near the ping-pong table spoke up helpfully. "Oh! You mean syn—"
Three people tackled her verbally at once. "DON'T," they said, and she clapped a hand over her mouth.
Ingrid, at the front, had gone very still. A muscle in her jaw tightened like a drawstring. Then it passed.
"Thank you, Janelle," Kevin said faintly.
Kevin had prepared a slide titled WORD TRANSITION PLAN. It listed approved alternatives for the retired word: teamwork, collaboration, togetherness, cross-pollination. The last one was in a smaller font, as though he had added it in the middle of the night and then regretted it.
He also introduced a jar. It was a large glass jar with a handwritten label that said THE JAR.
"A dollar for every slip," he explained. "Proceeds go to the holiday party."
Then he turned to me. "Mr. Pask would like to say a few words."
I stepped up onto the platform. I had prepared nothing. I thought about the jokes I usually open with, the ones about my sign, and the one about my sister's sunflower seeds. Then I looked at Ingrid, standing very straight with her calculator.
"My name is Leonard Pask," I said. "On Friday night, your CFO volunteered to sit in my chair for two minutes. That's all she signed up for. Two minutes of a silly bit, and then back to her table."
The room was quiet now.
"What happened after that is my mistake. Not hers. My release cue failed, and I didn't check properly. That's on me."
I took a breath. "I'm going to keep coming back until it's fixed. And until then, if anybody laughs at Ingrid, I'd consider it a personal favor if you'd laugh at me instead. I have a lot of material."
There was a pause. Then somebody near the back started clapping. Then a few more people joined in. It wasn't a standing ovation, mainly because everybody was already standing.
Ingrid didn't clap. But she looked at me for a moment longer than she needed to. Then she nodded once, very slightly.
Gordon stepped forward and put a hand on my shoulder. He was beaming in his fleece vest.
"Now that," he said warmly to the room, "is what I call real synergy."
Bawk.
Gordon froze. He looked at Ingrid. Ingrid looked at the ceiling. Gordon reached slowly into his back pocket, took out his wallet, and walked a dollar bill over to THE JAR in total silence.
The room lost it. Even Ingrid's mouth twitched at one corner. It lasted less than a second, but I saw it.
We set up in a small conference room called Collaboration Pod B.
It had a round white table, four chairs, and a whiteboard covered with the faint ghost of a diagram that had once been very important. Bev put the pillow on a chair. She poured the chamomile tea into a paper cup. Ingrid looked at both with suspicion, but she sat down.
"You're still volunteering?" I asked. "Say so if not. We stop the moment you want to stop."
"I'm volunteering," Ingrid said. "Get it out of me."
I took out my pocket watch. I let it swing.
Ingrid watched it for about four seconds. Then her eyes narrowed.
"Your watch is wrong," she said.
"Yes."
"It says 4:17. It's 9:48."
"It stopped in 2009."
"Then why do you carry it?"
"Because it swings nicely."
She thought about this. "It's a broken asset you carry for sentimental reasons."
"Yes."
"I would write it down to zero," she said. "Proceed."
I proceeded with the voice and counted backward from ten. Ingrid sat upright with her hands folded, staring at the watch with intense, unblinking focus. At "three," she reached into her pocket and checked her phone.
"Sorry," she said. "Board email."
We tried again. At "five," she said, "Is this billable?"
We tried a third time. Bev turned off the lights, and I lowered my voice almost to a whisper. Ingrid's shoulders dropped a little, and her eyes went soft. For one hopeful moment, I thought we had her.
Then Kevin knocked on the glass and leaned in. "Sorry, sorry. Quick question about the Friday deck?"
At the sound of the door, Bev stood up abruptly. "I need to make a call," she said, and she slipped out past Kevin into the hall.
I watched her go. In thirty-five years, I had never seen my sister make a voluntary phone call. She considers the telephone a device for receiving bad news.
But I didn't have time to wonder about it. Ingrid was wide awake again, sitting up, already reaching for the folder Kevin was holding out.
"It's no good," I said quietly. "You're too wound up."
"I'm not wound up," said Ingrid, who was gripping the folder like a railing.
"You don't relax. You audit." I put the watch away.
"The only reason it worked on Friday is you were trying to prove me wrong. You were so busy watching for the trick, you walked straight into it."
Ingrid considered that. "So I need to try less?"
"You need to try nothing at all."
"I have never tried nothing in my life," Ingrid said. It was the most honest thing I had heard all week.
Gordon came to find us at lunchtime. He shut the door to Collaboration Pod B and sat down heavily. He wasn't beaming now. The fleece vest looked deflated.
"We have a problem, Ruthie," he said.
"I know," Ingrid said.
"No, a different one." He rubbed his forehead. "The Apexion meeting got moved up to this Friday."
Ingrid set down her pen.
I raised a hand. "What's Apexion?"
"Apexion Dynamics," Gordon said. "A startup out of Cincinnati. They want us to acquire them, and it would be the biggest deal in our history."
He hesitated. "Their CEO is a fellow named Trent Whitlow. Very sharp, very energetic. He wears a headset microphone even in small rooms."
"Why?" asked Bev, who had come back.
"Nobody knows," Gordon said. "But there's one word he uses more than any other."
He looked at Ingrid apologetically. "I counted it in his last pitch video. He said it thirty-one times in eleven minutes."
Nobody had to ask which word.
"Ingrid," Gordon said gently. "Maybe you sit this one out. I can have Kevin run your numbers."
Ingrid turned to look at Gordon. It was not a long look. It did not need to be.
"I have been in every deal meeting at this company for nineteen years," she said. "I am not missing the biggest one because of a chicken."
She turned back to me. She pushed the cup of chamomile tea across the table, untouched.
"Mr. Pask," she said. "You have until Friday."
Up next: The Cluck Count
Continue to Part 4 →