cutthroat environment.
So I was thrown for a loop when they gave us all laptops in the first ten minutes of orientation. The HR manager leading our pan-departmental training session handed the machines out as if they were bento boxes, while we, a cohort of about fifteen, sat in rows of tables in the classroom-style meeting room. I was parked between two young women hired as financial analysts — both of whom, I recall, having vaguely pornographic names: Tiina Cherry (spelt with two phallic i’s) and Regina Wetmore. The laptops we were assigned were the slickest I’d ever seen — putting to shame the dud I used for my work at U of T’s Philosophy department — but the girls barely blinked at the handout.
Orientation revealed that ODS was in Year Three of its latest corporate piatiletka: The ODS Way (2010–2014), the goal for which was to re-establish billion-dollar revenues by the end of “Fiscal 14.” The HR rep, using a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation full of Microsoft Visio diagrams, walked us through how this overarching mission statement was to control our behaviours in every interaction while on company time. This was more like it, I thought. A downright fascistic approach to human manipulation: the relentless sloganeering, the buzzword indoctrinations, the pressure not to use any independent judgment that wasn’t “laser-focused” on the company’s profitability. I raised several reflexively comic protests during this presentation, but my jokes fell flat. Yet despite these subversive queries, I did not achieve the pariah status I assumed I would. In fact, Tiina and Regina — who seemed to have become BFFs during the mid-morning coffee break — invited me to join them for lunch.
In the afternoon, I settled into my assigned cubicle, which was right outside the office of the communications manager who hired me. “Orientation go okay?” he asked, coming out when he spotted my arrival. He was a tall, breezy technocrat named Stuart, with thick curly hair and a meticulously trimmed soul patch, so unlike the red mass of fur that engulfed my face. He took me around to meet the rest of the team, an ensemble of marketing types and quondam journalists and social media specialists. Everyone knew who I was and why I was there — someone even claimed to have read my one confirmed bestseller, The Movable Apocalypse (Bibliophilia, 1998) — and everyone was friendly. But it was a friendliness singed by stress, by worries over looming deadlines and relentless project plans, by evening GO Train schedules forever present in the back of their minds.
Stuart and I reviewed the complex nondisclosure documents I had signed — outlining all of the proprietary elements of ODS’s business that I’d agreed would not make it into my new book — and then he set me upon the task for which I’d been hired. The company’s enormous, labyrinthine website had been written in a kind of business pidgin, and it was my job to rewrite a large section of it into lucid English. The firm was happy for the free labour, and this was exactly the kind of work I wanted during this operation, since it would put me in contact with multiple divisions of the company — its fund managers, its corporate advisors, its legal team, its various ancillary offshoots — and give me a view into their world. The job itself was a simple simulacrum of journalism: do a bit of research, go interview the relevant experts, cobble together the web copy, et cetera. Stuart even suggested I could do much of it from home, and I was tempted by the prospect: to be in my own book-lined office, a Bloody Joseph to sip, Grace beyond the closed door doing her thing with the kids. But no. My true subject matter was ODS’s corporate culture, and I needed to be in the thick of it.
And what to say of that culture? ODS believed in competition, believed it in its bloodstream. Saw it as the one agora that everyone was obligated to participate in. The next sale, the next business relationship, how one chaired a meeting or approved a business plan — it all became about beating somebody else. This created an air of antagonism that hummed like white noise throughout the organization. These men and women, caught up in a kind of radicalized individualism, battled one another not only for the pre-eminence of their effort and ideas, but for the chance to vanquish the effort and ideas of others. Everyone I spoke to seemed cast in a sarcophagus of anxiety. And where did this feeling spring from? One word summed it up: change. Change was the siren call of liberalized markets; it was the only constant these people could count on. A failure to adapt to this kind of mindless dynamism would spell their downfall, and it bred a particular strain of human fear that brought out the worst in these people’s natures. Their only relief came, it seemed, from ducking down to the Path beneath Bay Street, that enormous mazelike shopping mall, to partake in some retail therapy as a reminder of why they had signed up for this life in the first place. I myself went down there for lunch sometimes, and would even run into Tiina and Regina in one of the Path’s countless food courts. The girls were always kind to me — smiling sprites who welcomed me and my tray of tasteless pad Thai to their table. Yet some simple probing revealed that they were already overwhelmed by their workloads, as if they had been with the firm for years rather than just a few weeks. And as I looked around the food court, everyone seemed to be in the same boat, shackled by years of compounded stress that may have come on in just the last four hours. What kind of life was this? I thought. How could these people not form a pitchfork-wielding jacquerie to overthrow their taskmasters? But this was Bay Street’s monopoly on their reality. It was all they knew.
My “official” interviews with members of the C-suite provided some insight into the fons et origo of this so-called culture. I got twenty minutes with each of them, including the reclusive Viktor Grozni himself. I was frustrated (though impressed) by the way they were all able to stay unflaggingly on message, as if the firm’s business models and mission statements were as finely engineered as a Lamborghini. They all pleasantly dismissed any notion that their company was in trouble.
Only Grozni, that acne-scarred oligarch, got openly hostile with me. “You’re not wearing a tie,” he smiled as he extended his hand over his desk when I entered his surprisingly spare office. “Most men wear a tie when they come see me.”
“Oh, Viktor, what is a tie anyway?” I smiled back, accepting his hand. “It’s just an arrow that points to your penis.” The interview went downhill from there. I questioned him — politely at first, then more sternly — about the cutthroat nature of ODS’s business culture, and he retorted with buzz phrases like “excellence” and “competition” and “high-performing environment.” When I suggested that his brand of competition forced employees to engage in some rather predatory practices, he welcomed me to name the regulations they were violating. When I suggested the federal government had created the very landscape that made such behaviour possible, he said, “Yes, isn’t it great that Canada finally has a government interested in growing the economy after so many decades of suffocating socialism?” And when I suggested that he had a moral obligation to good corporate governance — considering how many Canadians had their pensions wrapped up in this racket — Grozni looked at me as if I had spoken Martian. As our exchange grew more heated, I began to see him as the embodiment of that great Greek term pleonexia, which John Stuart Mill — enlightened man that he was — had written so eloquently about. Grozni’s was not your garden-variety greed, but rather “the desire to engross more than one’s share of advantages … the pride which derives gratification from the abasement of others; the ego which thinks self and its concerns more important than everything else …” The impression Grozni left me with was that my viewpoints were outdated at best and dangerous at worst. He even said to me, near the end of the interview, “The Canada you knew, Mr. Sharpe, is long gone.” “It’s Dr. Sharpe,” I corrected him, “and I think you’re wrong.” He just chuckled once, as if to say I can’t fathom a world where someone like you could prove someone like me wrong.
Back in the CBC studio during the commercial break, I was tremulous. As a stagehand came by to re-powder my brow — I was tacky with sweat by this point — my imagination began to corkscrew out of control over how my gaffe might be reverberating around the country. My heart raced as I looked over at Sal and Cheryl, who sat cool as breezes at the other end of the desk. Their poppies hovered over their breasts like beacons of respectability, while mine was probably fluttering somewhere among the eaves or gutters of Parliament Street.
I gestured to Sal to lean back in his chair with me,
