blood drives, canned food collections, volunteer teams for neighborhood soup kitchens. She did this while overseeing the production of all Blue Boxes and hardware in over fifty facilities around the globe. Did this quietly, without once asking for praise or recognition. Did this without seeming soft or maternal. In another age, men in gray suits would have called her a kind den mother. Cliff once jokingly referred to her as dear and she turned to him and hit him, hard, in the arm. He could not rotate his shoulder for more than a week.
Yet even more than her strength and temper, what probably most prevented the senior staff from calling her dear or maternal was Julie’s endless appetite for discussions about sex.
“The head of production from that Korean company we just bought reminds me of an aging leopard,” she said to me now. “A sleepy, languid man who rises only to breed.”
I nodded. Waiting. Sure something more would come.
“He’s taking early retirement tomorrow,” she said. “He agreed with my suggestion today.”
She nodded. She turned and was gone.
One hundred and fifty e-mails by three. Suggestions from staff members. Requests from board members. Favors to be returned. Thanks to be given.
Another group of four, all in green, this time near the elevators. Already today I’d seen an oddly large number of people in green.
People saying Hello to me as they moved out of the way of another of my walking meetings, some people even whispering, a few even pointing, sometimes a group slowly spreading apart, graciously and with unintended formality, making way for their CEO.
“I’m not royalty,” I’d once said to Whitley.
“It’s not your choice,” she’d replied. “They’ve made of you what they want to believe. And they want to believe you are not like them.”
The steady sound of the ventilation system, metallic and barely audible below and between the noise of so many people in motion.
Shadows in my office I’d never noticed before.
Six hours’ sleep in the past three days.
A memory of Julie with her head on her desk after lunch, the five-minute nap of the exhausted executive vice president of worldwide production.
The spreadsheet, eight hundred pages, open on my screen. For a few minutes only. Updating the model. Incorporating new purchases of secret mainframes. Adding recent leases for yet more satellite time. Tying in the hidden cash I ran daily through acquired companies. Removing now defunct shell corporations through which I bought and sold equipment. Moving assets to newly formed shells based in Bermuda and the Caymans.
“Timeless,” I heard a woman’s voice say from outside my office, the words drifting to me through the noise on twenty, through the noise in my office, through the noise coming in from the city now caught in the windows around me. “Placeless,” the voice said. “Godless. Sourceless.”
Not till four that afternoon did I realize it was all the members of the company’s Tech Support, Network Administration and Software Development groups who were wearing green.
“I like your shirt,” I now told Leonard, the head of those groups.
“Thanks,” he said with a pleasant nod, but offering no explanation as to why his shirt matched his pants, his pants matched his sneakers, his sneakers matched his socks. “As expected,” he said, “the equipment will total two hundred twenty-nine million dollars over a three-year period.”
Somehow I hadn’t noticed Leonard’s green ensemble at our senior staff meeting that morning, or in any of our interactions earlier in the day. Maybe that’s because Leonard was one of those big people, not fat or overweight, but big in a way that was startling every time I saw him, an unexpected amount of space suddenly occupied anytime he entered the room. Big hands, big eyes, big features, big motions. He had the largest fingers I had ever seen. His size tended to overwhelm whatever it was that he wore.
But now I saw that he was all in green. I wondered if maybe he’d changed clothes at some point, inexplicably donning a costume for the fading light of the afternoon.
Unlikely.
Cliff, sitting next to me now, nodding and taking notes, hadn’t seemed to notice the green. Or maybe he didn’t care. With numbers in front of him, calculator at his fingers, Cliff became a living computer, a machine purely focused on absorbing, processing and refining the information presented to him. In those moments he had no ability to register anything else.
All day, though, I’d been seeing the tech people in green—a gangly system administrator typing frantically on a marketing executive’s locked-up computer, a near teenaged girl changing toner in a brightly glowing copier, three Chinese programmers in a heated debate as they reported to Whitley about security threats from Indonesia. Some were in olive-green pants, some were in forest-green shirts or light-green shoes, one was in a dark-green hat.
There were no secret handshakes as they passed each other, no furtive hand signals, not even a shared smile. They simply all wore green.
“Leonard,” I said, “you’re wearing all green.”
He glanced up, nodded, said, “NT, XP, 2000, UNIX.” It was as if he’d launched into some high-tech haiku. In fact he was listing a range of computer systems in use at a number of our newly acquired companies. “Multiple flavors on the UNIX side,” he said. “Irix, Linux, lots of Solaris. And of course that’s in addition to every mainframe platform known to this planet.” He sighed heavily. “So many platforms, so many skills.”
Cliff nodded carefully. I nodded knowingly. Leonard turned a page.
Located on the ninth through twelfth floors, the tech group formed four floors of highly rambunctious but remarkably good-natured individuals. They hacked into each other’s computers, they organized floorwide competitions in various Web-based role-playing games, they logged into the computers that operated the building’s air-conditioning system in order to raise the temperature in rival programming groups by ten, then twenty degrees.
As I watched Leonard’s thick fingers trace absently along the sharp edges of the papers in his lap, I wondered for a moment if any of the industry spies or bored college students trying to hack into our systems were themselves sitting at their computers dressed entirely in green.
“Green,” I said, to no one in particular it seemed. “All green.”
“Collabra, Marimba, Domino, Exchange,” Leonard said, turning a page, then continuing. “Java, C, VB, Korn. So many skills . . .” he said, and let the sentence trail off.
Cliff looked up. “The real cost is personnel, yes?”
Leonard nodded quickly. “The real cost is personnel, but there’s a notch up in training.”
Cliff tapped on his calculator. I nodded knowingly. Leonard turned a page.
And really, I did know. I knew exactly what Leonard meant. I understood everything he and Cliff were saying. In Technical Development, in Strategic Planning, in Sales and R&D, everywhere I knew the workflows, I knew the org charts, I knew the software tools, I knew the strategies for the best communication and support. I knew what markets we were in, what markets we wanted. I knew
