Company - Max Barry [99]
The employees murmur, raising their eyebrows and shrugging. Jones hears phrases like, “Well, it's an improvement,” and “At least they're listening now,” and he knows it's over. Because everybody would rather have a bad job than no job at all.
“No!” he shouts. He shakes his fist—this is no help to his argument, but he can't help himself. “You want to tell these people what's best for the company, Blake? You don't even know what Zephyr is! It's not the logo, or the bottom line, or the investors, or the customers—” Jones is leaking sarcasm by this point. “It's us! Look around, you see us? We're it. We're Zephyr! We spend half our waking lives here. We know it better than anyone. We care about it more than anyone. That's what people do, Blake, when you put them in a workplace: they get emotionally involved. We're not inputs. We're not machines. You can't outsource some of us and expect everything to be the same. Maybe you wish we were easier to manage, but bad luck: we're human and we're difficult. And we have lives outside of work, goddamn it, and you can't keep stealing pieces of that! You can't keep feeding the bottom line with us! If you do, if that's all you know how to do, then goddamm it, this company deserves to die!”
The workers roar with approval. It stuns him. Jones thought he was delivering a final, hopeless rant. Instead he has turned the crowd. He looks from one cheering face to another.
It's unclear who starts the chant. It's not Jones. It should be, but he is too dazed to press his advantage. The important thing is that it starts, and drowns out Blake's efforts to respond.
“Resign! Resign! Resign!”
It rolls around the boardroom like a boulder. One member of Senior Management after another tries futilely to raise his or her voice against it. Blake Seddon holds up his hands for quiet and is completely ignored. The Phoenix struggles against the workers holding him down.
Blake gives up any attempt at dignity. With the veins on his neck standing out, he shouts, “We will not resign! And you don't have the authority to make us!”
Most of the crowd doesn't even hear him. Jones does. “You're right. We can't force you to quit. But you can't force us to listen to you. Stay up here. Call yourselves Senior Management. But we won't be doing things your way. We'll be taking charge from now on.”
The other members of Senior Management exchange looks. Jones knows the thought is wriggling into their brains: What if this rebellion is for real? Zephyr is already reeling from a catastrophic reorganization. If a bunch of PAs, clerks, and sales assistants start trying to run the company . . . well, surely the end is nigh. Each member of Senior Management possesses a hefty stockholding and a munificent termination clause: the kinds of things that can be difficult to extract from a deceased company. And not only that: if Zephyr goes under while they're on board, they would be unemployed with a bad CV.
An executive who resigns before a corporate collapse, on the other hand—and Jones sees the realization dawning on several Senior Management faces at the same time—is in a different position. This person receives his payout. He cashes in his shares. His CV positively glows, because he clearly disagreed with the direction of the company—a decision stunningly vindicated by its subsequent collapse. That person has a future. That person is a corporate genius.
Stanley Smithson pipes up. “Very well . . . as much as it saddens me, I will resign. I would like to say that—”
“I also resign!”
“I resign, too!”
A mighty cheer goes up from the employees. Jones looks at Blake, but that would be hoping for too much. Blake