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precedents for Axtell’s job title or her professional lexicon (‘client relating’, ‘personal branding’) – a scarcity which may lead one to judge her as an unnecessary sickness. But this would be to misconstrue the sheer distinctiveness of the contemporary office, a factory of ideas dependent upon the ability of tens of thousands of employees to communicate properly amongst themselves in order to fulfil the needs of intemperate and exacting clients and so, by extension, an entity acutely vulnerable to internecine fighting, to the petty withholding of information between departments, to the nurturing of poisonous grudges over inequitable pay scales, to the appearance of dandruff on the collars of managers, to the splitting of infinitives in company releases and to the offering of clammy hands to crucial contacts – and hence an entity not above the communal salve discreetly embedded within karaoke nights and ‘Employee of the Month’ schemes, which reward their winners with river cruises and boardroom lunches with the chairman.

5.

For a long while, I try to meet this chairman, but first he is in Russia, then in India and then in the United States, though during this latter period, I am certain that I see him entering a lift at the London headquarters. Then he is for another interval officially upstairs but too busy to see me, until finally, I am allotted half an hour in which to talk to him about the future of the firm and the challenges facing his profession.

We sit across from one another in a bare room, chaperoned by the head of Public Relations, the purpose of whose presence is unclear, except to reinforce the implication that I should tread with care.

A show of surface geniality barely hides the chairman’s impatience with writers. This morning, as on every other weekday, he was up at five, went jogging for forty minutes and was at his desk before seven. He rules over 12,000 people spread out across offices in Denmark, Cameroon, India, Senegal, Sweden, Scotland, Albania, Northern Ireland, Moldova and South Africa.

Yet despite his remit, he has renounced almost all the instruments and symbols of authority. He is universally known by his first name. He has no jet or chauffeur. He shares a secretary. He takes the train to work. He doesn’t even have his own office. The architects designed one for him, with views of Tower Bridge, but he insisted on sitting in the middle of a regular floor at a desk no different from that of an intern. Its only distinguishing feature is a piece of laminated plastic, to the right of the telephone, on which is printed a quote from a speech by Theodore Roosevelt, in which the president spoke of the need for every man to strive for excellence and, ‘if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat’.

The sight of the chairman’s furniture brings to mind W. H. Auden’s poem ‘The Managers’ (1948):

In the bad old days it was not so bad:

The top of the ladder

Was an amusing place to sit; success

Meant quite a lot – leisure

And huge meals, more palaces filled with more

Objects, books, girls, horses

Than one would ever get round to, and to be

Carried uphill while seeing

Others walk…

But Auden knew where leadership was headed. In modern times, he wondered,

Would any painter

Portray one rising triumphant from a lake

On a dolphin, naked,

Protected by an umbrella of cherubs?

Of course, power has not disappeared entirely; it has merely been reconfigured. It is by posing as a regular employee that the chairman stands his best chance of preserving his seniority. His subordinates admire the sincerity with which he pretends to share their fate, while he privately recognises that only a convincing show of normalcy will prevent him from ever having to be normal again.

The chairman has also been forced to surrender his right to bark orders. He cannot scold graduates of INSEAD and Wharton. The one tool left to him is persuasion. Three or four times a month, in various corners of his empire,