VELOCITY - DEE JACOB [55]
“Godzilla,” said Amy. “All my years with Hi-T, I’ve never heard that name.”
When Amy flew to New York City for the Crystal Ball meetings, she found the demeanor of Tom Dawson to be cool and remote – and she felt both annoyed and at the same time relieved. Since that evening on her front porch when she had turned him down, there had been a few other trips, but there had been other people along on those flights. This was the first time she was flying alone with him. He seemed to have concluded that there would be no personal relationship between them, and he was acting appropriately. Courteous. Professional. Reserved. This was not what she wanted.
The skies above Highboro were cloudy, but once in the air and climbing toward cruising altitude, the plane broke through the dense gray, and the sun was brilliantly golden in the perfect blue sky. She was seated behind him, in the passenger compartment. By now she had a sense of his pilot routines, and waited for him to trim the plane and set the autopilot.
Then, hoping to break through the frost, she asked him, “So … how’s your business?”
“My business? It’s been good,” he said.
“That’s nice. Aside from Hi-T, how many clients do you have now?”
“Three regulars, business clients like you. And any number of one-timers. Depends on the month. They tend to come in waves for some reason.”
He began turning a knob on one of the instruments. As if to tune her out, she thought. Presuming the conversation – if it could be called that – was over, Amy opened her laptop to review her presentation one more time.
But then Tom turned to her and said, “I’m thinking about leasing another plane. Something bigger, more comfortable.”
“That would be nice. I like this airplane, but it is a little …”
“Small,” said Tom. “That’s true, and I know I do lose some business because I can’t seat larger groups. On the other hand, a bigger plane means more money, higher costs. And if I go to a two-plane operation, I’d have to bring on a second pilot, at least on a part-time basis.”
That meant, of course, that he would not be the pilot every time, she reasoned. As she thought about this, they fell quiet again.
“What about you?” Tom asked, filling the silence. “How is business at Hi-T?”
“We’ve started a big continuous-improvement program. I have high hopes for it. In fact, it had better deliver, because the reason I’m flying to New York today is to make a presentation declaring the gains we’re going to make in the coming year. Most of those gains are going to have to come from the improvements this program is supposed to deliver.”
“That’s Lean Six Sigma? The program?”
“Right.”
“I remember talking to … that guy, what’s his name?”
“Wayne. Wayne Reese.”
“Right. Nice guy and all. Very bright. He’s all gung ho. On a trip to Maryland, just the two of us, he filled my ear with all the great things about Lean. Didn’t have the heart to tell him, I already knew most of what he was telling me.”
“Really?”
“We used it in the military. To improve logistics – surely one of the biggest, if not the biggest, supply chain systems in the world.”
“How did it work out? The LSS, I mean?”
“The toolsets are very good. Very powerful if they’re applied the right way.”
“But what kind of results did you get?” she asked, pressing.
Tom shrugged his shoulders. “That was some years ago. I retired.”
He was becoming reserved again, and Amy decided not to push.
“Good luck with it,” Tom said, turning away.
There was something in his tone Amy didn’t like, something that implied she might need the luck, but she let it go.
The Crystal Ball presentations were held in an elegant but windowless room inside the Winner corporate headquarters in Manhattan. The walls and ceiling of the room were adorned with antique oak paneling taken from the mansion of an English estate. A long table, also of oak, with lion’s-claw feet, dominated the room. Nigel Furst sat in the center of one of the longer sides, in the position where, beneath the edge of the table, there were a number of buttons