VELOCITY - DEE JACOB [7]
In his first year, Random Tornado reported to Winner’s corporate management an 11 percent increase in Hi-T’s net income, and a 17 percent increase in productivity. Amy, for one, was not sure how “productivity” was calculated, but that was the number that WING printed and so it was taken as gospel. For this marvelous first-year performance, the Tornado was given a tremendous bonus, rumored to be in the range of millions of dollars. He then put himself and all the Highboro managers on one of Winner’s corporate jets and flew them to a resort in Jamaica for three days of work, surf, and frolic.
On a personal level, Randal could actually be a fun guy to be around. He was very work-hard, play-hard. Amy, almost against her will, found herself liking the Tornado in Jamaica. When she returned, nicely tanned, to the office, she showed Linda pictures of Randal wearing a dreadlocks wig, doing a cannonball dive into the resort pool, and pretending to bite the dorsal fin off a shark he had hooked on an afternoon fishing charter.
“And, Linda, you should see him dance,” Amy said. “He just needs a couple of Cuba libres to get him going. You’d never know he was the same … well, you-know-what from here in the office.”
Then, eighteen months after he arrived, the Tornado was gone. He was hired away from Winner to run a semiconductor company in Silicon Valley that had survived the tech-bubble crash only to stagnate and decline in the marketplace. The Tornado was certain that he could turn the company around in a matter of a few years, and that disciplined cost-cutting was the foundation on which he would build. For accomplishing this, his total take from the company – mostly in stock options – was said to be potentially enormous, perhaps even beyond millions.
The Microbursts threw a wild good-bye party for the Tornado. Oddly, no one else was invited to attend. Amy got Randal a bottle of good champagne and attached ribbons and a card wishing him well. But the first morning after the Tornado’s departure, when she arrived at her office and found no emails on what WING had ferreted out of the metrics and no Post-it note on her chair, she breathed a deep sigh of relief. Within days, the coffeepots reappeared.
That relief, however, was short-lived. Well before the Tornado went off to California, even before he had collected his enormous first-year bonus at Hi-T, Amy could sense that things were not going as swimmingly as a 17 percent jump in productivity suggested.
In the beginning, right after Winner acquired Hi-T, Amy had tried to make the best of it. She had some slick presentations and brochures created to cast the best light on the change of ownership. She briefed the sales force. She herself met with key customers and spoke to them reassuringly of the exciting times that lay ahead. Yet as WING3.2 came online and Randal mandated his changes, Amy had a feeling that maybe she should have been less enthusiastic in her assurances to everybody.
There was a vague sense in the air of Hi-T losing altitude, of a loss of momentum, of a rudderless yaw. The decay in performance was gradual and hardly detectable at first. Amy first noticed it in the faces of her fellow managers, the frowns when the Winner policy changes were handed down, the faces filled with stress as the Tornado turned up the pressure. There were several good managers who, like B. Don, either retired or moved on during this time. Amy herself, for a brief period, had her résumé out, but the only position in the Highboro area that she found even slightly appealing would have entailed a precipitous drop in pay. So, like everyone else who stayed, she hung on.
As the end of Randal’s first year had approached, Elaine – Hi-T finance manager, also the Elaine of Bill and Elaine – began making noises