Up in the Air

I was given a small beige office in the rear of the company’s crumbling brick waterfront headquarters and tasked with the care of seven executives who were let go in sequence, one per day, and sent to me before their tears could dry. All were middle-aged men with families, and all but two of them asked me what they’d done wrong, to which I answered, “Nothing. Blame interest rates. Blame low commodity prices. This problem’s global.” One heavyset fellow, a face like a potpie, his suit full of strange custom seams to hide his girth, mistook me for a priest and made me kneel with him while he prayed from a card he carried inside his wallet. Another asked me if I would call his wife and repeat my interest rates remark.

I counseled these men for two weeks. The company gave them offices next to mine where they could make phone calls and draft their pleas for help and fill out the numerous tests and work sheets that sought to identify their strengths and weaknesses, goals and longings, habits of thought and feeling. I scored these surveys, interpreted their results, and provided each man with a “master self-inventory” of five double-spaced typed pages, his to keep. One man set his aflame before my eyes, but most of them clung to and studied these documents with the devotion of Egyptologists poring over tomb writings.

For three of the men it seemed to work. They passed through guilt to anger to despair to something approaching acceptance, if not hope. My bright-eyed graduates. My little soldiers. A fourth man dropped out at anger and, months later, was arrested by Secret Service agents for driving an Osceola diesel tractor into a crowd at a presidential campaign stop. The other three men were unreadable. They clammed up. Oddly, these three were the first to find new jobs, while two of the success stories still hadn’t when I stopped tracking them one year later.

In time, I learned not to track my former subjects, just as the elders in our field advise. Unfortunately, it was not by force of will that I accomplished this necessary forgetting but through reflexive, progressive memory loss. I learned to live from the present forward only, and I don’t regret it. One must these days if one is to stay in business, and it’s all business now. Try selling stock to last year’s buyers. Impossible. Try marketing tractors to your customers’ ancestors.

All in all, by the time my plane left Davenport (my first trip in a spacious seat up front) I was fairly sure I’d done some good and certainly no real harm. A solid beginning, and one that set my course for years to come. There were bleak spots, naturally, but ISM threw me enough upbeat executive coaching jobs—Art Krusk, some others—that I muddled through them. The mounting memory problems weren’t really an issue because there was nothing particularly worth remembering in my life just then and also because I’d developed regular habits. Pack one bag well, with the necessities, launch yourself into Airworld, with all its services, and the higher mental functions become irrelevant. That’s the merciful nature of the place, and the part I’ll miss.

“This is your speech?” said Julie. We’d reached Gillette by then, a natural gas boomtown where flames burn on tall stacks and deer cross the freeway in lines of six and seven.

“It’s just the setup. The lead.”

“It’s awfully long. Just give them the finger and be done with it.”

“These are hardened professionals I’m speaking to. I have to crack their armor plate by plate.”

I intend to crack it by talking about Vigorade. A few of my listeners will have similar stories from their own practices, but this is mine, and I hope to tell it well, without too many Verbal Edge curlicues and a minimum of M.B.A. abstractions. I don’t require that they cry, though. Let them laugh. I’m the one resigning. I don’t need followers. I just need to bleed a little, publicly. Preferably all over Craig Gregory’s shirt.

Vigorade was based in San Diego and sold a line of secret-formula sports drinks that acquired, over time, a curious reputation on college campuses and other youth spots for mild, euphoric, narcotic-like effects when drunk in large quantities or mixed with alcohol. The company was small, its products specialized, but the fanaticism of its young customers yielded crazy margins. For a period. Disaster struck when an anti-drunk-driving parents group obtained a memo from corporate marketing outlining strategies for targeting teens with the myth of the Vigorade-vodka cocktail. Petitions went out. Class-action suits were filed. Sales spiked at first due to the furor, but soon they stalled, then slid. Executives who’d been living extremely well by veiling a humdrum beverage in urban legend were summoned upstairs and told to empty their desks even as guards, directed to search for documents that might play into the hands of legal foes, were emptying them for them.