SERIAL : 35

INDIAN IN COWBOY COUNTRY

THE HUNT

Like a shrewd direct mailer, he sent succinct and polite requests for meetings, with a handwritten “personal” inscribed on the envelope, a tactic Dan suggested. This was to prevent an overzealous executive assistant from opening his letter and making the decision to either reject it or reroute it to the human resource department, from whom he could only expect a standard “thank you but no thank you” missive.  

He was pleasantly surprised with the results. His Lunch Bunch was right- he was undershooting, and he did have a credible reputation in the industry. His requests for interviews were often granted. Dan had cautioned him that he needed to schedule fewer meetings in a day. This would allow the executives the flexibility of extending the interview to call in colleagues to meet him and, perhaps, take him out for lunch or supper to test his social graces and etiquette.

The Lunch Bunch held mock interviews with him, sensitizing him to major management concerns and smoothening his rough edges. Dan took him to his favorite clothier and picked out suits for him. Satish blanched at seeing the price tags, but Dan comforted him. “Think about it as an investment, not an expense. Its CAPEX, not OPEX,” he said, referring to industry acronyms for capital expenditures and operating expenditures.

During the first two weeks of August, Satish entered a new universe of experience. Though they had different personalities, the executives all had similar concerns about sustaining the value delivered to shareholders, and how to get the right people and organization to deliver this value. They were uniformly polite and courteous, making inquires about his family and background, and were appreciative that he had written to them when there were so many employment opportunities in town for a person of his caliber and reputation.

Most of them carefully avoided discussing the details of his work at Clark, staying far away from potentially confidential issues. Others, when they did tread in these waters, respected his tactful dodges and did not push for more information.

Uniformly, they were interested in his strategic thinking, his quick “analysis and synthesis” skills, and whether he was an effective “organizational man” who could successfully lead engineering teams, which he had displayed at Clark.

As Dan had predicted, a second meeting often followed his first one. This would be over lunch or supper with a key subordinate, an obvious sounding board, present. There was no doubt in these executives’ minds that he would be a good addition. He would also be affordable, since he was so grossly underpaid at Clark.

As he grew more confident, he entered a new realm of interrogating the executives on their strategies and the challenges to successfully executing them. His questions were incisive, and soon he could tell if he was being “fed a load of manure,” as Clyde would say.

During the peak heat season in mid-August, Satish began to receive offers, some by mail and some verbally at subsequent meetings. All were for senior positions: vice president at smaller organizations, and director at larger ones. Each had a different compensations plan, with variations in stock options, bonuses, salaries, and perquisites.

When he saw the numbers, he realized how unappreciated and underpaid he had been at Clark. At first, he was angry with Tim and the rest of the management team, but then he reconciled that his inattention was equally to blame.

At first he attempted to take his assortment of job options to his Lunch Bunch, but soon all of them were unavailable. They were working on a project that Clyde had brought to them, and could not discuss it with him because of non-disclosure agreements. Monica was the only trusted partner with whom he could discuss his array of options.

He created spreadsheets- quantitative analyses of various compensation plans- to share with Monica. She liked what she saw, but felt that they were inadequate for him to make a good decision. She asked him many questions about his chemistry with each firm’s executive team.

Working on Monica’s germ of an idea, he added a series of aspects to his evaluation criteria. But when he drew graphs comparing scores on these two dimensions, he discovered that firms that were offering substantially higher salaries scored lower on the qualitative dimension, and vice verse. He then created numerical thresholds of acceptance on both dimensions, and found that only three of the twelve offers he had received exceeded thresholds on both counts.

Satish had learned a long time ago, the hard way, that numerical analysis in complex systems, such as in oil and gas exploration and production, could only provide a general sense of direction, like a compass. He was traversing an uncharted territory, and the engineer in him wanted more information to make an intelligent decision. That was when Tim called.

“Hey buddy! How are you doing?” Tim asked.

“Good,” Satish replied. “And you?”

“Good, But it could be better. How’s the job search going?”

“Good actually: better than I expected.”

“By the way, if you have some time, I’d like to meet with you.”

“I’d be happy to, Tim. You pick the place and the time, and I’ll be there.”

“How about this afternoon?”

“That’s short notice, Tim. I have already scheduled a meeting for this afternoon. Are there any other slots open on your calendar?”

“I’ll tell you what; let me have Liz give you a call.”

“Billy’s secretary?” Satish asked.

“Yeah. Actually, Billy wants to meet you. You know I’m just his gofer. I’ll tell you what, set a time to visit with Billy and call me, and we’ll meet at least an hour before that meeting. I’ll fill you in.”

“Can you tell me why he wants to meet me?”

“Can’t do. I don’t know the whole picture, only part of it. By the time you get here, I’ll have a better idea. All I know is that Billy wants you to come back.”

“Sounds good, Tim. Take care.” Satish said, and hung up the phone.

He could not hide his delight. It was as if his firing had been repudiated. Monica, who heard the tone of the conversation go from mild interest to delight, was curious about the cause of this sudden transformation in her husband. He told her that Tim had just informed him that Clark wanted him back.

Monica did not share his joy, and she told him so.

“Why would you want to go back to a firm and a boss who just fired you?” she asked with rare disdain. “You need to keep your self-respect.”

“I did not say that I was going to join them,” he said defensively.

“I just said that they wanted me back. I have no clue what it’s all about.”

“You should have said you are not interested. You have a dozen job offers and you would still want to go back to Clark?” she asked sternly.

“I cannot say no immediately. I have to listen to what they have to say. I cannot be emotional about it. I have to be rational. Let’s do this. Take the graph that we used earlier and see what would make Clark attractive to me.”

Monica was not convinced that the graph would reveal anything, but she decided to play along. Both graded Clark on its qualitative aspects and came up with different scores. He gave them higher marks that crossed his acceptance threshold, while she did not. He was disappointed with her low scores. She justified her grading with, “They exploited you for ten years, paid you less, and then laid you off. How do you expect me to see them in better light?”

Satish stayed silent because he knew there was more coming.

“You cannot ignore the last six months. You, Seeta, and I have had a tense six months wondering if you were going to get another job. If it were not for your Lunch Bunch, you’d be still out there calling on six people a day. You can trust the Lunch Bunch but not Clark, and certainly not Tim. He was their slave master. He kept you down while all the time pretending to be your friend.” She stopped abruptly.

‘Are you done?” he asked.

“Yes. I am done,” she said, and suddenly began weeping uncontrollably.

He rushed to her and hugged her. He asked her what had happened, and through the tears and the sobbing she mumbled, “I just realized something out of the blue. It came from nowhere: a thought that I married a blessed man, who sees no evil or bad in anyone. And thanks to your karma, when people began to hurt you, strangers came out of nowhere to help you get back on your feet. I am so sorry that I spoke out.”

“Calm down, Monica. Calm down,” he said as he held her and stroked her hair from the forehead back. Seeta, who was taking a nap, woke up. She saw that her mother was upset, came to her and said, “Mommy, don’t cry.” She shook her favorite rattle as a distraction.

Seeta followed her parents as her father sat her mother down on a sofa in the den, then sat next to her and held her while she recovered. She then climbed on to her mother’s lap, stood up, and began showering her cheeks with kisses. She said, “Good, Mommy. Don’t cry. Want milk?”

Monica could not help but smile when she heard her daughter ask her if she wanted milk, a tactic she used to quite Seeta down whenever she cried. Slowly, she returned to normal. She kissed her daughter, gave her husband a peck on his cheek, and said, “You two are the best family any women could ever have.”

“Mommy is the best Mommy,” the daughter added, and immediately asked, “Can I have a candy?”

The parents burst out laughing at this little imp’s perfect timing in asking for a treat. Satish picked her up in one sweeping movement of his right hand and went to the kitchen to reward her for her contribution in calming Monica. As he gave her a piece of chocolate, he asked Monica, “Would you like to have some chai? I am going to make some.” She uncharacteristically declined, saying that she was nauseated from tension.