Chapter 35

I would like to say that life gets easier, and I get to spend a lot more time with my girlfriends. The truth is something entirely different. After I restructure my companies, I release my girls from most of their responsibilities. Having less help, and nobody hired to run my three consolidated companies, the lion’s share of the work falls on me.

It is now Tuesday, Jan. 9th, after school. I’m in my office, and I have one phone call to make before conducting my first job interview for one of the CEO positions. I’m excited for two reasons. The first is that if I hire her, I will have a lot smaller workload, and at least one of my companies will be in good hands, growing exponentially.

My first call is to Cohn and Wolfe, instructing them to wage a PR campaign against the Canadian government over their lack of action regarding the fishing issues with France, Spain and the US.

As soon as I get off the phone, it rings, and it is Moira saying, “Mrs. Nancy McKinstry on line 3 for you, Boss.”

“Thanks, Moira.”

In the other timeline, Nancy McKinstry ends up in the Netherlands, the CEO of Wolters Kluwer. She was on more than one list as the top woman CEO on the planet. In reality, she is the lowest person on my list of people I want heading my companies. She isn’t as charitable as the rest, but in this world, perception is often more important than reality, and she is the only woman on my list. She has already been given the knowledge and experiences that inspire her to become great.

Another reason she is the lowest on my list is, I believe in family and loyalty. Working for Wolters Kluwer, she often abandons her family for months at a time. She left her kids in the Netherlands while off working. Her husband split his time working in the US as an anesthesiologist and home in the Netherlands. It makes me wonder who raised their children? I can’t judge because I don’t have all the facts, and it is not like my parents did a good job.

“Hello, Mrs. McKinstry. How are you doing?”

“Fine, thanks. I am curious why you want me to interview for a job, especially as a CEO. I have never held that position before.”

“I wouldn’t worry about that. I know of your work at Booz Allen and am impressed.”

“How do you know about my work here?”

“I only hire people that are good at their jobs, which is why I want to hire you.”

“I’m not so sure I want to work for you. I want to remain where I am. I think that I am doing important work, and I don’t see how working for a child could top what I am doing here.”

She has told me enough for me to know that she isn’t a person I want working for me. She makes her decisions based on incomplete information. She knows nothing about me other than what little she has seen in the news and that I am still young.

If I were a 16-year-old boy, I wouldn’t have become successful by ignoring those around me. I would need advice, or I would make rookie mistakes. If she thought about it, she would realize that I would have no choice but to rely on her and give her much of the control she would want. Instead, she has judged me to have the impetuousness of youth.

She is the least of the people I intend to interview, so she has just lost her chances of ever working for me. If she were one of the others I hope to interview, I would still want her, as they are worth putting up with the disrespect. She isn’t. I will be using this as a practice, in case I have this problem with one of those I truly need.

“I’m sorry you feel that way, ma’am. Booz Allen does a lot of good work, but working for me, you would get on the ground floor of something far more amazing.”

“I can’t see how it is possible that you could outgrow Booz Allen.”

“We will shortly since we are involved in a lot more fields than they are. We started the internet in Japan. We are still building it up here. We have shipyards on two continents. Not to mention, we have startups in the fields of metalwork, medical implants and procedures, telecoms, electronics, computers, magnetics and a few more. It was only last January that we started up.”

“I never heard about the medical field or metalwork. What are you doing with them?”

“People with pins, plates and rods in their limbs to replace or strengthen bones no longer need to get them replaced every ten to twenty years. Our implants don’t cause the bone to become brittle. We also created a test that will almost eliminate stillbirth in all woman that take the test.

“As for metalwork, we created a couple different alloys of steel that nobody else can reproduce. One drastically strengthens steel, and the other makes it non-magnetic.”

“What is so special about non-magnetic steel?”

“Military applications, A minesweeper can then float amongst the mines without setting them off, unless there is direct contact. Submarines will be undetectable by an aircraft with a magnetic anomaly detector. Etc etc.”

“You seem to have grown a bit more than I was led to believe, but I’m still not sure about working for you.”

“Let me guess. You are concerned about my age and my taking control from you. You think I am a bit impetuous, but you don’t actually know me. You are basing your opinion on prejudice. I have military contracts with the UK, US, Japan, Canada and Germany. Each of those nations vets people before giving them military contracts. Do you think I could grow a company from nothing to having military contracts with most of the biggest western powers if I was an impetuous youth? I know I am young and inexperienced. I know that I have to rely on the advice of those with more experience. There are areas where I will require some things be done that don’t make sense. But, for the most part, my CEOs would have complete control of their companies. I trust you or I wouldn’t have made the job offer.”

It is a long and arduous interview that is more of a negotiation, but after almost three hours, Nancy says, “You sold me. I’ll take the job.”

“I’m sorry if you got the wrong idea, but this was a job interview, and you were informed of that before you called. I don’t believe in just saying you are hired or not. You learn nothing from that.

“Ok, so what is it now.”

“Let’s look at how the interview went. This was an interview for a CEO position in an up and coming company that will soon be world renowned. What you received in the registered mail gave you enough to suggest it to be so. Anybody that is any good as a CEO makes their decisions based on facts, not limited information. You called here without doing your homework. A CEO either does his homework or delegates it to somebody then reads the report. You didn’t, and in so doing, made some offensive comments.”

“How was I supposed to know this was serious?”

“You thought it was serious enough to call. Now, like a poor leader, you are passing the blame. As soon as you realized you were mistaken, you should have owned up to it. I am not your opponent. I should have been your boss. Instead, you forced me to spend the next two hours pleading with you to show you that we aren’t a joke.”

“I need to know who I am working for.”

“Which you would have known had you done your research. I understand that things come up for a person in your position, and one week may not have been enough time. That is what delegation is for. Failing that, you could have admitted to being ill-prepared, or if you didn’t want to tip your hand, you could have begun by giving me the benefit of the doubt and made your opinion based on the interview instead of a lack of facts.

“That is just not how things are done. And that is why you will never be truly exceptional. An exceptional CEO thinks outside the box. You think in shallow conventions. It explains a lot about the things I was unsure about with you.”

“How dare you talk to me this way.”

“I figure that you have guessed by now that you don’t have the job. I’m sorry you wasted my time.”

“I’m good at my job, damn it. You are an impetuous child just like I thought.”

“I admit that you have had success with how you do things. There are some experiences that you need to become truly good at it. You have demonstrated that you make rash decisions without hard facts, which means you are lucky, not good. There is nothing to say that if I hired you that the luck would follow you. I’m sorry, ma’am, but I think this is the end of the conversation.”

“Fuck you, Asshole,” she says before hanging up the phone.

I hope that this is getting the worst of the interviews out of the way. Tomorrow’s interview is the one we need to nail. Marc Benioff currently works for Oracle, a multinational computer company. For the last three years, he has worked there doing customer-oriented work, learning what people want and need, with both hardware and software. He isn’t done learning yet, but my hope is that we can give him the experiences that he was to get with Oracle over the next ten years.

Another big thing with Marc Benioff is that he did an internship with the Macintosh division of Apple, programming. He was also a child prodigy, writing his first app at the age of 15 and then going on to create games for some of the bigger companies before he graduated high school. He paid for college using his game royalties.

The company he built in the future was Salesforce, a cloud-based company. If all goes well, we will build it together seven years early.

This time, it is me phoning him. He had left word that he would be home all afternoon and so I don’t wait for the girls after school. As soon as the bell goes, I am out of there. With the help of one of my bodyguards, we load my bike into one of our SUVs and head to the office.

Karen, my personal secretary during school hours, was told about the phone call and is intelligent enough to realize its importance. We don’t even say hi, and she doesn’t enter my office to give me the daily notes, as is routine.

After I sit down, I take a moment to compose myself before I make the call.

“Hello, Benioff residence.”

“Yes, this is Trent Brown. I’m looking for Mr. Marc Benioff.”

“I’m just messing with you, Trent. This is Marc. How’s it going?”

“I’ll tell you at the end of the interview.”

“You sound a little nervous.”

“Let’s just say I have a lot of respect for your achievements. Living off royalties while going to school is quite impressive.”

“So is being the youngest ever self-made millionaire. Trust me. The respect is mutual.”

“I’m glad to hear it. I must say I admire your choice to learn more about what the customers need before delving into any big projects. But, I think it is time to bring you in out of the cold.”

“I appreciate it. So, what is this job offer I am hearing about?”

“I reorganized my companies because things were getting too complicated. They are now consolidated into three companies under one holding company. I want you to head the computer company.”

“It’s tempting. I still have friends with Mac, and I was hoping to go back there, but to tell the truth, you have them scared. It was a bit underhanded of you to start going after schools and undercutting Mac. That was their big game plan and they are starting to lose a lot of money as you take their market.”

“I feel bad for Mac, but it needed to be done. NeXT is outgrowing Apple, and they will eventually go under. All the kids growing up, being taught Macs at school will be at a disadvantage. I have other plans for Apple. We are going to save it, and Apple will play a big part in our future.”

“What do you have in mind?”

“You know better than that. I can’t tell you anything that you may leak to your friends. It is bad enough that I told you I had plans for them. I just don’t want anybody there fearing how things are and leaving for a more stable job.”

“So what can you tell me? What job have you picked out for me?”

“To start with, I want you to step out of your box for another year, this time, purely as a management role. I know you are capable of it and I need a CEO that knows computers. When the year is up, you can choose to hand over the responsibility to your executive secretary and dive into one of our projects, start one of your own or continue working the company.”

“If I am working out of my field, I want to stay where I am at. I owe these guys.”

“No, you want to be with us. We are the leading experts on quantum theory. We are the leaders in solid-state technology. We built the only viable version of the internet and already have the first few web pages online. The one that might confuse you is we are in the process of building a quaternary computer. By next year everybody else will be irrelevant.”

“That is putting a lot of my buddies out of business.”

“Not if you are at the helm. You can buy out Oracle, and your buddies will have the ability to do things they have only dreamed of. For now, we need to develop NeXT Web into a money-making machine. Then we can do anything you want.”

“You sure know how to tempt a guy.”

“That is just to entice the geek in you. I know the real man inside you is also a bit of a humanitarian. You want to help with the social injustices. You will be working alongside my other two companies, one of which is mandated for medical development, humanitarian aid and environmental studies. We already have a building picked out to purchase as a woman’s shelter. We are just waiting for the lawyers to stop fighting over it before we put in our bid.”

“Lawyers, what is wrong with it?”

“The previous owner used to own slaves. The government has already seized the house. It is just a matter of waiting until all sides have collected their evidence before it gets put up for sale. I already made a deal. The government wants to get out in front of the PR on this mess. So, they agreed to a reduced price. They want to claim part of the credit in setting up the shelter.”

“I keep my ear to the ground. I heard you started supplying implants for the child hospital in Vancouver. I don’t understand the metallurgy, but they say it is a weaved titanium and call it a miracle metal.”

“I was surprised to hear that myself. I was expecting trials to last another year, then the next thing I know it is ready for market. I decided to give the first lot to the BC Children’s Hospital. My girlfriend Carol was the inspiration for that. I was appalled when the doctors said how often she would need surgery after she hurt her arm.”

“I think you just hit on the one thing that concerns me, the amount of violence in your life. I know you have been cleared of all wrongdoing. There was that mess in Fort Grand, and you have had at least two attempts on your life in the last year. There is the frequency at which the police show up to your school, and the altercation where I hear you put an MP down in your gym.”