Chapter 22: Meeting the Press

“Hello, Dexter James.”

“Hello, Phil Xander,” Dexter said while fidgeting around on his chair.

“It’s a pleasure to have you back on the show,” Phil said.

“It is?”

“Sure, why wouldn’t it be?”

“I thought I was banned for life from your show,” Dexter said.

Dexter reached under his butt to feel the seat of the chair. He frowned and twisted around. He pushed around the seat bottom.

“Would you stay still?”

Dexter got up and moved to the other chair on the set. There was now an empty chair between him and Phil.

“There’s busted spring in your chair. It was poking me in butt,” Dexter said.

“It’s kind of hard talking to you with you seated all of the way over there,” Phil said.

Dexter sat back in his chair and smiled. Phil’s comfort meant very little to him, in comparison to his comfort.

“It’s kind of hard talking to you with a spring poking me in the butt.”

“Sorry about that,” Phil said.

“So you were saying? Oh wait ... I had just finished saying that I thought I was banned for life from your show.”

“Not at all.”

“Okay,” Dexter said.

He looked around the set. There was a guy standing by one of the cameras holding a sign.

The sign said, “Don’t bring down our servers.”

Dexter grinned.

“I promise I won’t bring down your servers today.”

“Thank you,” Phil said, irritated by another distraction. “I’m sure our IT folks appreciate that.”

“Is that one of them over there?”

“Yes.”

Dexter gave a thumbs up to the guy with the sign.

He shouted, “I won’t bring down your servers, today.”

“Thank you!”

“You’re welcome.”

Trying to get control over the interview, Phil said, “I asked you to come today to talk about your company, Legacy Coffeemakers, Inc.”

“I like talking about that company,” Dexter said.

“I’ve got to say that I’m pretty impressed with your coffeemakers. They really are tough,” Phil said.

“Why do you say that?” Dexter asked.

“We had a couple of interns play broom hockey with one of your one cup coffeemakers, behind the set, to see how tough it is.”

“Did they manage to break it?”

“No. It still worked perfectly,” Phil said.

“We’ve had a lot of people try out our warranty on that coffeemaker. We’ve gotten a lot of letters about how rugged it is,” Dexter said proudly. “They don’t try the same things with the six and twelve cup coffeemakers.”

“What’s your secret?” Phil asked.

“What secret?”

“The secret to getting such a tough product out,” Phil asked.

“That’s not a secret. I give people the authority necessary to do their jobs. Responsibility is coupled with authority. If something goes wrong, it’s the person with the responsibility who is at fault. It’s that simple,” Dexter said.

“So where does that leave you?”

Dexter said, “I have a responsibility to ensure that my people are meeting their responsibilities. I have the authority to fire anyone who isn’t meeting them.”

“How does that work out?”

“Let’s take the case of the engineer whose name is on that one cup coffeemaker. He had total responsibility for the design. He had the authority to do what was required. I don’t go in and change his design nor overrule his design decisions. That’s not my job. You see, if I meddle in his design, then I become responsible for any problems that I introduce. As soon as you have a dilution of authority, you have problems with assigning responsibility.”

“Your designer doesn’t work alone. He doesn’t design everything,” Phil said.

Dexter said, “That’s right. He did the overall design, and then contracted out some design tasks to others. He gives them requirements and they design to the requirements. They have total authority over their designs. He can say that their design didn’t meet the requirements, and that becomes their fault. He can point out flaws in their design. Then they have to fix the design. Of course, his requirements could have been bad, and that’s his fault. He has to fix the requirements. It’s really very simple.

“That’s what happens when you delegate responsibility and authority. It clarifies things tremendously. If you don’t have the authority to make something happen, you really can’t be held responsible if it doesn’t happen. Then things get murky. Who did what? Who didn’t do what? Where’s the problem? Why didn’t someone step in and fix the problem?

“When the answers you get are: ‘I can’t do this because I’m not allowed,’ but the person who is allowed isn’t responsible for getting it done ... then you have real problems. Those kinds of problems can’t be solved by blaming people.”

Phil said, “I guess that makes sense.

“Our designer wanted a tough rugged machine that would last twenty years under hard use,” Dexter said. “In my opinion, he met that goal.”

“Has anyone managed to break one?” Phil asked.

Dexter answered, “You know the answer to that question.”

“You are referring to the lawsuit your company has filed against one of the other companies that makes coffeemakers.”

“Yes. They bought five thousand of our coffeemakers using an intermediary. The group that accepted delivery of the coffeemakers then destroyed the machines. In some cases, they drilled holes through the sides of coffeemakers. They then tried to return them under warranty expecting us to replace all five thousand coffeemakers with new ones. The idea was that they would then do the same thing with the replacement coffeemakers and keep doing it until we were out of business,” Dexter replied.

“They drilled holes though them?” Phil asked.

“Yes. Right into the water reservoir. There is a line in our warranty saying that we would prosecute Warranty Fraud to the fullest extent of criminal and civil law possible. We view that as Warranty Fraud.”

“I would say so. Still, five hundred million dollars is a pretty large amount to be suing them,” Phil said.

“Why? This was a clear attempt to put us out of business. If they had been successful, we would have lost that much in sales over the next three years,” Dexter said. “I think it’s quite reasonable to sue for that amount.”

“You do have a point, although a lot of people were rather surprised by the amount.”

“I’m not surprised that they were surprised.”

“How did you discover they were doing this?” Phil asked.

“I’m not at liberty to say,” Dexter answered. “All I can say is that there are a lot of honest people left in this world who won’t take money to perform criminal acts.”

“That’s good to know,” Phil said.

“A lot of companies should remember that. The days of big companies doing whatever they want are over,” Dexter said.

“I will admit that there has been a major change in corporate ethics,” Phil said.

Dexter said, “We’ve got six executives out on bail because of this. There are a lot more in greater legal trouble than that, in other cases; cases that have nothing to do with me or my company. A lot of employees have become whistle-blowers.”

“Why would you say that is happening?”

Dexter said, “People are tired of watching the company they work for go down the tubes because of criminal acts by upper management.”

“Won’t your lawsuit damage the company and put employees at risk?” Phil said.

“Not as much as you would think. You see, in our lawsuit we are requesting that all settlement money must come out of executive compensation,” Dexter answered.

“I’m not sure the courts can force them to do that.”

“I don’t know if they can or not. However, we can request it and make that request known to others. It really looks bad to shareholders when the executives get big bonuses after a settlement like that. It causes them to lose confidence in the management of the company,” Dexter said.

“You say that as if you know it for a fact,” Phil said.

“We’re not the first to make that request,” Dexter said. “Executive compensation in some of these large companies will often run over half a billion dollars... a year. I mean, you’ll hear about some executive getting a bonus of fifty million and you think that’s all the company paid out. That’s not the case. That’s the bonus for just one executive. There are hundreds of other executives from the director level on up who are getting sizable bonuses. It adds up very quickly.”

“I know that’s particularly true in the financial industry where the majority of compensation is in the form of bonuses,” Phil said.

“Personally, I feel that level of compensation is criminal. Considering that the median salary of an American worker is fifty thousand a year, five hundred million is the equivalent to the salaries of ten thousand employees. Or you could give a hundred thousand employees a five thousand dollar increase in pay.

“In our past conversation, you said that the American worker is too expensive. I suggest that the American executive is the real threat to profitability.”

Phil smiled. “You are now a corporate executive. Are you saying that you are a threat to profitability?”

“Yes, I am. As an executive, I could pull so much money out of the company that I could kill it. As an owner, I’m not going to do that,” Dexter answered.

Phil said, “I see that it’s time for a commercial. We’ll be right back.”

“You’re off the air!”

The makeup ladies came out to do their job.

Phil shouted, “Would someone replace that chair? I can’t stand talking to him while he’s seated so far away.”

“You can just swap chairs,” Dexter said.

Things were a little hectic on the set. There was a small game of musical chairs while the stagehands swapped chairs. While that was happening, the makeup woman was trying to get at Dexter who was standing around making it a little difficult to properly apply the makeup. When the new chair had been put in place, Dexter tried it and gave a nod of approval.