The Bottom-Up Strategy
Howard Springer clambered out of his French oak sleigh bed and dipped a cautious toe into the morning. Depressed? Not exactly. Dissatisfied? Again not exactly. He was more than content with his life – a beautiful home, richly remunerative work and a gorgeous wife. What then was the problem? For undoubtedly there was a difficulty, some small hard pea below the comfortable mattress of his existence.
Was it that last presentation? One of Howard’s silver bullets – was his sound bites and buzzwords: piercing expressions that cut to the heart of an issue and simultaneously wrapped it up in a handful of words. Gazing confidently at the upturned faces of the captains of business and industry seated in packed rows before him, he had flashed up on the overhead his latest coinage: The CEO as Pentathlete.
He had sensed the failure at once. His buzzword had fallen flat, dropping to the floor with a dull echoless thud. Howard had pressed on but it had been no good. Eventually – thankfully – his presentation petered out and the CEOs filed out, leaving dead air and deflation. Howard knew he would have to come up with something new – and fast.
Or was it that dinner party last week? Howard had invited round a couple of economists, Alex and Rowena Poliakov, and a professor of Classics, Theodore Patrides, a learned ornament of Howard’s own college. A noted bon viveur and connoisseur who, as the scion of a wealthy Greek shipping dynasty, had the inherited wealth to indulge his tastes, Patrides had long been keen to see the Springer house, and Howard had been only too pleased to invite him along.
The Poliakovs had been the first to arrive. As a rule Howard steered clear of economists. They were a tribe too close for comfort to business academics, potentially dangerously rivals. But he made an exception in the case of the Poliakovs who were old friends. Howard greeted them at the door and popped open a bottle of champagne. Not long after Tanya came down and joined them, in a striking jade gown that admirably suited her green eyes, high Slavic cheek bones and ash-blonde hair.
Then Patrides bounced in. Short and slightly paunchy, sharp-eyed and elf-locked, he somewhat resembled Dylan Thomas run to seed: a cheeky cherub somewhat past its sell-by date. He gave off a sense not so much of rot and dissolution but something old and musty, the slow vinous product of long ages of civilized fermentation. At once goatish and refined, it was not for nothing was he nicknamed ‘Bacchus’ within the university.
Patrides accepted the proffered glass of champagne and at once strode over to inspect the paintings on the walls. Howard was a minor collector, picking up odd pieces in the course of his global consulting. Half the collection consisted of abstracts by contemporary African and Australian artists, intricate, chaotic patterns of violent, swirling colour. Not for Howard the tribal masks and carvings often found on boardroom walls – they were far too boringly predictable and anyway, if genuine antiques, beyond the stretch of even Howard’s pockets nowadays.
The other half featured computer-generated works, wild fractals and weird shapes such as his three-dimensional ‘Mandelbulbs’. Hanging off the walls in cubes of translucent plastic, their granular convolutions resembled some weird combination of coral reefs and Cambodian temple carvings. Tanya hated them.
‘Utterly remarkable!’ Patrides exclaimed. ‘A complete cultural break. Postmodern rupture. I love it. The past – everything remotely humane – shunted aside. The Classical World – pouf! Christianity – pouf! The Renaissance, the Enlightenment, Romanticism – pouf!’
‘Personally I think they’re fascinating,’ Rowena said.
The Aquinos, the Springers’ live-in Philippine servants, swept in white-gloved to serve the meal. Dinner passed – edgily – and after it had faltered to an uneasy close. Howard showed Patrides to the door. There, Patrides had paused and patted Howard on the arm. ‘You know who you really remind me of? Another Howard – you know, Howard Kirk, the character in Malcolm Bradbury’s novel The History Man. He was the echt 1970s lefty. You’re his twenty-first century equivalent, his reverse free market image on the right.’
Tanya, looking over Howard’s shoulder, giggled.
‘Actually, that’s not quite right,’ Patrides continued. ‘You’re far more creative than that, Howard. You’re actually an artist, academically and aesthetically – a surrealist. Deeply superficial and superficially deep – and I mean that as a compliment.’
Howard had not known whether to smile or punch him. He settled for a shrug. Professor Patrides chuckled and beetled off into the night.
Squatting on the edge of the bed, Howard pushed aside his unease along with breakfast tray Mrs Aquino had brought earlier and reached into the bedside cabinet. Removing an antique silver snuffbox, spoon and salver, he laid out a crisp ridge of crystal before nostrilling it up in one go. As the cocaine fired up his synapses, the day assumed a distinctly brighter hue. Clicking off the sleek minimalist Louis Paulsen lamp on top of the cabinet, he leapt out of bed, stepped over to his ensuite bathroom with its heated floors and walls of snow-white Brac Croatian limestone and took a long hot shower. Towelling himself off, he scrutinised himself in the mirror. Nothing too much worry about there. At 46 he was still lean and trim, his body carefully honed by daily sessions in his gym. Then he strapped on his Patek Philippe watch and his daily uniform of crisp white shirt, bright blue Ermengildo Zegma suit and Brunello Cucinello shoes.
Sliding back the door of the walk-in wardrobe he shared with Tanya, he sidled through its silken contents and tapped on the other door leading to Tanya’s bedroom. No answer. Still asleep, he decided, after surfing the tides of global capital into the small hours and the first stirrings of the Asian markets.
Howard had met Tanya through the business school. A Russian emigré who had left when Putin first started cracking down on the oligarchs, she had married a retired American oil driller, before ruthlessly marvining him through the Californian divorce courts. Putting her new-found wealth to work she had paid her way through a finance degree, then struck out on her own as an independent trader. Howard and Tanya had clicked immediately and, having settled the pre-nup, quickly leapt into the marital bed together.
Not that the marital bed was all that constricting. The two led, not so much separate, as parallel lives. Long periods would often elapse before they caught up with one another. Whole stretches of Howard’s life were anyway spent on the road, advising and consulting around the world, staring down from jet windows or gazing up, lead glass malt whisky glass in hand, at the bedroom ceilings of international hotels. But, for all its detachment, the marriage seemed to work. Howard and Tanya were indisputably a success: a power couple straddling the worlds of finance and academe.
Unsurprised by Tanya’s silence but, Howard turned and walked down the residence’s central staircase, glancing up as always at the Rocco Borghese Brillanti Quadri chandelier and revelling in its shimmering cascade of hand-blown gold brown crystals. What pleasure every single droplet gave him! Indeed what deep visceral delight everything in his house gave him, every last judiciously chosen, carefully designed and expensively commissioned detail. It was all just so exquisitely right: an idiosyncratic twist, elegant, expensive and eclectic. Just like himself in fact. Let colleagues in meagrely rewarded disciplines sniff at him down their shabby genteel noses! Howard cared not one jot. He was a Mr Out-of-the-Box, a Mr Twenty-First Century, a new and self-created thing, floating free of the past, a global brand capable of endless stretch and constant reinvention.
He reflected on his current project, his book Failing Forward – How to Win by Losing. He really should get down to it. Surely he could come up with something new and striking. The prospect flapped ineffectually at his brain, then flew away. It was no good. He was totally log-jammed; the ideas simply would not come. Forget Failing Forward. He would take the day off, go up to London and take in some art galleries.
As he boarded the return train, Howard’s thoughts reverted to his buzzwords. He really needed to come up with something new. Instead of leading the pack, he’d become a laggard gasping at the rear of the peloton. The CEO as Pentathlete – how clunky! He needed something new, something fresh and different. Something neurological perhaps? Or something softer, more biological? Words spun through his mind: sperms, ova, gene splicing. Nothing really grabbed him.
After he left the train Howard marched over to his parked Maserati, leapt in and sped off homewards. Reaching the Springer residence he hurled the car down the ramp to the garage undercroft and screeched to a halt. Vaguely, Howard noticed another smaller car, a battered old black Volvo he did not recognise, parked among the other vehicles but bounding up the stairs to the ground floor he gave it no thought. The Aquinos stepped forward to greet him, their faces strangely troubled and Mr Aquino even put out an arm as if to bar Howard’s passage and began mumbling something. From upstairs he could hear voices, feet and slamming doors. What on earth was going on?
Howard brushed past Mr Aquino aside and charged up the main staircase, for once sparing no glance on the chandelier above. There was a straggle of clothes leading to Tanya’s bedroom, a shoes, a blouse, a skirt, then a bra and panties. A terrible suspicion formed in his mind. He hammered on Tanya’s door but there was no response. Out of the window he glimpsed movement: a short paunchy figure was clambering over the back garden fence, his trousers at half-mast. The cheeks of the man’s behind wobbled whitely as he hauled himself over it. Or was he deliberately mooning Howard? For a moment the man glanced back, and it seemed to Howard that he flashed him a goatish leer before slithering out of sight on the far side of the fence.
Howard turned and bellowed through Tanya’s door: ‘Open up, Tanya! Let me in! Come on – explain yourself – you owe me that at least!’ Silence. ‘H
And how could you with Patrides of all people?’ All the frustration of the day boiled up inside him. ‘You don’t care about anyone except yourself do you, Tanya? You’re just a gold digger, a Russian tart!’
At a loss for words, he stumped up to his study. It was all over then. Tanya and he would have to split. Everything would have to go – the house, the cars, the Aquinos, even – depressing thought – the chandelier. But the university! He could just imagine the glee. A giant bale of schadenfreude was no doubt already on its way, hurtling down the chute towards him. He couldn’t stand it – he’d have to leave, find another job somewhere. Well, that shouldn’t be too difficult.
And with that patronising arsehole, Patrides, of all people! The image of his wobbling white behind swelled up unbidden, followed by a jostling, jeering self-pitying crowd of thoughts. A bottom – himself always down at the bottom, himself always left behind, himself only a bottom feeder at rock bottom. He’d have to scrape his way back up somehow. Then, out of the blue a blindingly brilliant idea sailed over the rim of his consciousness: The Bottom-Up Strategy. That’s what he needed now. In fact wasn’t it what the whole world needed? Global warming, social inequality, the population time-bomb – things could not go on as they were. It was time – long past time – to dig heads out of the sand and tackle things from the bottom up – radically, comprehensively and free of preconceptions.
The Bottom-Up Strategy: the more he thought about it, the more he liked it. It was timely, it was audacious, it was exhilarating: a sharp twist of hard and soft and Left and Right. Holistic and ethical but tough-minded and pragmatic too, always with a hard business eye on the bottom line. Under its banner he could marshal the toughest of free marketeers, the greenest of Greens, the shrillest and pinkest of activists – all those Monbiots, Pikettys, Sachses, Stiglitzes and Krugmans. And he, Howard Springer, would be the one out in front waving the flag!
But as a banner The Bottom-Up Strategy just wouldn’t do. Too basic, too lavatorial. The Make-Over Moment perhaps? No, that sounded like something from a fashion magazine. Something with ‘Renaissance’ in it maybe? No, wait, The Phoenix Project: what about that? Yes, that had the right ring!
Already Howard was beginning to feel better. He wouldn’t bounce back, he’d bounce forward. Today’s setbacks had been a blessing in disguise, forcing him to take the necessary leap into the future. Of course he and Tanya would have to split. The spoils would have to be divided too. Thank God for that prenup! Well, he had too much stuff anyway. Out with it all! A new pared-down lifestyle would be necessary, one in keeping with The Phoenix Strategy, one that was chastely tasteful and austerely elegant. And the timing was right too. He was tiring of Tanya’s hard lacquered shell, her icy cosmopolitan perfection. He was craving something softer, something closer and warmer – something younger. A vision of his new research assistant, his latest ‘quant’, dark-eyed, tall and shapely, swam into his brain.
Yes, he was definitely feeling better. Howard turned and headed with quick, decisive steps back to his bedroom. There he pulled open his bedside cabinet and reached once more into his snuff box.