It was a pretty violent descent. The plane was being tossed around like an ice cube in a cocktail shaker. I decided there was only one safe course of action. I blacked out.
Coming round in the airport terminal, it became clear we were in the wrong city. In fact, we were in the wrong country.
The storm had forced an unscheduled landing in a small, poor country that I’d only vaguely heard of. I switched on the mobile. It didn’t work.
But you know what airports are like. Wherever you are, you bump into an old friend. There was Wayne, sitting at the bar of course, and he was talking on his mobile. “It’s a restricted service at the moment,” he explained, “we don’t go commercial until next month.”
Wayne had spent his life traveling the world deploying mobile networks. Working for an infrastructure manufacturer, he had installed networks on every continent, in countries large and small. But here? In this impoverished backwater? And now? When his employer was bleeding to death, laying off tens of thousands in an attempt to defy gravity and rescue its plummeting share price. It didn’t make sense somehow.
“It makes a great deal of sense,” insisted Wayne. “We have the equipment and we have the people, so why not use them? It’s better than laying people off just because we have no orders for the next few months.”
The country we were in could never afford to order a mobile network, argued Wayne, so why not give them one for free? “We’re not jeopardizing future business,” he said, “Think of it as a form of vendor financing-one where we accept up front that we’re never going to get paid.”
The economic and social benefits of jump-starting least-developed countries with modern communications facilities have long been argued. But what are these benefits in practice? No one really knows because the often-discussed leapfrog in technological capability has never really happened on a sufficient scale. “Now’s the chance to find out,” enthused Wayne. “We’re offering these people the prospect of a future. We’re providing hope.”
Despite his fine words, altruism is not in Wayne’s nature. He knows very well that his company will be well placed for future business if the experiment works. Wayne is just lucky that his company’s president is sufficiently courageous and far-sighted to take such a gamble.
“I thought I was about to be fired, so I did something about it,” boasted Wayne. “My company has always admired Intel, so I challenged our president to take Craig Barrett’s philosophy to its logical conclusion. It worked!”
Wayne pulled a newspaper from his briefcase and pointed me to a quote from Craig Barrett. I began to read. “It does not make sense to overreact in the short term, because you spend lots of money hiring the work force, training them, laying them off, then end up hiring them back-it’s stupid.”
My eyes began to blur a bit. Wayne’s appetite for alcohol had not diminished over the years and keeping up with him was beginning to take its toll. But I carried on reading. “It’s better to carry on, even though it may mean the company carrying excess headcount for a period of time.”
I looked at the contented example of excess headcount sitting on the bar stool opposite me. And then I blacked out again.
“You should wake up now,” said the stewardess kindly. “We’ve arrived.”
I entered the airport terminal again. But this time it was the right airport terminal, in the right city in the right country. The storm had not been that bad after all.
Checking my e-mails that evening at the hotel, I found one from Wayne. He was not at all contented. In fact, he was very angry. “I’ve just been fired,” he wrote, “and so has my team. Twenty years of effort and experience destroyed at a stroke.”
Wayne announced he was going away to recover. He planned to chill out in a small, poor country that sounded vaguely familiar. “I chose it to get some peace and quiet. There’s no mobile network coverage there,” he wrote.
