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. 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 and talking on his mobile. “It’s a restricted service at the moment,” he explained, “we don’t go commercial until next month.”
Working for an infrastructure manufacturer, Wayne had installed networks on every continent. But here? Now? When his employer was bleeding to death? It didn’t make sense.
“It makes a great deal of sense,” insisted Wayne. The country we were in could never afford to order a mobile network, argued Wayne, so why not give them one for free? “Think of it as a form of vendor financing-one where we accept up front that we’re never going to get paid.”
Despite his fine words, altruism is not in Wayne’s nature. He knows his company will be well placed for future business if the experiment works. Wayne is lucky that his company’s president is willing 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.”
Wayne 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.
Checking my e-mails that evening, I found one from Wayne. He was not at all contented. “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 chill out in a small, poor country that sounded vaguely familiar. “I chose it to get some peace and quiet. There’s no mobile coverage there.”
