At this point, Ron thought that he would never make it to CEO. Like the weather of his home Florida, his character was inoffensive enough, and indecisive enough during stormy seasons. This was not to say that he never held the ambition. He, too, had this whole agenda when he joined. He clenched his fist and was eager to pluck out operational ailments furiously and relentlessly. But when words got out that he was cutting jobs, a few bad seeds popped up and threatened to sue. Naturally his hands were tied. Since then, he had been blaming those knuckle heads for a lackluster tenure. A decade of holding the SVP title meant that he had been conditioned with a S’il Vous Plaît smile and rhythmic head nodding whenever he stepped into board meetings. In the room where it happened, he was as likable as he was forgettable; just as a bobblehead figure on a car dashboard: he was close enough to the steering wheel, yet never driving. To make up for his lack in competency, he goose-stepped to the board’s commands, one quarter at a time.
So, when Larry, the board president, appointed him as interim CEO after they fired the current guy on Thursday evening, he could barely believe his turn of luck. By Friday morning, news spread that the company was still struggling after rounds of lay-offs, CEO was fired with no official replacement (that should have been his clue). Following rumors that the company may shut down soon, their stock plummeted from a miserly two dollars to a ghastly ninety cents. Ron woke up that morning in a superb mood. Birds warbled in sweet angelic duets. A beam of sunlight shone on his bald head and led him on his path of ascension. Each step in his bathrobe and slippers sent his buoyant body bouncing and twirling and sashaying towards the singing clouds. His long-forgotten dream manifested. He had willed it into existence. Who’s the best? Who’s the man now?
Ron strutted into the office on Friday with great expectation of his vision for the next five years, next ten years, next century. He decided that first, he needed to get familiar with all the buzzwords in the market these days.
“Tell me how we’re leveraging the LMMs in our technology right now.” He waited at the snack bar and grabbed the first guy he spotted.
“The what?” The engineer was only passing by for his M&Ms. “You know, AI, ML.”
“Ah, you mean Large Language Models, LLMs.”
“That’s what I said.” It was best to keep the questions vague. After all, the CEO needed to focus on the big questions. “What’s your opinion on, that?” He asked.
Obviously, a big life change turned Ron into a new man overnight, and a new man needed a new setup that matched his new social status. Bought a Ferrari on monthly payment, his new salary would have no trouble covering that. Success breeds success. Drove that baby all the way from Florida to California in his manifest destiny. Fortune favors the bold. Took his mistress to live with him in his Silicon Valley penthouse. Behind every successful man, there is a woman. Also phoned his lawyer on his drive there and filed for divorce. Move fast, break things, isn’t that so?
Larry called him in on their Monday board meeting, and his eyes got a little moist when he saw his seat at the oval mahogany table (instead of against the back wall where he spent the last ten years taking notes). He gave Larry and the rest of the board his firmest handshake and never once broke eye contact.
“The situation is, no doubt, grave,” Larry announced, “we have decided to sell the company, and we’re looking for a buyer.”
Ron didn’t know yet that any prospective buyer in their right mind would fire the entire management suite, and only keep the engineers and patents. But at the time, protecting his own vanity and perhaps sanity, he repeated the phrase he knew so well from his reflection in the bathroom mirror, “You have found the right man for the job.”
He couldn’t read Larry’s eyes behind his glasses, all he caught was a twitch of facial muscle that could have been a hidden grin. “I trust that we have.”
Stranger Under My Skin 