CHAPTER TWELVE

PAST

 I’m not the best CEO in the world; I’m OK, but it does not come naturally to me. I had to learn the skills off others and from reading books. My real skill, the one that comes entirely naturally and takes literally no effort, is starting businesses. I can start a business easier than I can catch a ball and that’s no joke. But running them, well I get bored.

Because I get bored I have become one of the world’s best delegators. No one gets micro managed in my businesses and everyone is enthusiastically encouraged to fulfil their potential to the maximum. I learned very early on in my career that the best way to learn is to make a mistake at something, a wonderful boss called John Yates taught me that lesson, and where possible I’d let employees make their own mistakes, then help them learn. In 25 years of running my own businesses I’d never had cause to raise my voice even once, you don't teach people anything by shouting at them.

Which is why I appeared to be a stranger even to myself as I stood in the doorway of the office shouting at Angel at the top of my voice. I’d said my piece over half an hour ago but Angel felt the need to continue the conversation, spin the conversation and flip it over like a pancake, AGAIN AND AGAIN, until it turned into an argument. As someone who had great composure around my staff I found, that for some inexplicable reason, I could not prevent myself getting dragged into this ridiculous disagreement. The other staff sat in silence staring at their boss, the nice English boss who was more likely to buy them ice cream when they screwed up than shout at them; more likely to sit down for an hour discussing what went wrong with them than to dock their pay, the way Bulgarian boss’s usually do. The spectacle was like a car crash to them; they knew that really should not stare at the wreckage, but human instinct forced them to do just that.

Angel had, within days of joining, started issuing orders to the staff, insinuating they came from me. I’d warned her on several occasions to stop doing it and concentrate on her own job. A job that, despite her obvious talents, was NOT going as well as I’d expected.

This time the interference had cost the company, in other words ME, some serious money and in the simplest, most ridiculous way possible.

We shipped over one thousand packages a week direct to customers from our office in Bulgaria. These were product lines that we sold only a small quantity of and therefore not sufficient to send to F.B.A. Every one of these packages went air-mail to the customer. Airmail is about the most expensive way you can get a package to a customer and its cost is exponentially linked to weight.

Postal pricing is not linear, it’s in bands. 1g can take you up a price band and if that price band is the 1001g + band, it just cost you $5! A few grams on every package has the potential to cost you hundreds if not thousands of dollars a week.

Over the years I’d worked out a fine balance, literally down to the gram, on the quantity of packaging needed to protect the contents versus the number and cost of refunds for damage claims. We had experimented with every form of packaging known to man but the traditional padded envelope had proved most effective. For especially delicate items we had a rigid strip of single ply corrugated cardboard to encapsulate them and every item was individually wrapped in industrial grade cling-wrap; the cling wrap being surprisingly effective at preventing damage, for reasons I never quite understood. To keep the weight down as much as possible we even had the ‘Thank You’ slips printed on an expensive linen paper used for business cards, it looked great but more importantly it was one third the weight of a card at only 8g per Thank You slip.

Angel’s job as F.B.A. Manager meant she should never even come into contact with the direct shipping side of the operation. Nevertheless, she had instructed the two girls who did the packing to increase the quantity of packaging materials they used. When R2, nicknamed R2 since she was the second Ruby to join the company, had objected to Angel’s instructions, Angel ended the discussion with ‘the Boss told me to tell you’. A statement we would now call an alternative fact, but at the time was simply an outright lie.

The postage bill shot up by $4,000 in the two months after Angel’s intervention. In the same time the damage claims had reduced by $200. Allowing staff to learn, where possible, from their mistakes in their own job was one thing - But having staff flush $4,000 of net profit, MY MONEY, down the toilet in an area of the business they had NOTHING to do with was quite another.

However, it was still not enough to get me to lose my temper and break a 25-year record of never raising my voice to staff. No, what got me to lose my temper for the first time in 25 years was that, for the first time in 25 years, I had an employee brazenly switch from taking the credit for something to blaming others for it - all the while refusing to accept any responsibility whatsoever.

When I walked into the office and enquired in a sunny voice whose idea it was to use more packaging? R2 and the other packaging girl, Tanya, chorused “Angel.”

Angel’s face beamed a broad, proud smile preparing to bask in the glory she assumed was on its way, declaring that she had noticed the cost of damage related refunds and worked out they exceeded the cost of packaging materials.

“It was the obvious thing to do, I was surprised you didn't think of it!” she was still beaming and everyone caught the condescending tone of her comment.

“Angel, that’s really R2’s job to deal with the packaging,” I explained calmly. “And, in fact I had thought if it, very carefully actually, down to the gram I had thought of it.” I explained slowly. “I’d also considered the postage cost implications.”

“Well, they’re not much,” she stated, as if she’d thoroughly researched the issue and was in full command of the facts.

“Actually, they were $4,000 for the two months since you came up with the idea.” Again, I spoke slowly hoping my words would sink in and help her realize and learn from her mistake.

“Rubbish, you’re just trying to make me look bad in front of everyone!” she snapped in a scathing tone. Her accusation was like an invisible smack in the face, the thought that I would cause a disagreement with the motive of making her look bad in front of others was ludicrous to me, and the fact that her mind conjured up such a thought was almost as shocking as what her actions were doing to the business.

“I assure you I have no intention of trying to make you look bad, see for yourself,” I held out a copy of the past six months of postage figures. “You will clearly see the volume has increased yes, but 2 months ago the cost per unit went up 50 cents. We shipped eight thousand units, that and additional $4,000 - and before you say it, the product mix was the same as always”.

A simple ‘I never realized' would have ended the discussion there and then, we would have discussed the issue of getting involved in other people’s jobs in private, at a later date. But for me it would have been over.

“Why are you talking to me about it? I don't do the packaging. Talk to Tanya and R2 about it, it’s THEIR JOB” she said, shooting a look in the direction of the packing station. Angel no longer worked in the main office since she had involved herself in other people’s jobs too often. She now had her own cubicle in the room designated for stock and packaging.

“The girls pack exactly the way they are told to pack. You issued them to increase the packaging.”

“We both told her that you had been very clear,” said R2, her eyes darting back and forth from me to Angel, then back to me. Fear was written all over her face, being the last hired she was visibly worried that she was going to be in the dog house for this mess.

“We both told her that you had been very clear, you'd even given us a laminate to follow and put it on the wall and that we wanted to do it the way we had been told,” she continued.

“Then why didn’t you?” I asked gently. R2’s eyes were so full of tears I couldn’t believe they still hadn’t come pouring down her cheeks.

“Angel told us it was you that wanted the change,” her voice cracked as she spoke.

My instinct was to end the public discussion before it evolved into an argument as to who said what, where and when. However, Angel had no such intentions. I had never met anyone with logic even remotely resembling Angel’s. Her logic on culpability would have made Heinrich Himmler gasp at the audacity.

“Yes, I did say that but,” she looked over at Ruby and R2 with disdain, “if those two were any good at their job THEY WOULD HAVE IGNORED WHAT I HAD SAID! NO ONE FORCED THEM TO LISTEN TO ME. THEY SHOULD HAVE JUST DONE THEIR JOB THE WAY THEY WERE SUPPOSED TO!”

A silence filled the room. From the second they admitted they changed the packaging, Angel jumped on them. Their current claim that they didn't want to do as Angel instructed was irrelevant in her mind, and their admitting their part in the change was now being held up as conclusive proof of their guilt….and her innocence. Angel was trying to force everyone to ignore WHY they did what they did and simply punish them for WHAT they did. Forget the fact that she had LIED to them and they only consented because they THOUGHT I was the one who instructed the change, no in Angel’s mind none of that mattered – all that mattered was that THEY were to blame for following HER instructions!!!

“THEY are incompetent and THEY should pay you back the $4,000 because THEY did not do what THEY knew to be THEIR job!” She was now yelling and practically foaming at the mouth. “THEY know this has nothing to do with ME. THEY had no business listening to ME! Why did they listen to ME?”

The two girls R2 and Ruby, were now in tears, terrified they were going to be docked this un-imaginable sum of money. $4,000 is TEN MONTHS wages to an average person in Bulgaria, I paid my staff multiples of the average, but it was still a huge amount of money.

“ARE YOU CRAZY, DO YOU HEAR YOURSELF?” I screamed and everyone including me was surprised at the barreling sound of my voice. Anger ran like molten lava through my veins,

“WHY ARE YOU SCREAMING AT ME, THEY ARE THE ONES THAT MADE THE MISTAKE,”

“NO ANGEL, THEY’RE NOT,” my blood pressure was rising at her inability to be rational. “YOU ARE ANGEL.” I put my hands on her shoulders and turned her so that she was facing the mirror hanging on the wall. “YOU, YOU ARE THE ONE THAT MESSED UP -YOU.” She shoved my hands off of her shoulders and I could see that they were shaking with rage.

“HOW DARE YOU BLAME ME FOR THEIR INCOMPETENCE?”

I was seething with anger that seemed to grow and swell inside of me, but it was no longer because of the mistake that had taken place, but it was due to the sheer inability or unwillingness to own her mistakes that was setting me off. I had never had a disagreement like this with someone before – where the person says yes, I told them to do it but it’s THEIR FAULT FOR LISTENING TO ME!! How could she let those words out of her mouth and think they even remotely sound rational?

“HOW CAN YOU GET SIXES YOUR WHOLE LIFE AND NEVER DEVELOP THE ABILITY TO SEE YOUR OWN SIMPLE MISTAKES? HOW STUPID CAN YOU BE?” I knew it was mean, but I had been pushed over the edge and was having a hard time finding my footing once again.

“YOU ARE JUST JEALOUS OF MY GRADES, OF MY ABILITIES. YOU JUST WANT TO MAKE ME LOOK BAD BECAUSE I’M SMARTER THAN YOU.”

I had to fight, exert real, genuine effort to not put my fist through something. The conversation was spinning in so many directions my mind felt dizzy and incoherent. Her argument was so illogical that my brain had to work double time to make sure I was even hearing her correctly, that’s how ludicrous she sounded.

We shouted back and forth for a few more minutes until finally she left, once again storming away and slamming the door. I was left standing there, the sound of weeping voices filling the sudden silence.

For the first time in 25 years I acted in a way that was foreign to me, in a way that completely took me by surprise. I was fuming at the illogical and unreasonable explanations and blame shifting of Angel, but seeing two of my hard working, dedicated staff in tears over the utterly unjustified allegations pushed me passed my limit.

And what made it worse was that R2, the hardest working of all my staff, the girl who had the lowest error rate we had ever recorded, the girl that brought light and joy to those around her while doing a mundane job, despite being only 16 years old; R2 was in tears and R2 was Angel’s baby sister.

That’s what caused me to lose my temper and shout at an employee.

After the event I felt sick, physically sick, with myself for my loss of control, my loss of composure. I had good reason, very good reason, but I felt I’d lost a part of myself and in fact I had; I had lost part of my dignity. In fact, I was so shocked by my lack of composure that I felt I had lost part of my decency as a human being; it was a feeling I was to become extremely familiar with over the next three years.