DISCIPLINE THREE

Before Jamie could continue, Vince’s phone rang. He picked up the receiver. “You’re kidding.” Vince looked over at Jamie with a smile of disbelief. “Yeah, put him through.” After a brief pause, Vince greeted the caller: “How are you doing, Rich?”

Jamie hadn’t yet digested the situation.

“Well, in fact, it has been a while, hasn’t it?”

Suddenly it hit Jamie. Rich O’Connor was on the line. Vince could see the panic overtake Jamie. Does Rich know I’m here? Jamie thought. This must be a setup. Shit.

Vince ended the call. “Sure, I’ll be around. I’ll look forward to it. See you then.” And he hung up. He seemed amused by Jamie’s sudden loss of confidence. “What’s the matter? Seen a ghost?” he teased.

Jamie was a little jumpy. “What’s going on? How does he know I’m here?”

“Whoa. Slow down a little. First of all, nothing is going on. Rich has no idea that you’re here.”

“Is that normal for you to get a call from him?”

Vince laughed. “Only if you think that once every two or three years is normal.” He could see Jamie squirm, so he offered a little reassurance. “Stop worrying, Jamie. You said it yourself: there is nothing preventing you from talking to me. Hell, they didn’t even make you sign a noncompete clause. You’re fine.”

Jamie couldn’t deny that Vince was correct. Still, something seemed wrong, and he persisted: “What did he want?”

“I’m not sure.” Vince shrugged. “But it must be fairly important if he wants to see me.” He seemed relieved to be receiving some of Rich’s attention.

Jamie just sat there shaking his head.

With a new enthusiasm for learning about the final two disciplines, Vince prodded his guest. “Okay, let’s talk about the next one.”

It took Jamie a moment to regain his focus, and even then the first sentence out of his mouth sounded as if it was coming from someone in a daze. “Right. The third discipline is about communication.” Jamie stopped, as if he were done explaining.

“Okay. What about communication?”

Jamie finally came around. “Oh, well, it’s about communicating everything we just talked about. The clarity issues.”

Vince tried to complete the thought. “You mean purpose and values and mission and objectives and all of that?”

“Right. The third discipline is ‘Over-communicate the identity and direction.’”

“Over-communicate?” Vince frowned. “That sounds like something negative.”

Jamie was nodding. “Yeah, that’s what I thought when I first read it too. But I learned later that Rich thinks that in order to communicate something adequately, it has to be communicated so many times that the people doing the communication think they’re beating a dead horse.”

The look on Vince’s face seemed to say, That’s weird.

Jamie continued. “Remember how I said before that every member of Rich’s team could recite, and with passion, all of the issues relating to clarity?”

Vince nodded.

“Well, that’s because the guy says them over and over and over.” Jamie seemed to suggest that Rich really was over-communicating. “And the thing is, he makes his entire team do the same thing with their people. And then he does it with the whole company too. I told you, the guy is obsessed.”

“So how do they go about doing all this?”

Jamie took a deep breath, as if just thinking about the repetition was making him tired. “Well, first there’s the orientation of new employees. I was lucky enough to miss out on his spiel, but Rich and a few members of his staff take two hours every other week to tell new employees about the history of the company, the values, the purpose, and everything else.”

Vince wrote something down.

“But that’s not all,” Jamie continued. “Every time he gives a speech, or sends out an e-mail message, or even talks to a small group of people, he repeats this stuff.”

Vince seemed doubtful. “Every time?”

“Well, not in exactly the same way, but he’s constantly referring to it. It felt like listening to my grandfather tell the same stories over and over. But apparently no one over there seems to mind. They’d sit and give him their complete attention every time.”

“And his staff does the same thing?”

“Not quite like Rich does, but they’ve definitely drunk the Kool-Aid.”

Vince stared out the window, shaking his head slowly. Jamie assumed he was marveling at the ridiculousness of what he was hearing. He had no idea that Vince was beginning to understand.

Vince pushed the conversation forward. “Earlier you said something about posters. That Telegraph doesn’t have any of this stuff on posters around the office?”

Jamie now seemed a little miffed as he considered the point. “That’s right. As fanatical as they are about over-communicating, they would not let me have five thousand dollars to do a campaign around the company’s values. I wanted to have some golf shirts done too, and make posters that we could use to spruce up their offices.”

“Are you sure it was about the money?”

Jamie shook his head. “No, it was about Rich. He was adamant about not using anything slick or glossy, as he called it, to convey the identity of the company.”

“Why do you suppose?” Vince wondered if Rich had become some sort of eccentric tyrant. He hoped he had.

“Rich always said that the minute you make any of this feel like a marketing campaign, it loses its—what was the word he used? It loses its ‘groundedness.’ He would say that ‘it starts to feel like a slogan more than a reality.’”

At that moment, Jamie and Vince looked up at a framed poster on the wall above the conference table where they sat. It showed a fighter jet racing across the sky. In the background an enemy plane of some kind could be seen nose-diving toward the earth, smoke spewing from its tail. The caption below read, “SMARTER—BETTER—FASTER—GREENWICH.” For a moment, Vince almost felt embarrassed, but he decided that would be a waste of his energy.

To break the awkward moment, Jamie stood, went to the white board and wrote down discipline three:

DISCIPLINE THREE: OVER-COMMUNICATE ORGANIZATIONAL CLARITY.

Vince looked down at his watch. “Okay then. Let’s talk about the last discipline.”

At that moment there was a knock at the door, and before Vince could respond, his assistant, Tracy, was already poking her head in. “Sorry to bother you, but Rich O’Connor’s on his way up.”

Jamie froze.