The Business

The original things were those ghastly little pots with aluminium covers that it took both hands to open, if you were lucky, and which — even if you opened them carefully — usually splattered their contents over you.  It was Uncle Freddy who came up with the much neater modern version, which opens cleanly and can be worked one-handed; one of those things most of us look at and think, Why didn't anybody think of that before? or, I could have thought of that…Except that Uncle Freddy actually did.

ChilpsTM are, literally, tiny things, but they're produced by the billion every year; the tiniest royalty on each one soon builds up to a very considerable fortune indeed, and as Uncle F invented the thing, he's got the patent and so he gets all the money; his promotion to Level Two in the Business was honorary.  That kind of thing can throw out our system a bit, but somehow we manage to accommodate even the Uncle Freddies of the world.  A better solution for us as a company, of course, would have been to have owned the patents corporately, and there are a few lucrative ones which we do own, and a few more we are cautiously optimistic about.

An example is the IncanTM.  This is a tube made from aluminium, plastic or even waxed paper, designed to deliver two measured doses of finely ground powder into the nasal passages.  It's registered with every major patent office in the world as a way to deliver either snuff or some sort of medicinal draught into the user's nose, but nobody who knows about it is under any illusions about its real role and we have no intentions of letting it be used for such a mundane purpose.

It's a cocaine-delivery device for when, eventually, the stuff is legalised.  You'll buy a pack of IncansTM no bigger than a pack of long cigarettes from wherever is licensed to sell them (by which time, of course, you may not be able to purchase legally a pack of tobacco cigarettes), pop the tab off one, snort, snort, and bingo!  No chopping, cutting and ploughing into stupid little lines on a mirror or the top of a toilet cistern, unless you're so into ritual you regard that as the best bit.

I've tried them at our labs in Miami; they work. (Best of all for us, they work only once; unless you're some sort of Unabomber-style micro-engineer you can't easily refill them.) The aluminium ones are very sleek and sexy and will be the original, premium product.  They look a little like silver rifle-shell cases.  We may do steel gold-plated versions for the luxury and exclusive gift end of the market.  The plastic version is more mass-market, more blue collar.  The wax paper ones are aimed at the more environmentally aware consumer and are biodegradable.

We have high hopes for the IncanTM.

Back to the subject of corruption, racketeering, bribery, blackmail and other common business practices.  Even though our organisation has always been tolerant of such victimless 'crimes' as prostitution, blasphemy, drug-taking, belonging to a trade union, sex and/or procreation outside marriage, homosexuality and so on, the societies in which we have to live and with which we have to trade have usually had other ideas, so secrecy and blackmail have never been entirely off the menu.

We are, above all, pragmatists.  Corruption is frowned upon not because it is intrinsically evil but because it acts like a short-circuit in the machinery of business, or a parasite on the body corporate.  The point is to reduce such behaviour to a tolerable level, not to attempt seriously to eradicate it utterly, which would call for a regime so strict and confining it would limit the abilities of the organisation to change and adapt, and stifle its natural enterprise even more severely than widespread corruption would.  Even so, what we regard as a tolerable level of internal corruption is — thanks to our rules on financial transparency — positively microscopic compared to that in just about every other organisation we do business with, and it is a matter of considerable pride for us that in any given transaction or deal we will almost without exception be the most honest and principled party involved.

We're quite happy to deal with corrupt regimes and people, so long as the figures are all above board at our end.  In many cultures a degree of what is termed corruption in the West has long been a respectable and accepted part of the way business is done, and we are ready, willing and able to accommodate this. (In the West, of course, it is just as common.  It's just not respectable.  Or publicised.)  In all this, of course, we're just the same as any other business or state.  It's just that we've been doing it longer and are less hypocritical about it, so we're better at it.  Practice makes perfect, even the practice of corruption.  It ought to be one of our mottoes:  Corruption — we deal with it.

Voting for your immediate superiors usually strikes outsiders as the most bizarre of our business practices.  Manual and clerical workers tend to find the concept unlikely and bizarre, while those higher up have been known to react with outraged disbelief: how can it possibly work?

It works, I guess, because people generally are not stupid, and. we do our best to recruit people who are smarter than most.  It works, also, because we are used to taking, and are able to take, a long-term view, and perhaps because the practice does not extend into every other organisation we deal with and undertake joint operations with.

We have had several expensive but unpublished studies performed by highly respected universities and business colleges, which have tended to support our belief that letting people vote for their bosses means that a greater proportion of able and gifted people flourish and rise using this method than any other.  The more usual system, where people are picked out from above, does have certain advantages — talented people can often rise more quickly, skipping several layers of management at once — but it is our firm belief that this leads to more problems than it solves, producing a culture where those on any given level within a company are constantly trying to find ways to flatter those above them, sabotage the careers of their colleagues on the same corporate rung, exploit, oppress and denigrate those on the levels beneath them and generally spend far too much time frivolously furthering their own selfish ends and their status within the company when they ought rightfully to be engaged in the far more serious and productive pursuit of making all concerned more money.

Our system doesn't put an end to all office politics, of course, nor does it reliably weed out every plausible rogue, gifted bully or lucky idiot, but it does make them easier to spot, control and ditch before they get too far.  Gaining promotion by fooling your boss, especially one prone to flattery or sexual favours, can be relatively easy.  Gaining the trust of those who work with you every day and will have to take orders from you if you are promoted is a lot more difficult.

The usual objection to all this is:  Don't people tend to vote for people who'll give them an easy ride?

Sometimes they do, and a division of our company might suffer because there is a natural-born vacillator in charge, but people can be demoted by those immediately below them, too, or pensioned off, and — worst case — an entire department can be closed down from above, its structure dismantled, its duties redistributed and its perso

This almost never happens.  People would rather elect to put somebody in charge over them who knows what they're doing and whom they respect — even if they know that some of that person's later decisions will be disagreeable — than work under somebody who will damage all their interests by taking either no decisions or only easy ones.

We have works councils, too, in most of our wholly owned subsidiaries, though those tend to be at the sort of levels I'm not terribly familiar with.