She Gave a Single Dad the Worst Office in the Building — He Turned It Into the Busiest Room
Chapter 8
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"I gave you the worst office in this building so you would understand your position," she said. "You turned it into a stage.""I never invited anyone to watch me perform.""$8.4 million walked into my lobby and went to the basement.""He asked where the work was," Graham said. "I showed him."She told him that no further group sessions would be held in B-17 until compliance had reviewed whatever it was he had constructed down there. Graham said he would comply, and then he asked for two things which she had not expected: he asked for the instruction in writing, and he asked that the 14 open matters currently being coordinated out of that room be reassigned to named individuals before the room went dark, because otherwise they would return to the condition they had been in, and the 30 days Keen had given them had 26 left.Victoria heard the second request as a threat dressed as diligence. She said she would take it under advisement, which meant no.That evening, she stayed late and pulled the operational dashboard herself for the first time since her second week, instead of reading the summary: aged open items were down 31% over five weeks. It was the single number she had promised the board in September. She sat with it for a while, pleased, and then she opened the underlying records—which took her 20 minutes to find—and started reading the coordination notes on the closures. Most of them had the same three letters and two digits in them: B-17.She was still looking at it when Blair knocked at 7:40 with a tablet under her arm and a different report on it. Blair had been doing her own reading: across the previous 11 months, more than 400 service requests had been marked complete in the system before the client confirmed resolution, some of them by 30 days or more. It was, Blair said, exactly the kind of exposure an outside auditor would find first, and exactly the kind of thing that happened when people improvised outside of approved process.Victoria moved down to the end of the summary sheet, where the quarterly performance attestation was reproduced, because she already knew what she was going to see and wanted to be wrong about it.The signature on it was hers.Blair did not need to lie. That was the thing Graham would think about afterward, during the two weeks he spent at home watching the lilac in the side yard come apart in the wind: every sentence in the memo she produced on Monday was accurate. An employee had convened cross-functional sessions in a space with no approved charter; those sessions had produced decisions that were documented in a personal notebook before they were documented in the system of record; client communications had occurred in a setting outside the account governance framework.Nothing in it was false, and all of it pointed in one direction.