The
events of the last few weeks brought to mind someone I haven’t thought about in
years, a boss at a baking job I worked during the 1980s.
A small,
petty little man, Phil was always trying to prove how much smarter he was than
anybody else, especially when it came to business.
And yet,
he was always trying to get me on his side. In a business that changed hands
about half dozen times while I worked there, I was in the best position as the
night baker, partly because nobody else wanted to work the overnight shift
alone in a shopping mall, and partly because I did my job as good as anybody
else.
Phil was
one of those nasty behind the scenes manipulators always calculating, always
trying to find ways to get over on people he did business with.
Down
deep, he must have felt shame over how he got his fortune in the first place
and desperately needed to make another fortune in a manner that was more
legitimate.
He just
didn’t know how to be legitimate or honest, and so each new maneuver was even
more unethical than the last.
At some
point after college, Phil had hooked up with a soft drink distribution company,
and managed to claw his way up to becoming manager. The job may have been at
the request of his father, who apparently was best friends with the company
owner, and needed desperately for his son to find some place to land.
As
manager, however, Phil’s true talents emerged, especially when the contract
with the soda providers came up. He underbid his own boss and then took over
contract – a matter that ended up in endless litigation. Phil was always suing
someone or being sued, and seemed to see this as a fact of life, and part of
doing business.
Buying
the bakery where I worked was his first real venture on his own, trying to
prove that his success wasn’t merely a fluke. He had a handful of cronies he
brought on with him from the soda business, hangers-on who learned how to
cultivate favor by kissing his ass, and doing anything he asked them to do –
ethical or not.
These cronies
slipped into all of the power positions in the bakery, replacing competent
people who had cultivated real and honest relationships with the previous boss
through hard work and loyalty. Most of them eventually quit because they do not
take having to answer to these incompetent jerks.
Naturally,
business suffered. Phil was into power and so were these close associates, all
leaning on the backs of fewer and fewer competent workers until those who
didn’t quit, broke down, got ill or became just like the others.
Phil put
the business up for sale. And he was just sly enough and had enough sly
shysters to forge a contract with the new owner that set high payments, and a
provision that if the new owner didn’t keep up payments, the business would
revert to Phil.
At this
point, he began to spread rumors among the employees – including me, dark talk
about how evil the new owner was, and how corrupt, and how much worse things
would get shortly, and how we all ought to get out and find new jobs before
everything fell apart.
A number
of people took this seriously, and got out – although being where I was and
seeing what I saw I knew this was a ploy, one of Phil’s calculated moves
designed to destroy the person he had made the deal with.
I asked
about it later, and he laughed.
“This
how things are,” he told me. “There are no rules in business or in politics.
You just do what you need to do and make sure you don’t get caught.”
But like
all petty dictators, Phil eventually destroyed himself. His old boss with the
soda distribution company forced a settlement that took away a lot of his ready
cash, and since Phil was never the businessman his inflated ego made him think
he was, he was forced to sell off the bakery to more competent people under
terms were far less favorable to him. He, of course, still came out ahead from
when he was a mere manager his father begged an old friend to hire, but he lost
the one thing he really craved: power.
“It
always ends that way,” a reporter friend from Verona
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