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| panda-like calm through fiction | |||||||||
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Allocation
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I remember the first job I got. I still had pimples, not like spotty adult acne, but I mean my face looked like the nastier parts of the moon- after a bombing raid. My boss was an angry, sweaty man, with a thinly grown moustache and thinner hair; I remembered even with my acne I felt like I’d won the genetic lottery when I stood next to him. But Chuck always blustered. He didn’t have an inside voice, didn’t talk to customers at a reasonable volume. That was largely why he was hiring me: because he was excitable, and it scared customers. But right that moment he was scaring me, pointing to the sprawl of cars across a small valley beside one of the busier freeways in the Metro area. “It’s all location, location location.”
I worked at his Ford dealership and went to business school nights; it took me nearly six years to graduate that way, but I’d gotten good enough at sales that my commission covered my tuition, so I got to graduate debt free (well, except what I owed on the car I sold myself). By that time my acne had cleared up; it left a few tell-tale pock marks, but honestly, the fact that I’d escaped the worst of the Edward James Olmos syndrome was enough for me. Chuck had grayed, though he’d stopped losing hair, and even his moustache had filled in a bit. “All you, kid,” he said to me, and begged me not to quit. I left him with some platitudes about training the next generation of salesmen the way he’d trained me, but there was no bullshitting the old bullshitter; still, he was respectful enough not to call me on it. I got snapped up by Ford, and put into the lower echelons of middle management; the theory was I needed to learn the details of the business before I advanced. Apparently I learned what I needed quickly, because after three months I got bumped up to a regional management position. Alan, my new boss, well, I guess he’d been my boss but now he was the man I reported to, asked me into his office to discuss my strategy. First off he asked if I had one. I’d read up on what some of the Japanese automakers were doing, what some of our competition in Europe was up to. It seemed like there were gains to be made everywhere, in fuel efficiency, safety, reliability. But I admitted that increasing the R & D budget was above my pay grade, and he laughed at that, and leaned in real close, so that I could see that his moustache, while carefully groomed, was no thicker than Chuck’s had been when I started that first job. He said he was going to share with me the secret to success in the modern auto industry: “Allocation, allocation, allocation.” “There’s market everywhere. Skewing younger, older, towards men, towards women. Towards quality, towards style. There’s always more market. Thing is, the market’s not our concern. Because my boss, my bosses’ boss, and his boss, which is the shareholders unless I skipped a boss somewhere in there, care about one thing: return on investment. R & D, infrastructure, all of it is money the shareholders want to divvy up. So it’s all about allocation of currency: where you can put the shareholders’ money to maximize their gains at the end of the financial quarter.” I looked at him for a long time out of the corner of my eye, trying to size up whether or not he wanted me to agree with this short-sighted plan. But really, R & D was above either of our pay grades. Maybe some day I’d get high up enough in the company to change things. And I did rise up through the ranks. I was smart enough, and could sell people on things, which is a talent a lot of managers lack. The problem was, as the eighties gave way to the nineties, there were more and more Alans. It wasn’t just the shrewd careermen who recognized and exploited the trend, it was everyone riding it until it virtually became policy. Only it no longer made sense; when we had a majority share of the domestic market it didn’t matter if Toyota went after the fuel conscious, or if Hyundai courted the female market, or even if GM was going after a greater slice of our truck sales. But our portion of the pie had shrunk dismally, and a strategy for maintaining was little more than letting the shareholders bleed the company dry. But I’d gotten adept at towing the company line, doing as I was told. So I continued to move up, even though in moving, I often was simply taking over for another manager who had been cut, until finally I was in a position high enough in finance that I had a say in the R & D budget, that I could push for more innovation. Only, there was no money for R & D. We’d been cutting jobs just to stay afloat. Which brings us to this morning, when my boss called me into his office. He told me that we had to cut more jobs. I asked if something had happened, because at the last meeting we’d been told we were going to break even. He said that was true, but that we had, “already allocated ten cents a share to stock dividends. If we cut the dividends the shareholders will cut us- so we’ll have to make up the difference by cutting salaries.” So I’ve been here at my desk since noon, the only one left in the office since 5:18, placing some employee records on a pile to be kept, and others on a pile to be let go. And in my mind I hear Alan’s voice, repeating, “allocation, allocation, allocation.” |
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