Learning Curves Read online

  With that, Jen stepped back and watched the lift door close. She looked at her watch and groaned. Bloody big mouth, she chastised herself. But she couldn’t help smiling at the look on the young guy’s face, his mouth hanging open as the doors had shut.

  “Who the hell was that?”

  George looked up in surprise at the two men as they stepped out of the lift. “Problem, Jack?” he asked curiously.

  “Some madwoman, talking about protesters like we should invite them in for tea or something,” Jack said, his eyes flashing in irritation.

  George laughed. “Sounds like my wife. Ex-wife, rather. Now, have you got the notes from your meeting with Axiom?”

  Jack nodded and the older consultant moved forward to greet George.

  “Bit more complicated than we’d thought,” he said quietly. “I’ll fill you in later, shall I?”

  5

  “Welcome back, folks. Now, we’re into week two of the course, and that means that for the next six to eight weeks we’ll be taking a look at the internal workings of organizations. Today, we are very lucky to have a guest lecturer who really knows his stuff. . . .”

  As Jay, the program director, introduced Daniel Peterson, their internal analysis lecturer, Jen nipped through the double doors and down the side of the lecture theater, squeezing in beside Lara, who looked at her curiously.

  She sat down, but as she did so, she accidentally pushed Lara’s pencil case off her desk, scattering pencils everywhere. Shooting an apologetic smile at Lara, Jen ducked down quickly to pick the pencils up, then sat back up, noticing as she did so that things had gone a bit quiet.

  Nervously, she turned to the front of the room, where their new lecturer was looking right at her, at which point she dropped her own notepad on the floor, to the hilarity of everyone sitting around her. She went bright red and stared at him in disbelief. It was him. It was the man from the men’s room at the dinner.

  “Sorry, I was, um . . .”

  He was staring at her too. He’d obviously remembered as well.

  “Yes?” he asked.

  He was sort of smiling at her now, and Jen felt herself going a deeper red. Oh, God, he was going to think that all she ever did was say sorry and blush. Still, at least this time she wasn’t pressed up against the door of the men’s loo. At least this time she was just dropping pencils and papers all over the floor.

  “Sorry,” she said again.

  “Well, then.” Daniel looked back at his notes, then briefly gazed at Jen again. She felt her heart quicken, and looked away, quickly picking up her pad and burying her head in her notes. So he was a Bell lecturer!

  As he started talking again, she watched him, taking in his dark hair, his eyes—hazel or green, she couldn’t tell at this distance—his animated expression. Not that she was interested, she told herself. She was just interested in the subject matter. Then she frowned. She couldn’t be less interested in the subject matter. So maybe it was him after all.

  “So, when undertaking an internal analysis, we start at the beginning, with a MOST analysis,” he was saying. “For the uninitiated, that’s Mission, Objectives, Strategy, and Tactics, and the four should be mutually supportive.”

  Jen shook herself and started making notes. Mission, she wrote down. Objectives. Daniel Peterson. Daniel. Dan.

  “The mission statement can be as loose as you want it to be, but it needs to give direction,” Daniel was saying. “Someone, give me an industry so that we can bring this to life a bit more.”

  No one said anything.

  “How about you?” He was looking at her. Oh God, he was looking at her and she couldn’t think of a single industry.

  “How about condom manufacturers?” whispered Lara with a little giggle as she reviewed the notes Jen had made so far. “Or motels . . .”

  Jen shot her a look and furtively covered up her notes. Her mind had just gone completely blank.

  “Come on, any industry,” Daniel said encouragingly.

  “Um . . . ,” Jen said desperately. She needed to say something. “Um . . . condom manufacturers?”

  There was a ripple of laughter across the room, and Daniel looked slightly taken aback.

  “Right,” he said, slightly incredulously. “Right, well, condom manufacturers it is. So, er . . .”

  He looked back at his notes, put his hands through his hair, then looked back up.

  “Okay, then. So a condom company might choose to be the largest global supplier of condoms if it wants to focus on growth and market share, or it might opt for better sexual health if it wants to be considered the ethical, caring provider. The first statement would suggest aggressively targeting new markets; the second might mean partnering up with bodies like the World Health Organization to improve awareness of sexually transmitted infections and building the brand as the informed choice. Either way, the intended results would be more condom sales and better profit margins.”

  “Surely a condom manufacturer is looking for market penetration?” someone at the back shouted, and there was a murmur of laughter.

  “And fighting off stiff competition,” shouted someone on the other side of the room to rapturous applause.

  Jen buried her head in her hands and wished that the ground would swallow her up.

  Daniel Peterson forced himself to look anywhere but at the girl from the charity dinner. The girl he’d thought about on and off all week, smiling each time he did. He’d expected a boring dinner full of suits—hadn’t even wanted to go, and wouldn’t have either, if his chairman hadn’t booked a table—and he’d been right, too. Except for her. She hadn’t been boring at all.

  Don’t look at her, he said to himself like a mantra. You’re a lecturer. Focus on the task at hand.

  He didn’t know why he found this lecturing lark so difficult. Sure, he wasn’t an academic; he didn’t have any teaching qualifications, but he managed to give presentations at work all the time without any problem. But of all the places for her to turn up.

  He put his hands through his hair for the third time in five minutes, a reflex action that he did when he was nervous and that sometimes meant he had to wash his hair twice a day, particularly when he was stressed.

  Okay, he told himself, you’ll just have to make the best of it. He looked around the room and saw a rather overweight young man in the front row. Perfect, he told himself. Focus on the fat guy.

  He shouldn’t have asked her to pick an industry, he thought ruefully, but somehow he hadn’t been able to stop himself. He’d been thinking about her all weekend, and now there she was, right in front of him, and he found himself utterly unable to look elsewhere. But Jesus, why did she have to choose a condom manufacturer? Was it so bloody obvious that he was staring at her? Of course it was. She was taking the piss. It was her way of telling him to back off.

  Or was she flirting with him?

  The fat guy was looking at him. He looked like he’d just said something. Damn it.

  “Great points, articulately presented,” he said quickly. He had to move away from condoms and back to mission statements. He found his eyes wandering and pulled them back to the front row. “But what I’m really trying to explain here is that the mission statement isn’t just a few words cobbled together to look good. It sets out the strategy. And if the mission statement says you’re aiming at doing good in the world, and your tactics involve getting products manufactured in sweat shops, then there’s an obvious problem there. Either the mission has to change or the tactics do.”

  “Surely business isn’t there to do good in the world,” the fat guy said. “Surely business is there to make money.”

  Daniel frowned and unconsciously put his hands through his hair again. “Yes, well,” he said seriously, “ethics is a rather big subject for me to cover today. But there are businesses whose key selling point is that they are ethical or environmentally sound or whatever. Take the growth in organic food or fair-trade coffee. It can be quite a compelling offering to customers.” He
saw Jen stare at him furtively, then look away.

  “But then the motivation is still making money; you’re just doing it by being good,” the fat guy continued. “If people stopped wanting fair-trade coffee, the company wouldn’t go on selling it, would they? They’d switch to whatever customers were buying. Business needs to be profitable, otherwise it can’t survive.”

  “Bollocks!”

  Daniel looked up quickly. It was the girl. He arched his eyebrows.

  “I’m sorry?” he asked, trying to keep his face even and normal—whatever normal looked like. Right now he couldn’t remember.

  “It’s just that he’s talking total rubbish,” Jen continued, her voice full of passion and her lips dark red as the blood rushed to them. Daniel wondered what it would be like to kiss them, then shook himself. “Companies have to be responsible—they can’t just operate like they don’t have an impact on the world. Otherwise you’d say that corruption is fine so long as customers don’t mind . . .”

  “Well, it is,” the fat guy said glibly. “Government protection schemes could be viewed as corrupt, depending which side of the fence you’re on.”

  Daniel put his hand up. “Okay, guys, thank you for your input,” he said quickly. Think work, he told himself forcefully. Focus on the issue. “This is a big issue, actually,” he found himself saying. “And you’re both right, in many ways. . . .” He thought frantically. This really wasn’t his area of expertise. “There are two ways of looking at this,” he continued, trying to look confident and self-assured. “You could argue, for instance, that if a condom firm ignores the millions of Africans dying of HIV, then soon they won’t have a market for their products. If oil companies don’t do their bit to encourage energy efficiency, they’ll have themselves to blame when the world runs out of oil altogether and their profits run dry. Or you can argue that laudable aims like solving world hunger and teaching children in the developing world to read, are all very well, but if they don’t make a profit, then a business has no reason to do them. But in today’s environment, ethics is certainly becoming more of an issue. The globalization riots, for instance, and boycotts against companies that use sweatshops are really having an impact.”

  Jen found herself staring at Daniel again. Not only was he the most beautiful man she’d ever seen, but he was clever, too.

  Lara elbowed Jen, who started slightly. “Ask him out,” Lara whispered with a little smile. “You can call it homework.”

  Jen blushed and smiled back. “I think he prefers the guy at the front,” she said with a little shrug as Daniel continued to talk, his eyes fixed directly on the front row for the rest of the lecture.

  At lunchtime, Jen popped into Bill’s office to look at his books.

  “Hey, Jen!” He grinned. “What can I do you for? Fundamentals of Management? Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Business but Were Afraid to Ask?”

  Jen smiled at him uncertainly. “Do you have anything by Daniel Peterson?”

  Bill looked nonplussed, and Jen quickly regretted asking. She might as well have said, “Do you know if Daniel Peterson has a girlfriend?” She wondered if he did have a girlfriend. Or wife.

  “I don’t think so,” Bill said, frowning. “Daniel Peterson, you say? I don’t know the name, I’m afraid.”

  “He, um, works here,” Jen said before she could stop herself. “He lectures on internal analysis . . .”

  Bill looked thoughtful, then grinned. “Dan? Dan’s not an academic! He’s what we call a practitioner. I believe he works in bookselling. Just guest lectures from time to time.”

  Jen nodded, trying to hide her excitement. A bookseller! He wasn’t a Bell employee after all—he sold books. What a great job. She didn’t usually think of booksellers as corporate strategists who would be lecturing at an MBA course, but that made him all the more appealing. He wasn’t a corporate drone. And best of all, he didn’t work for her father—at least, not entirely—he probably worked in some lovely little bookstore somewhere, lovingly displaying books about . . .

  She frowned. What if it was a business bookshop? Someone who worked in a little independent bookstore was hardly going to end up giving lectures at Bell Consulting, even if he was just a guest lecturer. She wanted to ask Bill which bookseller he worked for, but stopped herself just in time. For all she knew, he might know Daniel really well and she didn’t want Bill thinking she was a stalker.

  “So,” Bill continued. “Maybe something on information systems?”

  Jen looked at him seriously and remembered Tim’s warnings about Green Futures’ finances.

  “Have you got something on financial management?” she asked hesitantly. It wasn’t a question she ever thought she’d ask anyone, and it didn’t exactly trip off her tongue.

  “Beginner or intermediate?” Bill asked with a big smile.

  “Both,” Jen said determinedly. “If that’s okay?”

  “Nothing wrong with a bit of ambition.” Bill grinned. “And you take your time. Don’t get much call for those ones, really.”

  “I can’t think why . . .” Jen winked at him as she left, clutching the books to her chest and wondering whether they’d fit in her bag. There was no way she was taking the tube home without covering them up.

  Daniel Peterson sat at his desk and gazed out of the window, deep in thought. There was bound to be some rule about dating students.

  He frowned. Was she technically a student? And was he technically a lecturer? He wasn’t, really—it was only a sideline. This was his second year of doing it. And he’d done it more as a favor than anything else. And his CV, of course.

  But either way, it was a stupid idea. She wouldn’t be interested in him anyway.

  Daniel’s brow furrowed. When she’d looked at him and gone pink . . . and all those “sorrys,” she was just so adorable.

  But it was ridiculous. Obviously. He was just looking for a diversion. He didn’t even know her name, and “the girl from the men’s room” was hardly a good moniker. No, this wasn’t about her, he told himself firmly, it was about being bored in his job. He needed to tackle the root cause, not get strung out about some girl, however stunning she was.

  He picked up the phone. “Jane, can you get me a meeting with Frank for this afternoon? Thanks.”

  That ought to do it. A meeting with the finance director should put all ideas of romance firmly out of his head.

  6

  Jen stared at the book in front of her and frowned. Had her life really come to this? She was sitting in the library, in Bell Consulting of all places, reading a book called Financial Fundamentals, which wasn’t exactly what she’d had in mind when she’d taken on the challenge of a covert operation.

  She turned the book upside down and pushed her chair back. Sure, she didn’t want to rush into anything. Of course, she had to plan things properly and keep a low profile so that she didn’t get caught before she found out anything of importance. But there was a fine line between lying low and doing sod all just in case you get caught. And right now she was definitely erring on the side of doing sod all. Anyone would think that she was scared of actually seeing her father or something. Scared of what she might find. Anyone would think that Angel was right about this whole thing. Either that or they’d think that Jen was considering a career as an accountant.

  Jen closed the book and sighed. If she didn’t do something soon she’d forget why she was here. She stood up and wandered over to the section of the library entitled Supply Chain, which was reassuringly empty, and walked slowly down the aisle, trying to work out a plan.

  It was like Daniel said, she thought to herself. She needed to set out her mission and her objectives. Develop a strategy.

  She walked back to her table and picked up her pad and pen, concentrating hard.

  Mission: to end the corruption in Indonesia and bring the perpetrators to justice.

  For a moment, she basked in the idea of having such a noble mission, but then she shook her head. That wasn’t her miss
ion, she thought, frowning. That was her strategy. The mission was to protect people whose houses had fallen down. Twice. People who trusted companies like Axiom to do what they promised. Her mission was to make sure that this time around, their houses were built properly, by firms that got the business because of their track record, not their ability to pay bribes. But how could she have any impact on something so big? She might as well have “world peace and an end to hunger” as her mission.

  Now there was an idea.

  She frowned, then decided to skip straight to the next line. Strategy: to uncover Bell’s involvement in the corruption—specifically the involvement of one George Bell—and to alert the authorities.

  Jen sat back, imagining herself handing her father over to the police in the manner of a Scooby Doo cartoon. He would look at her angrily and say that he would have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn’t been for that meddling kid . . .

  Except she wasn’t about to uncover anything. She knew no more now than she’d known several weeks ago. And she wasn’t a meddling kid anymore.

  What would Gavin do, she wondered, trying to imagine her ex-boyfriend in her place. Much as she hated to admit it, he was pretty good at this stuff; he always seemed to know what to do, always marshalled everyone into helping. Maybe that was her problem—she was so used to following, to taking orders, that she didn’t know where to start when there was no one to tell her what to do.

  She frowned. She didn’t want to be someone who took orders. Especially not from Gavin. She could do this. She just had to get started. Find a way in.

  Jen looked at her list and realized how pathetic it looked. How pathetic she looked. Angel was right—this had been a stupid idea. Unless she was going to actually go up to her father’s office and rummage around in his files, what was the point of her being here? Nothing, that’s what. It was just another one of her mother’s crazy ideas, and she’d been stupid enough to go along with it.