She had her hand on the knob when he spoke again. Sloan. She turned. He was still facing the stove. You asked the right question on Monday when you said why I didn't wake [clears throat] up in time.
But you asked it too late. You already had your answer decided. He paused. Start asking before you decide. That's the whole thing.
She stood there for a moment with that. Then she opened the door and went out into the night. The 10 days before the Meridian demonstration flight were among the most demanding of Sloan's professional life, which was saying something because most of her professional life had been demanding. The replacement of the hydraulic actuator had set back the pre-flight certification sequence by 36 hours, which cascaded into every department simultaneously and required a reorganization of schedules that made absolutely nobody happy. On top of that, the board had gotten wind of the termination and the technical fault through some channel Sloan couldn't immediately identify, and two board members had called within 48 hours of each other to express concern.
Not about the fault, not about the safety implications, but about the optics of a wrongful termination story emerging during a high-profile demonstration event. She handled both calls with more restraint than she felt. The fault was identified and repaired, she told them. The aircraft is safe. The demonstration will proceed.
And the mechanic, said the first board member, a man named Aldrich, who had been on the board since before Sloan took over and had opinions about everything. That's an internal HR matter, Sloan said. Is it being managed? I'm managing it personally, she said, which was true, though probably not in the way Aldrich meant. The second call was from a woman named Carver, who was more direct.
The concern, Carver said, is that if this becomes a public issue before the demonstration, our clients representatives are going to have questions we don't want to answer in front of cameras. Then we make sure it doesn't become a public issue, Sloan said. How? By doing the right thing, Sloan said, which generally has a lower chance of becoming a public issue than the alternative. Carver was quiet for a moment.
That's not a strategy, Sloan. It is, Sloan said. You just have to believe it works. She hung up and looked at the ceiling and acknowledged privately that she had no idea if it would work, but that the other options felt like things she wasn't willing to do anymore and she wasn't entirely sure when that had happened. She spent those 10 days doing something she hadn't done since the very early years of the company before the growth made it impractical or before she had convinced herself it was impractical.
She started walking the building, not in the way executives walk buildings, which is purposeful and project specific and involves an entourage. She walked it the way she used to when it was smaller, when she knew every person by name and the work felt close enough to touch. She showed up to the early shift before the management team arrived. She sat in the breakroom near the hangar and drank bad coffee out of a machine that dispensed it in a paper cup with a styrofoam shell and was almost certainly a health hazard. And she let people talk at her or not talk at her depending on what they felt like.