Victoria looked at Caleb. That was your condition? She said slowly. Yes. Why?
Because destroying the company to make a point about how the company was failing its people would be the most counterproductive thing I could do. Caleb said, "The people on that fourth floor, the ones who've been here for years, the ones who are building good things in spite of the culture problems, they didn't fire me, and they shouldn't pay for the decisions of the people who did." She was very quiet. "You're protecting the company," she said. "I'm protecting the people in it," he said.
"Which is the same thing if you're doing it right." The investigation took 11 weeks. The firm Richard brought in a specialized corporate culture consultancy out of Chicago that had done this kind of work for seven Fortune 500 companies arrived the following Monday with a team of eight people and a methodology that began with anonymous surveys and ended with direct interviews of 312 current employees. During those 11 weeks, Caleb came back to the building, not to the fourth floor, not to the executive level. He set up in a small office on the eighth floor that had been used as a secondary storage space, which required moving about 40 boxes of obsolete marketing materials, which he did himself on the first morning with the help of Gerald from the security desk, who had appeared at his side without being asked, and began carrying boxes without a word in the manner of a man who had decided some time ago that he owed this person something, even if he couldn't fully articulate why.
Every morning for 11 weeks, Caleb arrived at 7:30 a.m. He read reports. He took meetings with the investigation team. He reviewed documentation and financial records and the employment histories of people who had left the company over the past 3 years. He also three times a week walked the floors not as a shareholder, not announced. He walked them the way he had walked them as an operations associate.
Slowly paying attention, stopping to talk to people, asking specific questions about specific parts of their work, and listening to the answers with the full unhurried focus that people so rarely receive from anyone with power that they sometimes became visibly uncertain how to respond to it. He talked to a man named James on the tech development floor who had been with the company for 6 years and who had submitted the same internal proposal for a product improvement three times over 18 months and received no response to any of the three submissions. When Caleb asked him what the proposal was about, James described it in 14 minutes with the barely contained energy of someone who has been waiting a very long time for someone to simply ask. The proposal was excellent. Caleb told him so.
James looked at him with an expression that was complicated, grateful, and skeptical. In equal measure, the expression of someone who has received compliments from people in power before and has learned to wait and see if the compliment is connected to anything real. I'll be following up on this, Caleb told him. With respect, James said carefully. I've heard that before.
I know, Caleb said, which is why I'm going to give you my direct contact information, and I want you to email me the proposal by end of this week, and I want you to follow up with me in 2 weeks if you haven't heard back. James was quiet for a moment. Why are you doing this? He asked. It was a genuine question, not a suspicious one.
He wasn't asking, "What's your angle?" He was asking with the earnest bewilderment of someone who has been operating inside a system for so long that genuine interest from above feels fundamentally unfamiliar. Because your idea is good and this company should be using it, Caleb said. And because you've been here 6 years and nobody has answered your emails and that is a failure I want to correct. James nodded slowly.