What was being decided today was whether the company had learned anything or whether it was just going to swap one face at the top and keep the machine running underneath. At 2:00, the board convened for the final time on the matter, and Victoria Hayes walked in and took her seat at the head of the table because she was still technically the CEO, and she would be until the vote stripped it from her, and she was determined to make them do it in the light. Coleman let her speak first. It was the last courtesy the board would extend her, and everyone in the room understood it as such. Victoria stood.
She had prepared remarks. She had prepared them all night, and they were in their way. Magnificent, a defense of her record, the growth numbers, the 2,200 jobs she'd created, the two recessions she'd steered them through the shareholders she'd made rich. And for about 4 minutes, it was the old Victoria commanding and sharp and utterly persuasive. And Laura Bennett, watching from three seats down, felt an old traitorous flicker of the admiration she'd once had for this woman before it all curdled.
And then Victoria made her mistake. Her last one as it turned out because she could not help herself. She reached the end of the numbers and instead of stopping, instead of sitting down while she was ahead, she turned to the one subject she could never leave alone. And I would remind this board, she said, her voice rising, that everything we've suffered these past weeks traces back to one moment, one man's wounded pride. One investor who decided that a 30-second social misunderstanding was worth destroying 2,000 livelihoods over.
If you want to talk about character, let's talk about the character of a man who would freeze $180 million because he wasn't fawned over the instant he walked in the door. That's not the behavior of a great man. That's the behavior of a fragile one. And the room which had been listening went cold. It was David Okafor again, the junior board member, the one who'd broken her story open 3 weeks ago.
He didn't stand this time. He just spoke quietly, and the quiet was worse. He didn't freeze the deal because he wasn't fawned over. David said, He froze it because you looked at a man and decided he was nothing before you knew a single thing about him. And the reason that's disqualifying to a man like Carter isn't that his feelings got hurt.
It's that he understood something in that second that took the rest of us 3 weeks and a federal grade investigation to figure out. He understood that a person who will treat a nobody like garbage is a person who has garbage in them and it'll come out everywhere in every evaluation, every hire, every vendor, every decision forever. He didn't overreact, Ms. Hayes. He read you correctly in 4 seconds. And everything that's happened since has just been the rest of us catching up to what he already knew.
David paused. You want to call that fragile? I'd call it the best due diligence I've ever seen in my life. Silence. And Victoria Hayes, standing at the head of her table for the last time, looked around the room and finally saw it.
The thing that had been true for 3 weeks, and that she'd refused with everything in her to see. There was no ally left. Not one. Not Laura, who wouldn't meet her eyes. Not Coleman, who watched her with the flat calm of a man doing a hard duty.
Not the six who'd been in the room. Not the five who hadn't. Not a single human being at that long table who was on her side. She was alone. She realized she had been alone for a very long time.
She'd just always had enough power that being alone had felt like being above. Sit down, Victoria, Coleman said not unkindly. It's time to vote. She sat. The vote took 90 seconds.
It was not close. It was not close at all. One by one around the table, they voted to remove Victoria Hayes as chief executive officer of Summit Dynamics for cause for failures in leadership, for the systematic concealment of organizational risk, for lying to the board, for attempting to alter official records, and for the attempted retaliation against employees who had come forward in good faith. When it reached Laura Bennett, Laura closed her eyes for a second before she spoke. And then she opened them and looked directly at the woman she'd stood beside for 11 years, and she said, Aye, for cause.
It was the hardest word Laura had ever said, and she knew it was also the truest. The vote passed. Unanimous save for Victoria's own, which was not solicited. Richard Coleman entered it into the record, and then he looked down the table. Victoria, the board has voted to terminate your employment as CEO effective immediately.
Peter Sun will walk you through the separation terms and the ongoing obligations under the litigation hold. Security will accompany you to your office to collect personal effects. I'm sorry it came to this. I want you to know that I mean that even though I know it doesn't help, Victoria stood one final time. And here at the very end, the room braced for one last fight, one last speech, one last denial.
It didn't come. Instead, Victoria Hayes looked around the table one more time at the empty distance her own choices had put between herself and every other person in the room, and something in her face broke open just for a second, just long enough for everyone to see the frightened younger woman underneath the armor she'd worn for 22 years. And she opened her mouth and what came out was not a defense and not an attack. It was almost a whisper. When did I become like this?