The Goal

38

I stare at him blankly.

The stewardess leans through the door.

"Are either of you going to board this aircraft?"

Jonah says to her, "Just a second, please." Then he turns to me. "Come on, Alex! Quickly! Tell me the real goal, if you know what it is."

"Power?" I suggest.

He looks surprised. "Well... not bad, Alex. But you don't get power just by virtue of manufacturing something."

The stewardess is pissed off. "Sir, if you're not getting on this aircraft, you have to go back to the terminal," she says coldly.

Jonah ignores her. "Alex, you cannot understand the mean- ing of productivity unless you know what the goal is. Until then, you're just playing a lot of games with numbers and words."

"Okay, then it's market share," I tell him. "That's the goal."

"Is it?" he asks.

He steps into the plane.

"Hey! Can't you tell me?" I call to him.

"Think about it, Alex. You can find the answer with your own mind," he says.

He hands the stewardess his ticket, looks at me and waves good-bye. I raise my hand to wave back and discover I'm still holding the cigar he gave me. I put it in my suit jacket pocket. When I look up again, he's gone. An impatient gate-agent ap- pears and tells me flatly she is going to close the door.

It's a good cigar.

For a connoisseur of tobacco, it might be a little dry, since it spent several weeks inside my suit jacket. But I sniff it with pleasure during Peach's big meeting, while I remember that other, stranger, meeting with Jonah.

Or was it really more strange than this? Peach is up in front of us tapping the center of a graph with a long wood pointer. Smoke whirls slowly in the beam of the slide projector. Across from me, someone is poking earnestly at a calculator. Everyone except me is listening intently, or jotting notes, or offering com- ments.

"... consistent parameters... essential to gain... ma- trix of advantage... extensive pre-profit recovery... opera- tional indices... provide tangential proof..."

I have no idea what's going on. Their words sound like a different language to me-not a foreign language exactly, but a language I once knew and only vaguely now recall. The terms seem familiar to me. But now I'm not sure what they really mean. They are just words.

You're just playing a lot of games with numbers and words.

For a few minutes there in Chicago's O'Hare, I did try to think about what Jonah had said. He'd made a lot of sense to me somehow; he'd had some good points. But it was like somebody from a different world had talked to me. I had to shrug it off. I had to go to Houston and talk about robots. It was time to catch my own plane.

Now I'm wondering if Jonah might be closer to the truth than I first thought. Because as I glance from face to face, I get this gut hunch that none of us here has anything more than a witch doctor's understanding of the medicine we're practicing. Our tribe is dying and we're dancing in our ceremonial smoke to exorcise the devil that's ailing us.

What is the real goal? Nobody here has even asked anything that basic. Peach is chanting about cost opportunities and "pro- ductivity" targets and so on. Hilton Smyth is saying hallelujah to whatever Peach proclaims. Does anyone genuinely understand what we're doing?