and a big one

"Look, it’s something that you have in your head, in your way of seeing things. It’s not there. Come back to reality and just consider this for a moment. You said you calculated that factor into your data, anyway, so what’s the issue then? I understand it doesn’t have the weight you deem appropriate. Let’s allow the model to work itself for a while and then make adjustments. Please, no more interruptions in the Tuesday meeting like today. It has been tedious for everyone."

That’s what her boss, Marilyn Brennan-Smith, Harvard Wharton 26 years at the firm adjunct at Columbia, had to say about the calculations she tried to run for the meetings for the past three weeks. Each time she presented the method to Marilyn, Marilyn made changes to the algorithm, always fading her foreign market interdependence factor into obscurity. To her it was one of the seven drivers. Instead, Marilyn always accompanied her relegation scribbles with a story about a fellow professor here, a masters candidate there, a White House consultation with this Secretary, and that time she saved her boss from ridicule at a World Bank presentation in Geneva with a simple flip flop of a cost over-run analysis.

Back in her office, she made a few notes in the database, saved the file under her name and today’s date, copied it, made Marilyn’s magical imprint real, ran the model and watched the results on the three graphs Marilyn said were the important ski jumps to understand. She switched to the market live on her large monitor that partially blocked her view of Manhattan. To her, this was more than just about a simple number, a weight, a factor. This had to do with differing views of the world.

She remembered meeting the manager of the auto plant in Shanghai. His very pragmatic attitude, the way he could visualize the tentacles of his plant as he called them. His suppliers, the transport methods, the communications, the raw materials, the finance methods. He had said, he learned this at Stanford as an undergrad, and then later in his father’s furniture shop building benches like the one he gave to her as a gift. The one she used as a coffee table behind her. The bench reminded her that things can have different uses to different people.

An ugly rustic bench in a fish shop at a seaport in China can be an elegant coffee table in a corner office on Wall Street. And that is why Marilyn was wrong on this one. Marilyn saw a dove, she saw a gorilla. A big one.