She Has Her Own Ideas

Richard turned off the answering machine.  It had been a long day.  Nobody said that running a company was going to be easy, but this was turning out to be nothing like he had expected.  Three young account executives had come to him today and asked him if they could skip his procedures and just do it their way.  They said they felt restricted artistically by the rules he had built into the system they used.  The point of the system was to open up possibilities, he had been thinking as they spoke.  What could he do?

Getting away for the night was a good thing.  It never occurred to him that he would never go back.  It never occurred to him that not only would he never work another day, that there was a chance that he might not survive the night.  Why would it? 

An hour after dinner the chest pains started.  He'd had chest pains before.  It had been a running joke in his mind, about them, that his mother was arguing with him whether he was an adult now, whether he was trying to run the company too soon.  He owned the company, so he figured he was alright. 

There was pressure.  There was more money going out in more months than there was money coming in.  The manic cycles were taking their toll on him.  He'd had to fight the Betty Ford clinic disease, the perception from "experts" that everybody followed the pattern that they had defined.  That disease was everywhere in business these days, the perception that it had to be done in some way that didn't fit Richard's definition.  He couldn't stand having to defend doing what was right in a way that was innovative and successful, but still he had to do it, daily.  He ran a communications company.  He had to communicate.

He'd grown to reject those experts who classified everything according to their labels.  He hated their world, in fact.  That was one of the reasons he was having trouble understanding the executives' complaint.  They were able to do what they want as long as it could be brought around to the goal of the business, to teach how to communicate, and to create relationships with various businesses and people who needed networking assistance.  The forms were freeing, supposedly, built to create communication of goals and to draw out wants and needs, skills and desires.  What can I do to help you see clearly?  That was the central question of the business.

Richard went to bed at twelve minutes past eleven.