Eastern Promise is the latest in the Felix Hart books from Peter Stafford-Bow. It is published on July 3 but available to pre-book from June 26.
Gatesave Supermarkets had recently appointed a new CEO: a young thruster from the world of private equity by the name of Brad Schusselkind. The media called him ‘Brad the Impaler’ for his devotion to disruptive technology and his enthusiasm for dispensing with the more traditional aspects of human resources – that is to say, humans.
Brad had embraced the pandemic’s aftermath as an opportunity to revolutionise Gatesave and catapult it to the forefront of the artificial intelligence era. He had christened the new financial period Year Zero, declared that we were no longer managers but Change Agents, and fired all members of staff unable to generate one thousand new followers across their social media accounts within a week of his joining (a close shave – I managed to purchase several hundred aggressively pouting Instagram followers from a Belarussian website just before the deadline).
Cometh the hour, cometh the man, and the markets adored Brad the Impaler. Gatesave’s share price hit an all-time high and our crisis-swollen revenue streams were channelled into machine learning, large language models, robotic depots and an online-delivery drone fleet. All exciting, shiny stuff, I’m sure you’ll agree, and our institutional investors were clearly dazzled. But for me, the jury was still out. Not least because every Wednesday, at six a.m., Brad hosted a 10-minute video conference call, named ‘Break the Week’, for his senior Change Agency Leadership team. Distressingly, this included me.
Eastern Promise is the latest Felix Hart adventure
Brad was a big fan of rising before the sun. He called it Azimuthal Aspiration and it was one of the pillars of his personally crafted wellness regime, details of which were available in the link on his Instagram bio. Brad wasn’t keen on alcohol, dairy products, or late-night gallivanting, which he termed ‘sub-optimal lifestyle vectors’.
I suppose that explained why Break the Week was a crack-of-dawn online conference call rather than a midnight fondue party in a beer cellar; though if I ever attain the heady heights of the C-suite, I’ll be implementing the latter on day one, mark my words.
Anyway, I digress. Gatesave’s 100-strong team of Change Agents were obliged, every week, to log into this six-a.m. video call with camera enabled. I had resorted to taping a couple of Six Sigma PowerPoint slides to my headboard, clipping my iPad to a carefully orientated music stand beside my bed and going to sleep in a work-appropriate shirt on Tuesday night. The moment my alarm sounded at one minute to six the following morning, all I had to do was struggle into a sitting position, open the video conferencing app, rap a stylus vigorously against my cheek, and I looked ready to gallop my cavalry across the corporate battlefield and take an enemy trench before breakfast.
“We are not living through one crisis, singular!” beamed Brad, teeth shining, from my iPad screen that morning. “We are living through multiple, simultaneous crises. Crises, plural. We are experiencing a Climacteric Matrix!”
Every few seconds, the video feed of four random Change Agents appeared in a row along the bottom of the screen. As each participant spotted that they were on air, they would suddenly lift their chin and begin nodding earnestly to Brad’s inspirational brain dump.
“A Climacteric Matrix, people. Multiple, concurrent crises. Somebody, hit me, quick – what word’s an anagram of crises?”
Silence.
“Guys, I need to hear you’re ready to Break the Week! The week’s half done already! Tempus fugit, people! I want to hear my Change Agents breaking things and re-forging them, faster, leaner, smarter!”
The four faces along the bottom of the screen furrowed their brows. They were replaced by another quartet, who stroked their chins and grimaced in intense thought.
“Felix Hart!” called Brad.
I nearly leapt out of bed. There I was, in the bottom left! I hadn’t even recognised myself. Christ, I looked terrible; though in my defence, I had been drinking unfiltered orange wine at my local after-hours wine bar until two in the morning.
“Felix! Head of Beverages! Are you Breaking the Week with us, Felix? I want to hear an anagram of crises. Hit me! Go!”
“Oh, ah, erm… Christ, no, no, I mean, erm… Circus…? Crass…? Cress…? No, hang on.”
“All wrong! It rhymes with prize!”
“Erm… Cries?”
“No! The answer is… Scries! Scries! Who knows the meaning of scries?”
No-one did.
“A person who scries is one who reads the future via a reflective surface,” shone Brad. “Like a crystal ball. Or a mirror. Or…? Yes! A screen, like the device you’re using right now! Change Agents, you are witnessing the future unfold before your eyes. But listen, I don’t want witnesses. I want perpetrators. Do you understand?”
The other books in the Felix Hart series
To my relief, my picture disappeared, to be replaced by Maria from Supply Chain halfway through inserting a spoon of muesli into an angry infant’s mouth.
“I have great news, people. I’m using this call to introduce you to a group of really smart guys I’ve brought in to support Gatesave. They’re from a West Coast consultancy called Fulmination Technologies. Everyone, say hi to Scott, Raj, Ed, and Zak. These guys are going to give you the rocket fuel you’ll need to take this company orbital.”
Maria, her muesli-rejecting infant, and the other Gatesave colleagues disappeared from the screen, to be replaced by four youths in t-shirts, none of whom looked old enough to buy fireworks unaccompanied, let alone procure rocket fuel.
“Hey,” they said, in unison.
“Guys, I’m so stoked to be working with you again!” grinned Brad. “Ok, Change Agents, this week I need each of you to connect with your assigned partner at Fulmination Tech and develop a piece of creative disruption that takes this business up a level. I want to see your ideas by Friday.”
The call ended and I crept to the toilet for a pee.
- Eastern Promise by Peter Stafford-Bow is available from all good bookshops and Amazon from July 3. (ISBN 978-1-7393999-0-0). See www.PeterStaffordBow.com for more details.
