Delegating Work
The unintended consequences of choosing the easy way
James Hawthorne Longfellow III spun the opal and jade globe that sat on the right side of his expansive, teak desk. He enjoyed the perks that accompanied being the CEO of EverLi Corporation but wasn’t in the mood to do anything other than spin the globe to choose his next vacation destination.
Longfellow was hired the previous month for a clear and imperative mission: develop new multi-million dollar projects. He spun the globe again and glanced at his watch. Today was November 17, almost time to start a six-week-long Thanksgiving through New Year’s holiday.
Longfellow picked up the solid gold phone, the only other object on his desk. His assistant answered in less than a second. “Ask Beame to come to my office immediately.” Alicia Beam was the Stanford Business School-trained Vice-President for Methods and Methodology.
Longfellow leaned back in his chair to await her arrival. He didn’t have to wait long. She knocked on his door not thirty seconds later. Promptness among underlings was another perk of being CEO.
Longfellow gestured to Beame to sit in the burgundy leather chair facing his desk. “What do you know about hydrolapatic emusatx?”
“Quite a bit,” Beame replied. She tugged her suit jacket to remove any wrinkles and pushed her glasses up. “Hydrolapatic emusatx is an environmentally-friendly method for distributing everything from native electricity to pollen to Uber Eats orders using fractally-coded diffusion patterns. I could write a book about it.”
“Excellent. I need you to draw up a plan for EverLi’s blockbuster hydrolapatic emusatx.” Longfellow rubbed his hands together. “A blockbuster it must be. We need to see at least twenty million in revenue from your plan in the first quarter of next year.”
“I’m on it,” Beame said. She stood, but before exiting Longfellow’s office, added, “Thank you for this opportunity.” Beame, fifty, calculated that Longfellow, sixty, would retire with enough time for her to take over the helm for at least half a decade. She wanted to go out as a former CEO, not as a former VP.
Beame was planning her daughter Betsy's tenth birthday party and didn’t have time to take on another project. Not between now and the end of November, that was for sure.
When Beame returned to her office, she called Sid Gauthier, the Division Head for Ambulatory Innovation. Gauthier was perfectly capable of drafting a new project plan. Beame smiled as she recalled Sid’s creativity in bed. If he’s half as innovative and energetic….
Gauthier tried to steer the conversation to a repeat visit to the Belvedere Hotel. Beame alluded to the possibility—if and when the new hydrolapatic emusatx project surpassed twenty-million in revenue.
Gauthier cheerfully accepted the assignment.
Back in the office he shared with another division head, Gauthier weighed the pluses of doing the work himself against the minuses, and swiftly concluded that Angel Harris, one of the three project managers he supervised, was more than capable of devising a brilliant plan for a hydrolapatic emusatx. He glanced at his Timex and realized that Harris was likely at lunch. He thought about waiting an hour before emailing her, but decided to go ahead and give her the details of her next assignment right now.
Harris was having lunch with her newly-acquired assistant, Dan Trager, at DelVecchio’s, a popular restaurant across the street, when Gauthier’s email lit up her Samsung Galaxy S22. With her phone in her left hand and a fork full of fusilli with spinach and Asiago in her right, she read Gauthier’s email. She groaned. Harris wasn’t interested in hydrolapatic emusatx, preferring to work on the Star20 side of EverLi’s business, but Trager—that was a different story. As a new hire, he can and will do anything. She put down her fork, reread Gauthier’s email, and then explained to Trager the nature of his assignment, emphasizing the importance of quality and speed. “Excellence is assumed, velocity is implied,” she said, quoting one of EverLi’s twenty mottoes.
Trager suggested ordering champagne to toast his first assignment at EverLi. “Thank you for your confidence in me, Ms. Harris. I won’t disappoint you.”
“Of that, I’m sure.”
Trager left the office at 6:45 p.m., not too early so that he outgassed the appearance of being a slacker, but not so late that he looked like a cutthroat overachiever.
Over dinner, he filled in his wife, Amanda, and their thirteen-year-old daughter, Grace, on his exciting first day at EverLi. As he replayed every minute of his day, he worried about whether he was capable of researching and writing a plan for a first-quarter twenty-million dollar hydrolapatic emusatx. In business school, he’d studied granka traps and nonograms, but never any kind of emusatx. There are so many things that can go wrong. The more Trager thought about it, the more apprehension tormented him.
After another twenty minutes of retelling his day, he was certain he was not the person for this assignment. I’m doomed. Trager’s heart beat haphazardly, his flesh chilled, stomach knotted, and he bit his tongue. What am I going to do? I’m not qualified. I’m not expert enough. I have a bad feeling about this.
Trager passed his phone to his daughter and tapped through several screens until he reached the project description. He pressed the phone into her hand and commanded her to read it. Trager said, “You do it.”
Grace uncapped her Bic and copied the project description into her Composition notebook, taking care to accurately reproduce the unfamiliar, multisyllabic words. She fancied herself a medieval scribe in a purple, satin robe, scribing away in an up-high turret room illuminated with a flickering torch.
Five minutes later, when she was done copying the contents of her father’s email, she kissed her dad on the cheek and said, “Okay.”
Today was Friday. Except for meals and bathroom breaks, Grace remained in her room, working, imagining herself to be a cross between Madame Curie and Susan Wojcicki. In her mind’s eye, she wore a white lab coat with a gold glitter crayon popping out above her pocket, calculating with both a slide rule and quantum computer.
On Monday morning, she handed her father a new Composition notebook with the finished plan for the hydrolapatic emusatx. “All done,” she chimed. “I hope what I wrote is good.” Grace turned toward the dining room clock. “I have to get ready for school now. First period is gym. Ugh.”
Trager presented Grace’s notebook to Harris, who passed it to Gauthier, who gave it to Beame, who offered it to EverLi’s CEO, James Hawthorne Longfellow III.
Grace’s plan earned EverLi not twenty million, but one hundred million dollars in the first quarter of 2023.
At the next Board of Directors meeting, Longfellow accidentally dropped Grace’s notebook under the conference table.
Sammi Houston, a Board member, found it. She puzzled over the effervescent handwriting, lilac ink color, Hello Kitty stickers that appeared on the notebook’s cover and on random pages, writing style, and other decidedly non-standard EverLi attributes, and soon figured out the hydrolapatic emusatx’s origins.
The following week, the Board fired all its staff and hired thirteen-year-old Grace Trager as EverLi’s CEO and sole employee.
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If you enjoyed Delegating Work, I think you’ll also like my story, Stories Not Yet Told.
The truth will always surface sooner or later.
Great story!