Power Play: A Novel Read Free Page A

investigative firms, and will submit their names to all of you today. I want a straightforward, entirely legal investigation of all our board members, and myself as well, to discover who is responsible for the leak, since no one is willing to admit to it.”
    “Does it really matter?” he asked, looking bored again. “The word is out, you said you’re doing damage control. It’s not going to change anything if you find out who talked. It might even have been a very clever reporter who figured it out some other way.”
    “That’s not possible, and you know it. And I want to be absolutely certain it won’t happen again. What occurred is completely counter to all our rules of governance, how we run this company and this board,” Fiona said, and the chairman rolled his eyes as soon as she did.
    “For God’s sake, Fiona, it takes more than ‘governance’ to run a board. We all know what the rules are. We waste half our time discussing procedures and inventing new ones to slow us down. I’m amazed you find time to run the company at all. I never wasted all that time during my entire career. We made good decisions and followed through on them. We didn’t fritter away our time making up new rules about how to do it.”
    “You can’t run a corporation like a dictatorship anymore,” she said firmly. “Those days are over. And our stockholders wouldn’t put up with it, as well they shouldn’t. We all have to live by the rules, and stockholders are much better informed and far more demanding than they were twenty or thirty years ago,” she said, andhe knew it was true. Fiona was a modern CEO, and lived by all those rules that Harding thought were a waste of time. He criticized Fiona often for it.
    “I’d like a vote on an investigation to find out who the source of the leak was, using legal methods only to get that information.” Fiona turned to the board with her request, and Harding was the first to vote the motion in, just to get it over with, although he made it obvious that he thought it was foolish and a waste of NTA’s money, but he made no opposition to her request. Everyone voted for the investigation of the leak.
    “Satisfied?” he asked her as they left the boardroom together.
    “Yes, thank you, Harding.”
    “And what are you going to do when you find out who it was?” he asked with a mocking look. “Spank them? We have better things to do with our time.”
    “I’ll ask them to resign from the board,” she said in a firm voice and looked him in the eye, and what she saw there was the same contempt she had seen in his eyes for twenty-five years, since Harvard Business School. She knew that in her entire lifetime she would never win his respect and didn’t care. Her career had been phenomenal, no matter what he thought of her.
    The root of Harding’s dislike for her was an old story. She thought of it again after she left him and hurried back to her office, for an afternoon of meetings, that she had to rush for now. The emergency board meeting had taken longer than planned, with their discussions of the investigation, and Harding’s interruptions and caustic comments.
    In Fiona’s first year of Harvard Business School, she had felt inadequate and in over her head, and thought about dropping out manytimes. She felt less capable than almost all her classmates, most of whom were men, and seemed a great deal more sure of themselves. All she’d had was ambition, and a love of business, which didn’t seem like enough to her, particularly that first year. It had been a hard time for her. Both of her parents had died in a car accident the year before, and she felt completely lost and devastated without them. Her father had encouraged her to do anything she wanted, and she had followed through on her plans to get an MBA even after he and her mother died. Her only support system had been her older sister, who was doing her residency in psychiatry at Stanford, three thousand miles away. Fiona had