"The employees knew," Clark would say later. "Everybody's BS detector just went, 'Ding, ding, ding!"
Clark himself is famously blunt. That's his style -- part One-Minute Manager, part California cruel (honesty no matter what). Granted, he's not nearly as bad as he used to be. There was a time when he routinely crossed the line from "assertive to abusive," says Ghironzi. "You could park a Volkswagen in your backside, it got bored out so well." Karolyn Cline, a senior associate, remembers how once after a meeting, Clark "reduced me to tears" because "I was slouching and he didn't like that." But although such outbursts are less common now, Clark is no less reticent if he has something unpleasant to say -- about you or anybody else. His employees expect it of him.
"Here you're honest," says Clark. "I mean, drop your pants! No matter what the issue is. Because otherwise, where do the lies stop? Unless there's full disclosure all the time, you never know." Clark says he was appalled at the tone of Walker's announcement, the way Walker deliberately skirted the truth.
"I know why you did it," Clark told Walker privately after the meeting. "It's standard operating procedure in corporations. But with this staff, it won't fly."
Fine, but Walker had handled it the best way he knew how -- that's his position. Tom Walker is not Harry Clark. Walker's a different animal: a hotelier, first of all; a man with a smile, well versed in the art of smoothing things over, of putting the best possible face on a difficult situation; and of course, a corporation man. Ten years he worked for ITT Sheraton. You see it in the way he dresses ("I get teased because I'm a relentless wearer of suits and ties, and that is rather different from the modus that I walked into here") and in his management style.
"I asked for his [the controller's] resignation, and he tendered it," says Walker. "He didn't have a choice, and he knew it. Had he not resigned, I'd have taken more forceful steps."
Nonetheless, says Walker, "in front of the whole organization, I'd just as soon say I accepted this person's resignation as say I fired him. Harry's position is that you lose credibility. Mine is that there are people who, when they say, 'Call a spade a spade,' they mean that things need to be depicted in the harshest, most abrasive terms possible. I think a softer approach is very good with a lot of people in a lot of situations."
Six weeks later, in June, Clark left on sabbatical and Walker found himself in charge, temporarily, of MFS. That scenario differed slightly from the one Walker had envisioned at the outset, he says. His own sense of why Clark had hired him was that Clark had huge ambitions for the future of his company, that he felt constrained by "a kind of strategic thinness," that what he had on staff were mainly "day-to-day tacticians," and that he wanted "help thinking in larger corporate terms than was customary here." So Walker saw himself, at least partly, as a big-picture guy. He did not expect -- three months after he started, new to the company and new to the industry -- to be running the show. Says Walker, "If he said, 'By the way, in June I'm going on sabbatical,' that was something that didn't register early on in our conversation."
No matter, Clark was gone. What followed, in Walker's words, was "a certain amount of fallout." What followed, in one employee's words, was "total chaos."
* * *
Suddenly, the rules changed. "Our general MO," says Ghironzi, "had been high-octane, somewhat eccentric people kicking ass in what they do and running over everyone in the way and knocking the socks off our clients and conquering the world." Under Walker "it was, 'Do I look right? Am I at my desk at 8?' Guys who were used to skipping vacations and sleeping at the office didn't like to be chewed out when they didn't come to work early enough."
The structure changed. Before, "we didn't have a hierarchy of reporting and all this stuff," says Stalling. "There was Harry and there was us." After Clark left, suddenly there were levels, with Walker at the top and Mike Ford, a municipal-finance consultant, also new to the company, just below him. "I don't know how other people felt about it, but I wasn't going for it," says Stalling. "No way. Tom comes from the hotel industry. Give me a break! He compares parcels with bedrooms. I mean, that's ridiculous. And Mike, you know, is just weak. Just plain weak in terms of management and getting things done."
And the tone changed. Employees grown accustomed to Clark's way found Walker too much the fence-sitter. The Yes Meetings continued, but somehow they weren't the same. Now they were less about sharing credit and more about taking credit. Before, MFS had felt like a close-knit community to most employees. After Clark left there was "a lot of conflict," says Ghironzi. "Back stabbing and jockeying for positions that didn't exist," says Cline -- her point being that the alpha dog hadn't left the pack for good, he was due back in three months. "I was shocked and disappointed," she goes on. "This was our chance to show Harry that we were adults and could operate without him, and we obviously failed. I couldn't wait for Harry to come back."
Cline wasn't the only one who missed Clark. Everybody did. His employees needed him, that was obvious now. But whose fault was that? In other words, had they really "failed"? Or did Clark have them right where he wanted them?
* * *
Cut to December. Clark's sabbatical ended three months ago. Time for an important year-end Yes Meeting.
Everybody gathers in the hallway outside Clark's office. The early financial results are in, and they're not good. Revenue growth has slowed; profits are down. The reasons? There are lots of them: the cost of the new building, a major 1994 expense; the acquisition -- yet to pay dividends -- of a smaller competing business; a failure to market as aggressively as in years past; Harry's own absence; the turmoil that erupted. Lots of reasons, but one major one: "Over the summer the senior staff let me down," is what Ford, himself a senior staff member, hears Clark say, even if those are not exactly his words.
"Wow, this is hard," Ford is thinking. Perez, meanwhile, has his eye on Walker -- "Tom doesn't look good at all," he tells himself. "He's choking on a bone or something."
But Clark's not finished. The bonus pool, $115,000 in 1993, would be about 50% less this year. Very disappointing, but it gets worse. Clark has an idea, something he wants everyone to at least think about. There are some people in the company, hard-pressed people with families, who can't afford to buy a computer. Clark thinks it's a shame that any kid today should grow up without a computer in the house. He wants to help. No, he wants everybody to help. He wants to take 20% of the bonus pool and set it aside in the form of $1,000 grants to help needy employees buy their own computers.
