Around him sit four other PRT managers--six, if you include the two men whose recruitment is part of the reason for the festivity. The six are from all over; one is from the other side of the world. As they unfold their linen napkins they trade jokes, share easy talk, and take in the restaurant. Along the railing at the cliff's edge are torches, which reflect in the crystal. Suspended wings of ivory sailcloth form the hint of a roof. In the cove close below, illuminated by floodlights, perfect turquoise water licks perfect blond sand.
The champagne has been earned, an observer would agree. PRT/Barbados was heading toward a $19-million year. The company overall would eventually reach 1997 sales of $62 million, and a pre-Thanksgiving initial public offering would make seven new millionaires and finance a near doubling of the company's sales--to $120 million in 1998.
But in the end, none of that is what the PRT managers are celebrating, or what they're talking about around the table, or why Mellinger is considering champagnes. They're celebrating something else--something more.
Weeks later, on a perfect end-of-summer night in Manhattan, Mellinger would stand on a street corner outside Grand Central Station, trying to explain what all the celebrating is about. He has built an organization unlike the model we all know. One that isn't about him, one that doesn't rely on what he knows how to do. What's the reward for that? he is asked. If it isn't the market share and the money, what is it? Because when you stop building a heroic organization, what you lose is easy to see: you don't get to be a hero anymore.
And Mellinger, standing there below the lighted windows of skyscrapers, just shakes his head, his small mouth forming a smile. "It's a puzzle to me," he says, "why anybody would want it that way, the heroic way. I've had that feeling--of being the guy whose desk everything ends up on. It was horrible. Every morning I'd wake up and pray that I wouldn't have to clean up some disaster. I'd pray that somebody out there would save my ass. And I said to myself, 'I can't live like this.'
"And then I realized"--he slows down here, lowering his voice for emphasis-- "I don't have to.
"Forget the hero stuff. I don't want a hero mentality anywhere in our business--anywhere in my life. Everybody thinks you have to be a hero to build something--software, a company. Bullshit. Do it together. Ask the right questions. Stuff doesn't have to be so hard."
He stops to let the lesson hang in the warm, soft, new-smelling air. It's one of those New York nights when everyone wants to be out, when broad street corners are where you want to linger. Cabs shark down the boulevards. Sidewalks swim with couples, after-work chums, schools of happily conspiring women.
"It's a great city, isn't it?" Mellinger says, looking at it all around him. "A night like this--to be a part of it is great."
A part of it.
Characteristic #3 of the antiheroic organization: Give up being a hero and, suddenly, you don't always have to perform like one. You don't have to supply all the energy, all the ideas, all the emotion. You don't have to fear that if you stop, so will everything else. When it's all about you--the cult of the CEO--you're separated from others. Being a hero is lonely. As an antihero, you get to be a part of what you've created.
And back at the cliff-side table above the sea, you realize that that is what all the conversation is about. The story about Mark from J.P. Morgan, laughing as he crawled through the Bridgetown sewers with the telephone guys, checking cables. The story about the party in the garden, under the big white tent and the moon, and all the investment bankers in bare feet with their suit pants rolled up, dancing with the Barbadian government leaders on the grass. The story about the prime minister's ducking out of the national budget negotiation to meet with the gang from little PRT. And all the stories about the young, single Indian women reinventing their lives in this place half a world away, where freedom and possibility made them giddy.
The point of the stories, you realize, is that they're not about Doug Mellinger. Instead, they're about a place only an antiheroic organization can become: a place where people gather to participate in the adventure, to be who they really are, to feel safe, to feel they belong. Forget the business--the stories around the table are about what they've all really made: the corporate equivalent of Mellinger's boyhood backyard. The place everyone comes to. The place where things happen.
His choice of champagne having arrived and been poured, Mellinger raises his glass. His colleagues--faces flushed by the heat and the excitement--fall silent and smile.
"To...," Mellinger begins. He pauses, starts again: "To...."
But then, and not for the first time, he can't think of what to say.
" Us," one of the grinning men across from him says, finally. " To us," they all say, and they laugh.
They're happy. The night is brilliant, the champagne is good, and their day has gone well, as have a whole succession of days. And they're here, together, where not one of them had ever imagined he would be.
Not one of them except Mellinger, of course, who knew the place all along.
Michael Hopkins is an executive editor at Inc.
