The Witch of Portobello

"Have you noticed a change in the bank too?"

How to respond to a question like that? On the one hand, I would be giving her more power than was advisable, but on the other, if I wasn't straight with her, I would never get the answers I needed.

"Yes, I've noticed a big change, and I'm thinking of promoting you."

"I need to travel. I'd like to get out of London and discover new horizons."

Travel? Just when everything was going so well in my branch, she wanted to leave? Although, when I thought about it, wasn't that precisely the way out I needed and wanted?

"I can help the bank if you give me more responsibility," she went on.

Yes, she was giving me an excellent opportunity. Why hadn't I thought of that before? "Travel" meant getting rid of her and resuming my leadership of the group without having to deal with the fallout from a dismissal or a rebellion. But I needed to ponder the matter, because rather than her helping the bank, I needed her to help me. Now that my superiors had noticed an increase in productivity, I knew that I would have to keep it up or risk losing prestige and end up worse off than before. Sometimes I understand why most of my colleagues don't do very much in order to improve: if they don't succeed, they're called incompetent. If they do succeed, they have to keep improving all the time, a situation guaranteed to bring on an early heart attack.

I took the next step very cautiously: it's not a good idea to frighten the person in possession of a secret before she's revealed that secret to us; it's best to pretend to grant her request.

"I'll bring your request to the attention of my superiors. In fact, I'm having a meeting with them in Barcelona, which is why I called you in. Would it be true to say that our performance has improved since, shall we say, the other employees began getting on better with you?"

"Or shall we say, began getting on better with themselves."

"Yes, but encouraged by you--or am I wrong?"

"You know perfectly well that you're not."

"Have you been reading some book on management I don't know about?"

"I don't read that kind of book, but I would like a promise from you that you really will consider my request."

I thought of her boyfriend at Scotland Yard. If I made a promise and failed to keep it, would I be the object of some reprisal? Could he have taught her some cutting-edge technology that enables one to achieve impossible results?

"I'll tell you everything, even if you don't keep your promise, but I can't guarantee that you'll get the same results if you don't practice what I teach."

"You mean the 'rejuvenation technique'?"

"Exactly."

"Wouldn't it be enough just to know the theory?"

"Possibly. The person who taught me learned about it from a few sheets of paper."

I was glad she wasn't forcing me to make decisions that went beyond my capabilities or my principles. But I must confess that I had a personal interest in that whole story, because I too dreamed of finding some way of "recycling" my potential. I promised that I'd do what I could, and Athena began to describe the long, esoteric dance she performed in search of the so-called Vertex (or was it Axis, I can't quite remember now). As we talked, I tried to set down her mad thoughts in objective terms. An hour proved not to be enough, and so I asked her to come back the following day, and together we would prepare the report to be presented to the bank's board of directors. At one point in our conversation, she said with a smile: "Don't worry about describing the technique in the same terms we've been using here. I reckon even a bank's board of directors are people like us, made of flesh and blood, and interested in unconventional methods."

Athena was completely wrong. In England, tradition always speaks louder than innovation. But why not take a risk, as long as it didn't endanger my job? The whole thing seemed absurd to me, but I had to summarize it and put it in a way that everyone could understand. That was all.

Before I presented my "paper" in Barcelona, I spent the whole morning repeating to myself: "My" process is producing results, and that's all that matters. I read a few books on the subject and learned that in order to present a new idea with the maximum impact, you should structure your talk in an equally provocative way, and so the first thing I said to the executives gathered in that luxury hotel were these words of St. Paul's: "God hid the most important things from the wise because they cannot understand what is simple." [Editor's note: It is impossible to know here whether he is referring to a verse from Matthew 11:25: "I thank thee, O Father, thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes," or from St. Paul (1 Corinthians 1:27): "But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise, and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty." ]

When I said this, the whole audience, who had spent the last two days analyzing graphs and statistics, fell silent. It occurred to me that I had almost certainly lost my job, but I carried on. First, because I had researched the subject and was sure of what I was saying and deserved credit for this. Second, because although, at certain points, I was obliged to omit any mention of Athena's enormous influence on the whole process, I was, nevertheless, not lying.

"I have learned that, in order to motivate employees nowadays, you need more than just the training provided by our own excellent training centers. Each of us contains something within us which is unknown, but which, when it surfaces, is capable of producing miracles.

"We all work for some reason: to feed our children, to earn money to support ourselves, to justify our life, to get a little bit of power. However, there are always tedious stages in that process, and the secret lies in transforming those stages into an encounter with ourselves or with something higher.

"For example, the search for beauty isn't always associated with anything practical and yet we still search for it as if it were the most important thing in the world. Birds learn to sing, but not because it will help them find food, avoid predators, or drive away parasites. Birds sing, according to Darwin, because that is the only way they have of attracting a partner and perpetuating the species."

I was interrupted by an executive from Geneva, who called for a more objective presentation. However, to my delight, the director-general asked me to go on.

"Again according to Darwin, who wrote a book that changed the course of all humanity [Editor's note: The Origin of Species, 1859, in which he first posited that human beings evolved from a type of ape], those who manage to arouse passions are repeating something that has been going on since the days we lived in caves, where rituals for courting a partner were fundamental for the survival and evolution of the human species. Now, what difference is there between the evolution of the human race and that of the branch of a bank? None. Both obey the same laws--only the fittest survive and evolve."

At this point, I was obliged to admit that I'd developed this idea thanks to the spontaneous collaboration of one of my employees, Sherine Khalil.