from Third Quarter 2009
Corporte Board Member
by Don Morrison
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather. Happy families are all alike. Call me Ishmael.
Not bad for openers, eh? Penned by Dickens, Joyce, Tolstoy, and Melville, they are among literature’s most famous opening sentences. I offer them as inspiration to poor Andrew G. Bodnar, a former pharmaceutical executive who recently pleaded guilty to making a false statement to the government in a patent dispute. Now he is facing an opening sentence of his own, imposed by U.S. district judge Ricardo M. Urbina: two years’ probation, a $5,000 fine, and, oh yes, the judge also ordered Bodnar to write a book about his crime—a cautionary tale to deter other white-collar types from wrongdoing.
Anyone who has ever faced the terror of a blank page, the soul-sucking dread of coming up with that all-important first line, will know that there could be no injunction more imaginative, more cruel, more certain to deter recidivism. Which raises the obvious question: How soon can we try this in the boardroom?
The possibilities are vast. The chief executive did not make her numbers last quarter? Order her to write an essay on the importance of consistency and trust, something in the personal style of Montaigne but with the high moral seriousness of Emerson and Thoreau. Expect better numbers next time.
The audit committee failed to sound the alarm on those shaky derivatives? Have them collaborate on a one-act tragedy about the perils of neglect, with echoes of Aeschylus and Arthur Miller. Then make them perform the piece for their peers. Those audit slugs will never snooze again, and you will certainly get perfect attendance at that board meeting.
What if some of your fellow board members are distracted, disengaged, or otherwise not pulling their weight? Assign them to compose a country-and-western song, a kind of Willie Nelson-Randy Travis ode to the pain of love, the death of a dog, the nobility of a truck. Country music is mostly about duty and infidelity, so that should focus the dilatory directors’ minds.
In fact, there is hardly a boardroom behavior problem that does not lend itself to literary sanction. Thus you can fight digression with drama, factionalism with fiction, entrenchment with epigram, paralysis with parody, side conversations with screenplays, sycophancy with synecdoche, hyperbole with, um, hyperbole. Make the punishment fit the crime, as long as the former is as unpleasantly stupefying as English Lit 101.
There are, of course, limits to the punitive power of words. A few masochistic souls actually enjoy writing. Well, take away their laptops. Make them do improv skits instead. Off the tops of their heads. In the second language they studied in high school. Other offenders may be too obtuse to grasp the moral lessons you order them to describe; they would resentfully consider the whole exercise akin to making a child write “I will not talk in class” 100 times on the blackboard. To them I would say that enlightenment and a mature style come only after that difficult first book.
And if they persist in their waywardness and their business careers are sidelined by mal-, mis-, or non-feasance, there is a steady public appetite for tell-all books by former highfliers who have crashed and burned. Consult the gossip pages for details.
Judge Urbina may be on to something. Prose from cons is probably not the perfect penitential solution. But in today’s uncertain boardroom climate, it will at least give the scoundrels a career with a future.