Read an Excerpt
1
Harry’s Experience
As Harry Hartwell strode through the Ramoco Oil Refinery on his daily tour of inspection, he greeted everyone by name, yet never slowed his pace.
“Hi, Harry. How’s it going?” said one of the supervisors, an old-timer in the oil business like Harry.
“I’m going great, George,” his voice boomed in reply as he kept moving forward. “But the big question is how’s it going with that wounded number four tower?” He smiled at George and pointed at the distillation tower that hadn’t been running at capacity for almost a month.
George got the message.
As they saw Harry approaching, workers made sure they were visibly doing something productive. Sometimes conversations stopped until he was well past. He didn’t comment out loud to everyone, as he did to George. Usually his look said it all.
“Good morning, Mr. Hartwell,” said a young woman, turning from a bank of instruments to face the refinery manager, her eyeglasses slowly slipping down her nose. The younger employees did not feel free to call him by his first name.
“It’ll be a great morning, Teri, if you can tell me that you’ve finally mastered those reactor adjustments.”
Harry had passed by before Teri could give her embarrassed reply.
A trio of maintenance people on their hands and knees around an ailing machine heard Harry’s voice coming around the bend. “Let’s get moving,” said the one wearing a baseball cap. “Here comes the field marshal.” He stirred noisily in his toolbox to find the proper wrench.
Half kiddingly his companion replied, “When Harry comes by, it’s the fastest you move all day.”
The third maintenance man whispered to the first, as Harry was approaching, “Look who’s talking.” He pointed a screwdriver at the second man and said, “If Harry did inspections twice a day, you’d be twice as productive.” Then he looked up to smile at Harry and in a louder voice asked, “Hey, Harry. Whatsa matter with the Giants?”
“Probably the same thing that’s wrong with your maintenance team, Joe. Too slow on the uptake.”
Almost three decades ago, the university had trained Harry to be a chemical engineer and a varsity fullback. His diploma got him a job as a process engineer at Ramoco, the oil refinery his father was managing. His gridiron experience helped to advance his career. A 250-pound fullback’s strategy is quite simple: Put your head down and run through the hole in the line; keep driving toward the goal until somebody stronger than you stops you; and never let go of the ball. During the past quarter century, using this basic strategy, Harry had been making steady gains until, like his father, he now sat at the head of the same Ramoco Oil Refinery in his hometown.
Harry loved the oil business. At ten years old, he knew by name every piece of equipment in the refinery. At the Ramoco anniversary party last Saturday night, he had regaled a group of employees with stories from the old days, stories that made them laugh at the crazy things that had happened in the refinery and some of the characters who had worked there. At such moments, folks could feel proud to be part of Harry’s team. But these moments were rare; on the job, he was more often seen as intimidating.
As Harry’s deep voice echoed ahead of him, two junior managers, a man and a woman, were carrying on a conversation in front of the vending machines at the far end of the long corridor.
“Have you proposed your new idea to Harry yet?” the woman asked.
“I’ve decided to wait a bit,” the young man replied. “I don’t think the Abominable No Man would go for another capital expenditure this quarter.”
“I thought you said He was a straight shooter. Why hesitate?”
“He is a straight shooter, but he pulls the trigger a whole lot. And I don’t want to be a sitting target. From Harry, a no is not just a no, it earns you a place on his Dumb Ideas list.”
“Quiet,” she whispered. “Here comes the old man now.”
Both junior managers stood up straight, smiled, and exchanged polite greetings with Harry as he passed by. His thick eyebrows, square jaw, and wide mouth gave him the air of someone rugged, ruddy, and strong. People at the refinery, however, often saw those features as the marks of a gruff, formidable boss.
As soon as Harry had passed out of earshot, the young man continued. “I’d like to find a way out of this place. When that guy looks at you, you feel he is either going to take your name or kick your butt.”
Harry entered his spacious office and sat down at his desk. At first, his mind drifted to the promotion he was bucking for—vice president of U.S. operations was his next objective. That job had to be a world-class pressure cooker, he mused. And that got him to thinking about the problems he faced at the refinery and some obstacles facing him in his own life. He felt vaguely troubled. Recently his body had been giving him subtle messages of stress: shortness of breath, frequent colds, and a lingering cough. At breakfast that morning, his wife, Molly, had expressed concern that he seemed depressed about something.
Lately, too, he had been tormented by a recurring nightmare about losing control. In the dream he would be driving his car to work. As he approached a red light and tried to stop, he would press the brake pedal but, instead of stopping, the car would rev its engine and accelerate. To avoid hitting other cars going through the intersection, he would then quickly turn the steering wheel, but it would spin uselessly in his hands. Amid screeching brakes and honking horns, his car would swerve unpredictably and careen toward other cars. A split second before the crash, he would wake in a cold sweat. At other times when he had the dream, his car would smash through the guard rail of a bridge and he would be plunging toward imminent death. Awaking shuddering from these nightmares, he wondered who or what disruptive force was trying to destroy his life.
He didn’t have to look very far. For Harry, waking life held a lot of threatening problems, people he didn’t want to see and situations he didn’t want to deal with. During the past week alone, disgruntled machinists’ union representatives had waved an almost-expired labor contract in his face, a fax had notified him that the next 10 million barrels of crude for his refinery would be delayed while a tanker was being repaired, the state environmental agence’s letter on his desk hinted at evidence that his refinery was polluting the local air, and upper management at Ramoco headquarters had called for an immediate across-the-board 15 percent cut in the salaried staff. But these problems were his usual diet. Dealing with the unexpected was what a refinery’s general manager did.
Unlike some of his more conniving colleagues who had risen in the Ramoco hierarchy, Harry did not play office politics. At board meetings, higher management spoke admiringly of his no-nonsense style and workaholism. His refinery was almost always tops in production—and always tops in turnover, giving it a middling position in profitability.
As Harry leaned back in his chair pondering his responsibilities to the refinery, he pictured himself conducting his next inspection tour dressed in Western attire and riding around on a horse, with a silver badge on his shirt that said “Ramoco Sheriff.” He sighed. To him, the law-enforcer image was not funny, it was wearying. “I guess my job here is to dispense frontier justice.” It was the voice of a man who knew what he had to do and didn’t want to do it. But the bottom line was that he loved the oil business. “I want the refinery to succeed because it is my life.”
The refinery was indeed his life. In fact, the standing joke was that Harry had an oil pump for a heart and oil in his veins. Once when he cut himself, there was a spirited debate about the octane level of the emerging fluid.
But that hypothesis didn’t hold up. Oil does not form clots in key arteries.
At a meeting later that day while he was announcing a schedule of layoffs, Harry developed severe chest pains and became sweaty and dizzy. He keeled over, unconscious, and was rushed to the hospital. A few hours later, he lay in a coma on life-support systems.
