My Faded Suit Got Me Ignored By 8 Billionaire Executives — Then I Read Their Data

Part 2

The reaction came before I had even finished my sentence.

Dan Foster set down his pen with a deliberate click that carried all the way down the long table.

Two other executives exchanged the kind of quick glance that functions as a final verdict.

Brian Clark completely stopped writing in his notebook.

Tyler Reed leaned back in his expensive chair with the faint, comfortable expression of a man watching someone else step on a landmine.

Craig Simmons studied his water glass as though it had become suddenly fascinating.

The temperature of the room dropped by degrees that absolutely no thermostat could measure.

Dan was the first to speak, and he did not bother to disguise his sheer contempt.

The senior director leaned forward, reminding everyone that the board had spent three years and forty million dollars in consulting fees analyzing Project Apex.

That strategy, he declared loudly, had been built by some of the finest minds in the entire industry.

Finding it remarkable that a freelance consultant with a one-page resume felt qualified to announce the leadership team was the actual problem, his voice dripped with condescension.

Reaching toward the stack beside him, the man picked up my resume while still holding it face down.

Holding the paper up by one corner as though presenting damning evidence, he scoffed.

He asked the room whether anyone had actually bothered to read it, because he certainly had not felt the need.

A murmur of agreement moved along one side of the table.

Another director added that bold claims were extremely easy to make and very expensive to be wrong about.

He noted that people who had never carried responsibility for four billion dollars tended to have very confident opinions about how it should be spent.

The words were aimed directly at me, but they were spoken to the room.

It was the way people speak when they are closing a door on someone rather than arguing with him.

Tyler allowed himself a small, self-satisfied smile.

The interview, as far as most of the table was concerned, had just returned to being a race between two polished men.

Brenda said absolutely nothing during any of this.

She sat at the head of the table with her chin still resting on her folded hands.

She watched me the way she watched acquisition targets.

She was looking not at what I said, but at exactly how I absorbed pressure.

She had seen hundreds of people aggressively challenged in this room.

Most of them retreated into desperate apology or inflated into empty bluster.

I did neither.

I waited for Dan to finish, and I sat with the stillness of a man who had already counted the cost of his position and paid it in advance.

When the room finally quieted, Brenda spoke for the first time since her executives had turned on me.

Her voice was cool and completely without inflection.

She said that I had made a serious claim in a room full of serious people.

She declared that I would now be given the chance to either support it or retract it immediately.

She would ask me real questions, and I would answer them here today without a deck of slides to hide behind.

If the room was the problem, I was going to have to prove it to the room.

What did Brenda do when she finally realized that her entire leadership team had been wrong for three straight years?