Sons of Fortune (2002) by Jeffrey Archer

Author:Jeffrey Archer [Archer, Jeffrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Jeffrey Archer
ISBN: 9781405020794
Publisher: Macmillian
Published: 2002-06-02T23:00:00+00:00

28

IT DIDN’T TAKE six months for Nat to discover why Russell’s Bank had failed to increase its profits in over a decade. Almost every modern banking tenet had been ignored. Russell’s still lived in an age of written ledgers, personalized accounts and a sincerely held belief that the computer was more likely to make mistakes than a human being, and was therefore a waste of the bank’s time and money. Nat was in and out of Mr Russell’s office three or four times a day, only to find that something they had agreed on in the morning had been reversed by the afternoon. This usually occurred whenever a long-standing member of staff was seen leaving the same office an hour later with a smile on his or her face. It was often left for Tom to pick up the pieces; in fact, if he hadn’t been there to explain to his father why the changes were necessary, there might never have been a six-month report to present.

Nat would come home most nights exhausted and sometimes infuriated. He warned Su Ling there was likely to be a showdown when his report was finally presented. And he wasn’t altogether sure that he would still be the bank’s vice-president if the chairman was unable to stomach almost all of the changes he was recommending. Su Ling didn’t complain, although she had just about managed to get the three of them settled in their new house, sell the apartment in New York, find a nursery school for Luke, and prepare to take up her new appointment as professor of statistics at UConn in the fall. The idea of moving back to New York didn’t appeal to her.

In between, she had advised Nat on which computers would be most cost-effective for the bank, supervised their installation and also given night classes to those members of the staff who appreciated there was more to leam than how to press the on button. But Nat’s biggest problem was the bank’s chronic over-staffing. He had already pointed out to the chairman that Russell’s currently employed seventy-one staff and that Bennett’s, the only other independent bank in town, offered the same services with only thirty-nine employees. Nat wrote a separate report on the financial implications of over-staffing, suggesting an early retirement programme that, although it would cut into their profits for the next three years, would be highly beneficial in the long term. This was the sticking point on which Nat was unwilling to budge. Because, as he explained to Tom over dinner with Su ling, if they waited for another couple of years until Mr Russell retired, they would all be joining the ranks of the unemployed.

Once Mr Russell had read Nat’s report, he scheduled a Friday evening at six o’clock for the showdown. When Nat and Tom walked into the chairman’s office they found him at his desk writing a letter. He looked up as they entered the room.

‘I’m sorry to say that I’m unable to go

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