Imay have just come back from an outdoor survival training in Alaska, but I still knew a bad guy when I saw one. The man delivering coffee to Jane Bly’s office at the headquarters of BeSoft Toilet Tissue in Stoke Poges had two chips of cold granite for eyes and I knew that if I had to kill him, the world would be a better place.
Jane Bly was drinking her coffee and looking at my file as I came in. The pussycat bow round her neck tried to meowoffice professional, but the body inside her cream silk blouse screamed another story.
“Pleased to meet you — do sit down.” To most people, her voice probably sounded like a glass of sherry in an English country house after a day of fox hunting, but my training told me there was something foreign in her accent.
“Born in Moscow, studied French literature at the Sorbonne, followed by an MBA at Harvard,” I said. “Am I right?”
She looked surprised.
“Er … no, I’m from Wimbledon. And I studied personnel management at Braintree College in Essex.”
“Close enough,” I said, sitting down and crossing my legs. “I understand you’re looking for a change agent for your business transformation programme. Tell me everything you know.” I was about to offer her a cigarette when a sixth sense warned me not to. In the secret service, we’re trained to notice tiny details, but the no-smoking sign on the wall was a clue that many of my colleagues might have missed.
“Umm … that’s my chair, actually. Could you take the other one?”
She was smart. I looked her up and down with new respect. She was going to be a challenge.
“What should I call you?” she asked. “There’s no name given in the file I have.”
“You can call me 001,” I said, moving to the other side of the desk. “If we’re going to work together, we should be open with each other.” I looked into her warm brown eyes as I said that, trying to gauge her reaction.
“Right … Mr … Mr Double-oh-one. Now, I understand that since the country left the European Union last year, your organization has been told to find new ways to cover their costs.”
It was true. In 2019, we had cut ourselves off from the rest of Europe, which had caused huge financial problems for the country. The new Home Office minister had ordered the various secret services to cut their budgets by half. They had orders either to downsize or to find additional work on the external market. This was my first job that wasn’t for Her Majesty.
“Our company is digitalizing internal processes,” Jane continued, “to respond more efficiently to customer needs. The thing is, a lot of these processes are currently run by people. When we automate them, they lose their job or they need to learn a new one. We need change agents because there’s a lot of resistance to what the company is trying to do.”
“So you want me to handle that. Who are my targets? And what should happen to them? Broken legs, arms, necks?”
She looked at me in surprise. “No, no. We want you to win over our employees to the change. Not hurt them!”
“Ah! A hearts-and-minds operation. Like in Afghanistan.”
“Did that work?” she asked doubtfully.
“Official Secrets Act,” I answered, tapping my nose.
“Right … well, we want you to be an enthusiastic change agent and help make it happen. It’s a little different from what you’ve done before, but I’ll be here to advise you.”
Only she wasn’t. That evening, she had an accident with her bicycle, which put her in hospital with a broken leg. The question I asked myself was: was it really an accident or did someone want her out of the way?
I started work. I couldn’t do everything myself, so I set up a network of change agents throughout the company, similar to the one I ran in Shanghai. Everything was working well. The objections to the organizational changes quickly stopped and the unions said they were satisfied with what was happening. So when I got a phone call from the CEO’s secretary asking me to come upstairs, I expected a pat on the back from him and maybe several pats from her as well.
To my surprise, Jane had come to the office from the hospital for the meeting.
“Jane,” the CEO began, “could you describe the role of a change agent in a transformation programme?”
A change agent, she explained, was a kind of cheerleader. They should talk positively about the transformation with other members of the company, find people who supported it, publish success stories and arrange training courses if people wanted reskilling.
“Right. What about bugging union meetings?” asked the CEO.
“No…”
“Mysterious phone calls to people threatening blackmail?”
“No…”
“Kidnapping someone’s dog and flying it in an unmarked plane to Libya to be questioned by the local police?”
“Definitely not.”
The CEO turned towards me.
“Not only have you and your little team done all of these things over the past few weeks, you have also been personally responsible for three women complaining about your unsuitable behaviour.”
“That includes my secretary, to whom you sent this text message: ‘If I said you had a beautiful body, would you hold it against me?’”
He looked at me in surprise. “What century are you living in? Who do you think you are?” the CEO asked.
To say I was shocked is an understatement. After all I had done for them and they treated me like this! I would leave, but I had to have the last word. Then I remembered a little tip from one of my colleagues, 007. Oh, yes! That would show them!
“I have to go,” I said. “In Kazakhstan there’s a nuclear missile that somebody is trying to steal and I have to stop them.”
I walked towards the door, then turned dramatically and stopped.
“And to answer your question: the name’s Pickle. Humphrey Pickle.”