Many of them had spent eighteen frightening months watching the company teeter, wondering if their jobs would survive, and I wanted them to understand — cleanly, without melodrama — that their fear had not been irrational and their instincts had not been wrong.

Something had been rotten at the top.

They had felt it without being able to name it or prove it, the way you feel a draft in a house without finding the crack.

I was naming it for them. Honest executive control was a polite phrase for what the folder on the lectern would spell out in detail, and I used the polite phrase first, on purpose, because I wanted the employees to have a moment to absorb the shape of the thing before they saw its ugly particulars.

These were people who had kept a company alive through debt and fear largely on loyalty and their own competence, and they deserved to hear, from the new owner, that the problem had never been them.

The problem had been a showman at the top who mistook their labor for his own genius.