Our Inheritance – Shaken Not Stirred

As Scott hurried through the marketing offices at WellGen Defense Systems, he was five minutes late for the early morning meeting they had called. He had picked up a cup of coffee at Starbucks on his way into work, knowing that there wouldn’t be any in the conference room. Scott liked to get to meetings five minutes early, but the wait at Starbucks was longer than he had expected.

As he approached the conference room door, he heard a speakerphone and realized that it was his voice mail greeting, “Hi, you have reached Scott Grady at WellGen. I’d rather be driving around in a new Jaguar XJ220, but instead I’m either on the phone or in a meeting. Please leave a message, and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.” Someone must be annoyed that Scott was late and had called his office number to chew him out.

He stopped just outside the door to see if he could figure out who called him before he went into the conference room. Scott heard someone speak after the voice mail greeting had stopped. “Did you hear that Lee? That’s so… Uh…” It was Ross Nelson speaking to Lee Stover, and Ross stopped in midsentence when he remembered that he was being recorded on voice mail. Ross continued, “Get out of your car, Scott, and get over to the conference room! Everyone is here and waiting on you.” Scott walked into the conference room just as Ross hung up on the phone call. Scott sat across the table from Ross.

Ross Nelson was the marketing leader who had responsibility for all WellGen projects with Braxton Aerospace. He was overseeing the C-X pursuit, and he would get the credit for bringing in the order if WellGen won the contract. Lee Stover was from WellGen’s regional field-marketing office in Atlanta. His primary responsibility was to represent WellGen to the Braxton Aerospace executives and to be their advocate whenever they needed something from WellGen, good or bad. Lee had flown to Albuquerque a few days ago to become familiar with the C-X proposal before it was presented to Braxton Aerospace. Ross and Lee would be taking the proposal to Atlanta, and they also had the authority to negotiate the proposal price. They were taking Scott along in case anyone at Braxton Aerospace had any technical questions.

Scott remembered how annoyed he got when people came late to his meetings, so he didn’t offer any excuses but just sat down and remained quiet. Ross was further irritated when he saw Scott’s tie, with the big happy face of Mickey Mouse staring at him across the table. Ross shook his head and said, “You’ve got to be kidding, Scott! What’s with the tie? You’d better not wear that to Braxton Aerospace.

With two strikes against him, Scott considered his reply. After all, Ross was in a bad mood. Scott enjoyed adding a little humor to the work environment to help people relax, but this time he wondered if he would be adding lemon juice to the wound. He decided that just a little wouldn’t hurt. “You know, I always wear this tie when we have internal pricing discussions at WellGen. But rest assured, I won’t wear it with customers present.”

Ross bit his lips and looked down at his notepad as he twirled his pen in his fingers. Scott knew Ross had been under a lot of pressure the past week trying to get engineering to cut their cost estimates for the proposed C-X product development. He had hoped the Mickey Mouse tie would lighten things up as it had before; but today it wasn’t happening. Such is life. He didn’t look forward to this meeting. Marketing always over simplified what was required to develop products. The more they wanted to win a contract, the easier product development seemed to them, and therefore the cheaper the estimated cost for doing it should be. And they really wanted to win the C-X contract. It was a big dollar contract and would position WellGen for several follow-on projects as well. He also knew that Ross would not be interested in hearing about the potential problems and risks that Scott had tried to share with him before.

Ross cleared his throat and opened the meeting. “As you all know, Lee, Scott, and I will be going to Braxton Aerospace to present our proposal tomorrow. What we need to do this morning is agree on our negotiation strategy. We need to know how much pad we have in case we need to drop our price to win.”

With that, one of the engineers blurted out, “Pad! What pad? You had us scrub our inputs three times to get the price down to where it is now!”

Ross bit his lips again, studying his notepad. Then he shook his head, and after a pause he said. “I just don’t know why it costs so much? It’s like you engineers can’t see the opportunity we have here and the need to be competitive!”

Lee Stover jumped in before the engineers had a chance to offer any rebuttal. “Yeah. This is a great opportunity! The Air Force wants off-the-shelf equipment, and our commercial division has just the right stuff that we can offer. It’s perfect for them and us. It’s a perfectly good idea, so don’t blow it by making it cost so much!”