Ascent - Passion's Paradox - VOL.1

.07. Lawson Marshall

The week that followed was a busy one.

While Father approved of Neferu's ideas, the family soon found itself in a media whirlwind, dragging the company down with it. It's not as big a scandal as if there had been an oil crisis or a stock hijacking, but it's enough to make the press take issue with us. It must be said that around here, it is not often that the eldest son or any member of a great dynasty like ours allies himself against his family and especially with their worst enemies. This is especially the case, and anything that can fuel the Janssen Marshall conflict makes the editors happy. I'm glad they didn't find out about my father's secret relationship with Janssen's wife.

The media are waiting at the foot of the company and the penthouse, embarrassing everyone who lives there. They shout, call us with their microphones and their incessant flashes. Some of them have even appeared on our second homes and father has had enough but he knows he will have to put up with them for a while yet. We have no choice.

An opponent as close as Faramir means big change and big change means new strategies. But contrary to what I claimed to the press, ideas are not everything in the beginning when you have learned all your life only one strategy to apply. My father's, and probably one of the only flaws in our education on that. But I'm sure I've got it covered. I can't afford to tell a maddened press something I can't deliver in the time frame everyone expects.

However, I know that the changes I'm planning won't please that many of the company's top brass. But I leave them no choice and I have Neferu's full support.

"You're doing it wrong!" my father shouted at me in a bad mood this time.

"It is precisely by doing like you that we will go to the grave! Faramir knows you by heart!"

After attending a whole bunch of meetings where I announced the big changes in the road, my father came to meet me in the corridors. If he is not the boss anymore, he wanted to stay in the company somehow, especially after this event, so he attended the meeting and I might as well say that he is not happy with the measures I am taking. I knew for a fact that he would take it that way, that he would think I was doing it wrong. Darius Marshall needs to detach himself from what his father taught him, because personally I was already planning it, although not so fast. To change the business so as not to be overtaken by my father is to abandon all forms of strategies that the family may have applied before.

That's why I decided to model my new strategy after my mother's, and the way she did things in business. Quite different actually.

Darius Marshall ran the business like his father before him. An old strategy, but one that worked like no other until then. The strategy of cost domination has beaten the empire of Mergery Enterprise at the best of times and considering that environmental thinking was almost non-existent, needless to say that the goal is very simple: it is about cutting costs as much as possible by attacking both fixed and variable costs. The goal is to propose an offer with aggressive consumer prices compared to what is available on the market. To do this, it is necessary to intervene through the supply, production, distribution and fixed charges. And if it is not so easy with the oil to which my father tends as for the profits he succeeded by spending millions and billions.

This strategy is relatively relevant and adapted to our company which aims at the most possible world and not only the American society since we are able to enter in a logic of economy of scale. But my father obviously did not stop there. Continuing the work of his father, he applied a strategy of cooperation. Instead of entering into a direct and opposite confrontation, he decided to launch a cooperation with our various former competitors in order to take advantage of what would not be accessible. That's why he was always hanging out at golf clubs scratching the asses of his old rich and famous bosses, most of whom ended up merging with the company's big conglomerate partners like the NepTet.