An Incompetent Company President Chooses Death
Back in high school, we had world history class.
After our tests were handed back, whenever there was some time left over, the teacher would tell us little anecdotes from world history. I liked those.
I think we were studying China around then. If I remember right, the Sui and Tang dynasties were on the syllabus.
There was this emperor called Xuanzong. At first, he worked hard at governing, but then he became infatuated with Yang Guifei, and little by little the whole country started going off the rails.
At the time, I remember thinking, Why would anyone do something that stupid?
When an incompetent person becomes king, nothing good comes of it. Try a little harder, would you? That was what I thought.
Then somehow I made it into university, and you know how they have those general education courses? I chose world history for one of them. And this time, Europe was full of one baffling monarch after another. Quick-tempered, unable to read the times. Just hopelessly incompetent.
History is basically a collection of “terrible kings,” isn’t it? Great rulers are rare, and that’s exactly why they stand out.
Nine bad rulers for every one good ruler.
Let me say that again.
Nine bad rulers for every one good ruler.
But then I entered the working world, spent a few years at a small advertising agency, and my father died. I took over the landscaping company my family owned.
That was when I understood.
A landscaping company basically takes care of private gardens, maintains parks, things like that.
Ours was fairly large. We had several branch offices.
I worked hard too. I read through documents and went out to job sites myself.
But, well, things didn’t go very well.
Once a company gets to that size, the president doesn’t really have much to do. There are plenty of employees, and they handle everything for you.
And once you get to the director level, everyone is seriously capable. They graduated from well-known national universities in the region, joined our company, and worked there for thirty years. We had several people who knew both the fieldwork and the management side inside out.
Standing in front of people like that, what could someone like me—barely more experienced than a fresh graduate—possibly do?
Answer: nothing.
It hurts when you realize nobody actually needs you.
Even so, I kept trying. The older guys working under me were all good people. They’d say things like, “Let’s support the young third-generation president!”
So I kept at it for about ten years.
By then, I was in my mid-thirties.
At that point, I’d more or less given up.
I tried developing new clients and launching new businesses a few times, thinking those were the kinds of jobs someone with my so-called “young perspective” ought to handle.
You know the sort of thing you see in business magazines:
“The Secret Behind the Revival of a Long-Established Company Founded XX Years Ago: A Young President Takes on a New Challenge.”
Impossible.
All I managed to do was burn through the money in the company account.
Before I knew it, I hardly even went to the office anymore.
The older guys working under me kept pestering me to get married.
“Wouldn’t it have been better for the dynasty if this idiot had just died sooner?”
It had been more than ten years since I’d last thought about how many useless kings like that had existed.
And now here I am.
I can see the ground.
So much for that story about losing consciousness while you’re falling.
That was a complete lie.
I’m conscious.
Right to the very end.
Long live incompetent rulers.