The Man Who Wanted to Hire a School

By Diogenes the Cynic

The story goes that, after I was bought at a slave market, I was entrusted with the education of Xeniades’ sons.

There is something rather amusing about that. The man paid for a slave and brought home someone who told him how to raise his children.

Teaching the boys took time, practice and discipline. I do not recall settling the matter with a presentation on excellence. Nor did I teach them that they should spend their lives needing me.

I thought of them when I returned to Rio de Janeiro after a long journey through southern Brazil. There I heard that a professional was leaving his firm for a major international company. His colleagues were arranging the handover and speaking warmly of the opportunity ahead of him.

Enter Simão.

I borrow his name from Machado de Assis’s doctor, along with something of that conviction that the world ought to conform to his conclusions. Our Simão, however, was in business. He liked to discuss the future with the assurance of a man already appointed to run it.

Simão took the news rather differently.

He saw an opening.

In this story of mine, Simão kept a close eye on the market. So close, in fact, that he sometimes seemed better acquainted with other people’s next steps than his own.

He already had an office, plans and his own Crispim, who kept things moving without troubling him with much disagreement. What he lacked was a Martim. Someone experienced enough to spare him the work of teaching.

The departure struck him as a promising moment to approach those who remained.

Where others saw a career moving forward, Simão imagined a firm losing its footing. Perhaps someone was feeling uncertain. Perhaps this was the moment to offer a few certainties.

He had plenty. Mostly about himself.

“It should be easier to get people there talking now,” he observed, in this little comedy of mine.

I brought my lamp closer.

I wanted to understand why one man’s opportunity looked to him like everyone else’s vulnerability.

Simão explained that the market was always moving. You had to stay alert, act quickly and recognise talent.

He was very good at recognising it. Particularly once somebody else had developed it.

I asked how many young people he was training.

He replied that he needed to grow.

Perhaps he had not heard me.

I asked again.

He said there was no time.

An interesting predicament: he had time to follow people’s development at other firms, but none to help a beginner at his own.

On the desk lay names, job titles and possibilities. Martim was among them. I do not know what he was offered or how he answered. Simão, however, already seemed to be counting on his enthusiasm before asking for his opinion.

I have no objection to a job offer. People are free to change employers, earn more and take on different responsibilities. The firm this man was leaving seemed to understand that.

I knew of others who had gone on from there to important roles elsewhere. Their former colleagues spoke of them with pride, without insisting that gratitude should take the form of staying.

A school that judges its teaching successful only when its students never leave ought to reconsider what it is teaching.

Simão readily agreed. The freedom to leave struck him as an excellent principle while he imagined someone arriving at his door.

I asked whether he would feel the same when one of his own people found a better opportunity.

He preferred to return to his expansion plans.

I let him talk.

What interested me was his curious eagerness to acquire, along with a professional, all the years others had invested in that person. The questions worked through together, the drafts sent back, the responsibility entrusted a little at a time.

Simão could see the result. How it had been achieved seemed a detail best left to somebody else.

But a firm that develops people cannot be packed into the briefcase of someone who leaves. It lives on in the conversations, the habits and the patience of whoever pulls up a chair beside the next person.

I thought of Xeniades. He had bought a man and discovered that he would have to listen to him. Simão had not yet hired anyone and was already imagining how readily they would all agree.

Before I left, he asked whether I knew anyone.

“I know a young person who still has a great deal to learn.”

He said he was looking for a different profile.

I picked up my lamp. A presentation on the desk declared that people were the company’s greatest investment.

He seemed quite content to let others pay the first instalments.