18

The response to your talk is incredible. The journalists and the rest of the crowd seem almost reluctant to leave. You are the sole subject of the excited buzz of conversation in the room: for a few brief moments, you have a small sense of what it must be like to be a rock star, waiting in the wings to be called back onstage for an encore performance.

(Initial Share Price: 65, initial Image: 45)

Winston nods, apparently satisfied. "Fine. Let's get back to the tower. Now the hard work really

Several days pass, and you struggle just to keep up with the pressures of your job. As a bonus to your already substantial salary, MetaHuman loans you a company-owned apartment in downtown Seattle, near the MetaHuman Incorporated tower. It's a gorgeous, spacious, high-ceilinged home with a view overlooking Washington Park. Yet you spend so little time there that you've barely had a chance to move even your essential possessions from your former home, much further out of the city.

Nor have you yet had a chance to speak with your former colleagues in MetaHuman's human resources department, to learn their feelings about your unexpected promotion. Throughout your career, you have trained in HR because you are drawn to tasks that require a human element, an understanding of character—these are the problems at which you excel, and that you enjoy. Now, myriad other responsibilities have been imposed upon you. It remains to be seen how well-suited you are to this new role.

One morning Winston calls up to your office. "We need to talk about our research department. Can you come down to see me?"

"MetaHuman's research department is essentially its lifeblood," says Winston several minutes later, once you are seated in his plush office and his assistant has given you a hot beverage. "Our core business is the development of products to enhance the human body and its capabilities. Enhancements, we call them. Now, as I've mentioned before, the current legal brouhaha swirling around MetaHuman has resulted in an order to totally shut down all existing Enhancement research. We're forbidden even from using any previously developed technologies to create new Enhancements. We're starting out from zero. We have a couple of dozen smaller, noncore products—pharmaceutical supplies, and so on—that are not bound by the same restrictions and allow us to meet our operational overhead. But just barely. Right now, MetaHuman is bleeding."

"And so it falls on me to rebuild our line of Enhancements from nothing," you say.

Winston nods. "First, I want you to think about recruiting a new head of research. I've taken the liberty of speaking with Mr. Leach to clear your agenda for this afternoon, and of setting up interviews with the top three people on the shortlist I've prepared for you."

Next0