I caught it before the email went out. Luke thanked me. He said he was still getting up to speed on the rate structures.
This is what “up to speed” means in practice: two years of rate history, carrier-specific cost structures, client-specific rate agreements, the relationship between fuel surcharges and base rates, and the particular way each of our major clients tracked and audited their freight invoices. You do not get up to speed on this in eight weeks or eighty weeks. You get up to speed on it through the sustained experience of making decisions and living with their consequences.
Luke was thirty-nine. He had been in business development for thirteen years. He was not inexperienced in the absolute sense. He was inexperienced in the specific sense of not having spent those thirteen years making operations decisions.
The quarterly review prep was what finally crystallized for me what was happening.
The Q4 review prep came up on the calendar four weeks after Luke’s promotion. I had prepared every Alder quarterly review for nine years. I had a checklist. Luke had access to the checklist.
I mentioned the review to Luke. He said he had it handled.
I said I was happy to walk through the prep process with him.
He said it was fine.
Four weeks later, I was in the conference room and Luke was already seated and my role, as it currently existed, was not going to continue.
The connection between these events — Luke’s unpreparedness for the operations role and the decision to eliminate my role rather than acknowledge the unpreparedness — is not something I understood immediately. It took me several weeks of being outside the building to see it clearly: if Victor acknowledged that Luke was not ready to run operations, he would have to acknowledge that the succession plan needed revision. Revising the succession plan was something he had decided not to do.