Page 44 of The Session

“I take it your mother gave you an earful. I’m just glad she didn’t scare you off.”

“She didn’t give me a whole lot of insight into Max—just a general lay of the land—and told me to use my best judgment, which might be the worst piece of advice she’s ever given me.”

Tru sat down in a large recliner and motioned for Mark to take the one opposite her.

“All I’m asking is one week to show you who we are, for better or worse, and then you can decide if you’d like to pursue something more permanent.”

Mark waited for the flight attendant to take their drink orders, then asked, “What does ‘more permanent’ look like?”

“Summit is a unique organization. You could think of it kind of as an ecosystem with a lot of opportunities. There aren’t so many carved-out roles as there are people stepping in and saying, ‘I’m going to take something over or make something happen.’ And if you can, you get resources. If you can’t, well, then you sink,” she explained.

“I’m not sure I follow,” Mark said.

“The closest analogy is a consulting firm with partners and junior partners. A junior partner might say, ‘Hey, you know what? The battery industry has really bad public relations. I want to start a team to take that on and see if I can get some clients.’ If they succeed, great. They now have a new division. If they don’t, then they try something else. Here’s how it went for me: I noticed that our conferences weren’t well planned, yet they’re a critical part of what we do because they’re where we make the biggest deals. I saw an opportunity and stepped up. I took over a smaller conference, then another, and then, de facto, it became an area of responsibility.”

“Nobody else was running that prior to you?” Mark asked.

“Oh, there was, and he was terrible at it. He was a legacy who took it for granted.”

“A legacy?”

“Sorry—there are several decades of jargon and lore that I’m going to have to speedrun you through. Summit and its earlier incarnations, including Echo—the name it went by before they realized they had to rebrand because of a terrible reputation—has been around for over fifty years. There are people who started in the earliest days, and then you have the children and, in some cases, the grandchildren of those people. We call them legacies.”

“And you’re a legacy because your father is one of the founders.”

“Yes, but the unofficial term for somebody like me is ‘dynasty,’” Tru clarified. “It sounds stupid, I know.”

Mark gestured toward the interior of the jet. “Is this one of the perks of being royalty?”

“It’s ‘dynasty,’ and no—you’ve got to earn this,” Tru replied. “If I wasn’t a provider, we’d be having this conversation in commercial economy.”

“A provider?” Mark asked.

“It’s a term we use to describe somebody who earns money for the company. There are leaderboards. Of course, there are also a lot of disagreements and arguments over who gets to claim what as their earnings. But that’s usually not a problem until earnings go down.”

“This is way more corporate than I’m used to,” Mark admitted.

“You’d learn more reading the history of the Middle Ages. Summit is pretty feudal.”

Mark looked out the window as the jet began to taxi down the runway. He was starting to have second thoughts. The organization seemed even more cutthroat than he had imagined.

“I know—it feels like you’re about to jump into a pool with a bunch of great white sharks,” Tru said.

“The thought did cross my mind,” Mark replied.

“We’ve got a reef near the island. We get sharks in there, every so often—tiger sharks. The thing you have to understand about them is they’re pretty predictable. They see food, or something they think is food, and they go for it. If visibility is bad and they think there’s food there, they still go for it. But you’re smarter than a shark. Same at Summit. The people here are great at sales. They’re really good at manipulation, but only with people who walk in blind. You’re not walking in blind.”

“So as a business, you teach people how to do sales, you do training, and I guess executive coaching. Anything else?” Mark asked.

“Yes—a lot more. Some things even I don’t know about. We also do consulting, reputational management strategies. We have a couple of firms that work with political campaigns, sometimes on both sides. Just about any place somebody has to make a big decision and doesn’t know who to ask. Max has said repeatedly that our core business is trust. That’s a bit too pat for me, but I would say that’s what we sell people.”

While Mark considered himself trustworthy, he was pretty convinced he was neither good at trust nor good at giving useful advice, given the trajectory of his own life. As he looked at Tru sitting across from him with her confident smile and assertive demeanor, he felt the burden of future expectations he wouldn’t be able to meet.

Tru sensed his unease. “Listen, no pressure. Just spend a week to learn more about us. Best-case scenario, maybe you get involved with one of our professional athlete training programs, or possibly even take your little athletic foundation global with our help. Worst-case scenario, you realize we’re a bunch of whack jobs and you go back to taking out the trash at the old folks’ home.”

“Well, since you put it that way . . .”

“But in order to make this work, I have to make some things clear to you. Like I said before, there’s a ton of internal jargon and ways of doing things. You’ll pick it up quickly. You’ll also realize that Summit sometimes has its own convoluted way of describing something very simple, but we love our vocab. Second, because you’re not a legacy in the sense that you came up inside the organization, you didn’t have to go through all the rituals and all the other stupid stuff that I did. If Max describes Summit’s core product as trust, I would describe our internal culture as testing. We’re always trying to measure each other, both through formal means and informally. Third, because everybody knows you’re Max’s son by now, that’s going to carry its own weight. There are going to be a lot of comparisons, okay?”