Page 73 of The Session

“Your act of heroism is great and explains why you’ve been brought into this,” Tru went on. “But if you’re going to take on an active role, we need people to understand why that happened so quickly.”

“But we can be creative in certain circumstances,” Lightman added.

“Within reason,” Jameson corrected.

Lightman laughed. “Leave it to Mr. Jameson to keep us all honest here.”

“It’s important that there’s no suspicion that we put our thumb on the scale,” Tru said.

“I made that mistake with Kevin, and that ended up being his downfall,” Lightman said somberly.

“What have we come up with so far?” Mark asked.

“Trying to do sales as an accreditation is tricky, because even if you made a deal with a Saudi sheikh worth $100 million, people would assume Max set it up. It’ll be hard for you to get credit,” Rawling said.

“Although he deserves credit for Ozzy, and I won’t let anybody tell me otherwise,” Lightman said firmly.

“Did he have his tryout?” Mark asked.

“We just found out. He made the team, and it wasn’t even a question. It was exceptional. The state media said he showed ‘an effortless joy for the game that was infectious.’ Well done!”

“Congratulations, Mark. That’s a big win,” Tru said.

“But not one that will count for authority, at least not directly,” Jameson replied.

“Do you have to take the fun out of everything?” Lightman asked.

“I’m thinking one of the survival challenges,” Rawling suggested. “We have a few of them, and some older ones that are still valid. Setting a record there would go a long way.”

“A survival challenge . . . like getting thrown on an island naked and having to survive?” Mark asked.

“That’s not what she’s suggesting, although we do those kinds of things for our clients. What we call ‘survival challenges’ are situations where you get thrown in blind and you have to solve a problem—like sales or recruiting—in a very short amount of time,” Tru explained.

“Can you give me more details?”

Lightman answered instead: “I realized with my sales team, money only went so far as a motivator and was also finite. But if I got them to compete against each other, purely for bragging rights, a trophy was as good as $1,000 most of the time.”

“It used to be dropping somebody off in the middle of a city with a trunk full of VHS tapes to see how many they can sell,” Tru told him. “Of course, nobody buys VHS tapes or even has a VCR anymore. But for the longest time, a lot of the challenges were based on selling physical items.”

“We were collecting addresses. That counted too,” Lightman said.

“Yes, lead generation, but I don’t know if anybody has used that to get authority recently,” Tru mused.

Rawling picked up a thick book and started to flip through the pages.

“What’s that?” Mark asked.

“It’s the catalog—every single service that we sell. Or at least most of them,” Tru told him.

“We did give authority points for certain kinds of human achievement, now that I think about it,” said Lightman. “When Donald Huerte, CEO of that tech company, got more involved, we gave him points for doing an around-the-world balloon flight, and I think that went over pretty well. We did have one for spaceflight until you could just call Bezos up and hop on a rocket.”

“We’re not sending Mark into space or around the world in the stratosphere,” Tru replied.

“It could be fun . . .” Lightman said.

“We do give points for circumnavigating the globe in a sailboat or doing Everest, although we’ve had to reduce the number of points for that since it’s become basically a bucket-list item for half of corporate America,” said Rawling.

“We do have some survival team-building exercises. Cutthroat Cay, right?” Rawling asked.