Company Man
by Joseph Finder

This is an older thriller novel by the same author who wrote Suspicion, reviewed earlier here. The book was a little longer than Suspicion. It's around 500 pages or so. I found the main characters in Company Man to be well detailed and realistic. There weren't many characters who seemed thrown in to make the story move, with perhaps one exception. There's a fair amount of dialog. It probably took me longer to complete this book than usual because my free time continues to diminish. I need to do something about that. Anyway this book is set in Fenwick, Michigan, a town that's a little less than halfway between Grand Rapids and Mount Pleasant. The author took the normal liberties with town size and the like. His Fenwick is a small bucolic town with one main employer. That employer is Stratton. Stratton, and the author swears that Stratton is not a stand in for Herman Miller or Steelcase, is primarily a manufacturer of office furniture. For generations Stratton has provided a middle class or better type lifestyle for hundreds, even thousands of West Michigan residents.
Everyone in Fenwick has worked for Stratton, retired from Stratton or knows someone who has done both. As is usually the case when one company is so closely identified with a community Stratton executives have taken a paternalistic approach to their workers. Stratton rarely fired people. Resignations were rare. Workers and executives prided themselves on staying in the same job and doing quality work for decades. Stratton offered pensions, not 401K's. If you were a Stratton worker, you could hold your head up high with pride because your wallet was fat. You could provide a good life for yourself, your spouse and kids. But things change.
The current Stratton CEO Nick Conover is facing increasing market pressures from Chinese and non-union southern competition. These days, consumers aren't necessarily willing to pay a premium for well made US furniture. Nick has made some accommodations to business requirements by ordering layoffs, spinning off non-critical departments and considering overseas sourcing. Nick is a capitalist albeit one with a conscience. Nick has tried to cushion workers from the new market reality when he can but when push comes to shove he must place the good of the company above all else. Better to fire 2000 people and save 3000 than to lose all 5000 jobs. On some of these decisions Nick has had his hand forced by the new owner of the company, a Boston based private equity firm, managed by one Todd Muldaur.
Todd and Nick have a strong dislike for one another. Although like most people in corporate America, Todd and Nick verbalize these feelings through trite sports slogans, passive aggressive advice or silly sounding acronyms, their mutual disdain is clear. Nick hates Todd's micromanaging tendencies. Nick thought that having worked his way up to CEO he would have near total freedom of action. Todd is only concerned with the bottom line. Todd makes that abundantly clear to Nick. Todd doesn't like Nick and doesn't like Michigan, a place he thinks of as flyover country.