“Becca, Becca,” Dick sang out. “If you knew what I know,” he explained, dancing around her, “you would be singing!” He clicked his heels in the manner of the tin man on the yellow brick road, but without falling down. “Impressive,” Becca said, walking across the room to poor herself some coffee. “Your yoga classes are improving your flexibility.” “Two things, darling Becca,” Dick said, gliding to his desk. “First,” he announced, cradling a file folder with an adoring look, as if it were a gift of the Magi, “the Santech deal closed, FDA approval went through, and twenty-four hours later your little New Jersey garage company is up 450 percent! Becca shrugged, but she shone with pride. “I told you I liked that company. One of a handful this year”. “It’s almost unseemly, really”, he returned dryly as he sailed by on the wings of a 450 percent increase in three-hundred milion initial investment. “Only the tax man makes returns like you do. And he puts nothing in.” Becca removed a book from the center shelf of Dick’s perfectly functionless egg-shaped end table. “Liberating Everyday Genius?” “I’m mastering gifts I didn’t even know I had,” came Dick’s response. He trotted from his desk with some reading material of his own. “Which brings me to the second of the twin pillars of my astonishing news, Becca.” “Aren’t you the wordsmith?” she teased him. She sat on his boomerang couch and laid her esspresso carefully on the coffee table in front of her knees. She wanted to be comfortable. From experience she knew that Dick would victimize her for a while with the most fashionable management theory of the moment. He had the virtue of believing so firmly in the jargon of self-improvement that he was unfazed by Becca’s scepticism. He regarded her as his teaching opportunity. “Becca,” he asked her, shaking pages from a magazine with a flourish, “how is that you’re always on top of zeitgeist?” “I don’t know zeitgeist,” she said, her eyes sparkling, “but whoever he is I swear I wasn’t on top of him.” Dick chortled, than sat next to her with the earnest look in his eyes that usually followed a meeting with his executive coach. “You just have it, kid.” He ruffled her hair. “You never could take a compliment. Beautiful thing about you. I met with Christine-Elaine Piper – my executive coach – yesterday.” “How is Coach Piper?” “She’s fine,” he said, ignoкing her mockery in his earnestness. “And from what she says, you’re on to something.” Becca grinned. “Shoot.” He walked to the couch and squatted down next to it, so his eyes were straight close to Becca’s, like a coach in the huddle. “Kid, the zeitgeist,” he said, speaking in a slow, firm voice, “is creativity.” “What?” He laughted. “I wouldn’t have guessed you a natural for it either. But the big idea now is associative thinking. It’s naturally creative. It triggers the concepts that we need for more progressive management decision-making.” Becca, who had closed her eyes pretending to fall asleep, made a snoring sound. He poked her. “Come on. I mean it. This is really influential stuff. The point of more progressive management decision-making,” he said with emphasis, “is to beat the market. Okay? That’s the point.” She stared at him. “Dick,” she said, “an effecient, publicly capitalized market works on the basis of all available information. It can’t be beat. It can only be survived.” Dick laughed. “And if you believed that, you’d be a librarian.”