Critical Chain: A Business Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

university in the Midwest. It was not always a small university. As a matter of fact, about twenty years before my time, it was quite large. Do you know what happened there?"
     
    "No idea," he answers, wondering how she is going to tie it to a demand to cut his budget.

"They had a flourishing agricultural school," she continues in her soft voice. "They allowed it to grow about ten percent a year. It grew and grew, and with it, using your terms, the fixed assets grew: the number of classrooms, number of laboratories, number of tenured professors."

"And then..." Page says out of politeness.

"And then, agriculture did not need so many graduates anymore. Naturally, registration of new students dropped and fewer were eager to continue on to higher degrees. But the burden to maintain the buildings remained, and the need to pay the salaries of professors with tenure remained."

"It happens," he calmly comments, "in agriculture."

B.J. doesn't allow his comment to distract her. She hasn't yet finished her story. "The impact was not restricted to the agricultural school alone," she clarifies. "The financial burden was high enough to mandate a drastic cut throughout all the other schools. Some say it was a miracle that the university was not bankrupt."

She pauses. He doesn't comment.

"You don't think that it can happen to us?" B.J. inquires. "Definitely not," Page dismisses the idea.

"Why?"

"One cannot compare agriculture to business," he says conversationally. "You don't need a university degree to succeed in agriculture. In that field there is no external pressure that forces people to go through higher education."

"And in business there is," B.J. encourages him. "Without a doubt. Today, if you want to climb the corporate ladder you must have an MBA."

"Good for us," B.J. agrees.

Page is a little disappointed. He expected more decisive arguments from B.J. That's not the way to alarm him enough to voluntarily cut his budget.

"Chris," she continues, "there is another field that forces people to go through higher education. Lawyers must graduate from a university. Moreover, in law it's not an option, in business it still is."

Never underestimate her, he reminds himself, and aloud, he says, "I don't see the relevancy."

"I spoke with Paul Dimmers yesterday. You know him?" "Quite well." Page is starting to dislike the direction their conversation is taking.

"They are facing a real problem, he told me. New student enrollments at their law school are less than half compared to three years ago."

Christopher Page examines her face. He cannot decipher anything. Impossible to figure out. Is she aiming at next year's budget, or at something much larger? There weren't any warnings.

Maybe this is B.J.'s way of warning him? He decides to stop brushing it aside. At least until he can find out where B.J. really stands.

"How does Paul explain the drop," he inquires noncommittally.

"That's the interesting part," she answers. "It looks like they were talking about it for quite some time. If we had a law school in our university, no doubt we too would have heard about it before."

Page barely stops himself from saying, "Well?"

"Being a lawyer became a real fad," she starts to explain. "No wonder, considering the base salaries that were being offered. There was a flood of young people wanting to be lawyers. The schools ballooned. Almost a replica of the story I told you about my old university."

Page doesn't have any difficulty seeing how she intends to build the parallels to his business school. It's much more serious than he thought. She's not aiming at the present, she's questioning the foundation upon which his long-term strategy is built.

"You can figure out the story from there," she says. Nevertheless she continues; it's clearly important to her that it be verbalized. "Those many new students, after a few years, turned into many new graduates. So many that they outstripped the demand."

Page now has had enough time to figure out