Two Crowns ── The Day I Reached the Local Summit

The reprinted business cards hadn't arrived in time, so on my first day I went in wearing only the company pin my predecessor had left behind. The woman at reception rose and bowed low. "President. We've been waiting for you." In the elevator mirror I saw, unmistakably, the face of a man who had reached the top of a company. That same morning, an email from New York added, in small parentheses beneath my new title, another fact entirely.

The Illusion of the Summit

The president's office sat on a corner of the fourteenth floor. Two walls of glass opened onto the city's skyline; on the desk stood the pen holder my predecessor had arranged with care, and an approval terminal not yet powered on. My secretary came in carrying a thick file and read out the morning's schedule. A meeting with the head of sales, a progress report on drug-price negotiations, a congratulatory message to the regional branch managers' conference, and in the evening a round of courtesy calls on old contacts at the regulatory ministry. Every item on the day waited for my signature as its final stroke.

So this is what it means to stand at the top, I thought. No request stops here for a higher hand. Above me, in this country, there is no longer anyone. Chased by numbers on the front line, ground down by budgets and personnel at headquarters, I had spent more than a decade climbing a staircase, and now I had set my foot on its last step. That it was an illusion I would learn three hours later.

"Local summit" and "global periphery" are often two names for the same chair. The moment you sit down, you cannot see which name is calling you.

Two Org Charts

Before noon, an email prompted my first login to the global parent's HR system. I followed the instructions, and an org chart opened on the screen. In the Japan affiliate's chart, I was at the very top. Beneath me, the divisions of sales, medical, regulatory, and administration spread their branches. A familiar tree, the one over which I had reigned since that morning.

But the instant I pressed "Global View" in the upper right, the picture inverted. I was no longer the apex. I had become one of a dozen boxes hanging beneath the Asia-Pacific regional lead, a box marked only "Japan." Above that box was the regional lead, and above him the global commercial head, and a CEO, and a board. My signing authority carried a ceiling. Contracts above a certain figure waited, after my signature, for approval by a finance officer in a region I had never set foot in. The king's seal, in another kingdom, is demoted to a single application form.

One and the same person, placed at opposite ends of two charts. No one is lying. It is a fact that I am the apex locally, and a fact that I am the governed globally. The trouble was that both were true at once.

Two Demands Arriving the Same Day

At my first afternoon meeting, with the head of sales, I came to know this in the body. He spread the second-quarter figures on the desk, below the prior year, and spoke with heat about the tactics for clawing back. To accelerate penetration of our flagship product, he said, we need closer touchpoints than ever with local institutions: more speaker programs, wider opportunities to share information with physicians. As field logic, it held together. The numbers don't wait.

Fifteen minutes after he left, a second email arrived, from the parent's compliance function. The subject: "On the entry into force of the revised Global Code of Conduct." The standards governing engagement with healthcare professionals would tighten further from the new year. The number of speaker programs, the ceiling on honoraria, the duty to document every exchange of information. Almost everything the head of sales had just said he wanted to "increase" stood in the column marked "to be narrowed." Headquarters had pressed two arrows on the same man in the same week. One pointed up, the other down.

Each demand, taken alone, is right. Without profit you cannot protect the jobs or the research. Without discipline the very reason a pharmaceutical company exists collapses. The vexation was that both competed for the same resources: time, hands, contact with the field. More speaker programs help the numbers but edge toward the gray zone of the code. Thicker layers of recording and approval are safer but slow the field's pace without fail. My chair was set directly over the knot of that tug-of-war.

The Weight of the King, the Lightness of the Vassal

In the evening, returning from a call on an old contact in the ministry district, I sat in the back seat of the chauffeured car and laid the morning chart over the afternoon one in my mind. To be the local king is heavy. The lives of well over a thousand people in this country, their families, the trust of institutions cultivated over years, all hang from my judgment. To be the global vassal is, in a sense, light. Seen from headquarters, I am one interchangeable node. If Japan's numbers tilt, my name will be quietly erased from the chart, and another name will enter another box. To hold the weight of the king and the lightness of the vassal at once, in the same chest. That was what it meant to bear two crowns.

The hard part is that this duality is difficult to confess to anyone. I cannot tell my local subordinates, "In truth I too am governed." To them I must be the final approver; a complaint bends the spine of the organization. If I tell the regional lead, "the field is not so simple," it sounds like an excuse. The solitude of the king and the solitude of the vassal stand back to back inside one person.

Headquarters closes its numbers by the quarter. Local trust grows over ten years and breaks in a single act. I will live with those two clocks strapped to the same wrist.

When the car returned to the building, a box of freshly printed cards had reached my desk. On the front, in Japanese, "Representative Director, President"; on the back, in English, "President, Japan." On the front and back of one sheet of paper, the summit and the periphery were printed together. I pinched a single card between my fingers and stood a while watching the night view beyond the glass. Each day from tomorrow, I would be asked, in the space between this front and back, which way to face. Only now was the recognition catching up with me.

The two crowns cannot be removed. Take off one, and the other loses its meaning. Chase only the parent's metrics while abandoning local trust, and the numbers eventually lose their roots. Slight the parent's discipline to push only local circumstances through, and credibility collapses overnight. I have no choice but to take on, as a contradiction left intact, being both apex and periphery.

What I understood on my first day was not an answer but the shape of a question. What I will face over the next ten installments is the unending succession of days that ask how to live this duality. For today, I am still comparing the front and back of a new business card, and nothing has been resolved.