“You failed.” — The only woman who dared judge a powerful billionaire gave him a zero, but never expected him to change for her.

PART 2

“Leave.”

“Yes, sir.”

Sebastian began conducting experiments.

He held an elevator for three employees.

June wrote nothing.

He thanked a hotel receptionist by name.

Nothing.

He ordered lunch for an entire administrative department, then walked through while June was present.

Her notebook remained closed.

The following morning, he anonymously paid for repairs to an elderly tenant’s apartment.

June awarded no points.

He discovered why two hours later.

“You instructed your assistant to make sure I heard about it,” she said.

“I did not.”

“You gave the instruction while standing six feet away from me.”

“That may have been a coincidence.”

“Sebastian.”

It was the first time she used his first name.

He forgot his defense for nearly two seconds.

Then June smiled.

“No points for staged kindness.”

She walked away.

Sebastian immediately found Marco.

“She has no objective standards.”

Marco remained silent.

“How am I supposed to demonstrate improvement if improvement cannot be quantified?”

Still nothing.

Sebastian studied him.

“You agree with her.”

“I enjoy being employed.”

June’s notebook became an obsession.

Whenever Sebastian interrupted someone, she wrote.

Whenever he lost patience, she wrote.

Whenever he allowed an employee to finish speaking, she wrote.

Once, during an executive meeting, she wrote for almost thirty seconds after he rejected a manager’s proposal without discussion.

The next morning, Sebastian summoned the manager back.

“Explain the proposal again.”

The man looked terrified.

“All of it?”

“That is generally what again means.”

The manager presented his idea. It was badly researched, unnecessarily expensive, and unlikely to work.

Sebastian listened until the end.

Then he rejected it.

June wrote something.

“This is psychological warfare,” Sebastian told Marco later.

Yet somewhere between trying to earn points and attempting to understand why he was not earning them, small things began to change.

At one of his Brooklyn hotels, a maintenance supervisor approached him about a scheduling problem.

Normally, Sebastian would have issued a solution before the man finished explaining.

This time, he noticed June standing nearby.

So he waited.

The supervisor kept talking.

And talking.

Sebastian discovered that the problem he had been preparing to solve was not the real problem. The hotel did not need more maintenance workers. It needed the housekeeping and engineering departments to stop using different reporting systems.

“What would you do?” Sebastian asked.

The supervisor blinked.

“Me?”

“You appear to be the only person who understands the problem.”

The man proposed a solution Sebastian had not considered.

It worked.

The next morning, Sebastian passed him in the lobby.

“Good morning, Anthony.”

Anthony nearly walked into a marble column.

Sebastian continued walking, then realized June was not there.

He had remembered the man’s name without being watched.

The thought followed him all day.