With the publication of The Dollar Compass, the second novel in The Henrik Bertelsen Saga, I return to a question that keeps popping up in both business and life:
What happens when adventure, ambition, money, politics and moral compromise all arrive at the same time?
The first book in the series, Tumult in Mecca, followed Henrik Bertelsen in 1979, when he was still a young civil servant at the Danish Ministry of Labour. Entirely accidentally, he became involved in a Saudi hospital project with his brother Jakob. What was meant to be a simple consultancy assignment quickly grew into something lucrative, complicated and dangerous.
That experience gave Henrik a taste for international business. So when he was later offered a much better-paid job as a trainee salesman at the American computer company Control Data, he took the leap.
By the time The Dollar Compass begins in 1985, Henrik has become a successful sales manager. His career has moved quickly – partly because he is good at what he does, partly because he takes initiative, but mostly because of the kind of lucky coincidences business biographies often prefer to ignore.
He has done well. But the company he works for is in trouble.
Computer technology is changing. New competitors are arriving. Control Data’s once-strong position is weakening. Then history opens a door.
Mikhail Gorbachev has come to power as General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party and launches what becomes known as glasnost and perestroika. The Cold War begins to thaw. The Soviet Union needs two things if its system is to survive: lower military spending and access to modern technology.
The first creates an opening for diplomacy. The second catch the attention of Western companies.
For Control Data, and for Henrik personally, the Soviet Union may present the opportunity of a lifetime.
That is the surface of the story.
Underneath lies the real question:
How far are we willing to go when the prize is big enough?
Geopolitics can create business opportunities
We like to think markets open because customers have problems and suppliers have solutions.
Occasionally, they do.
But every so often, they open because the world changes.
In 1985, Gorbachev’s attempt to reform the Soviet Union created a new geopolitical situation. The entire Soviet economy was in desperate need of modern technology. Factories, ministries, infrastructure, research institutions and administrative systems were all lagging.
But the energy and raw materials sectors had a special importance. They offered the Soviet Union its best chance of earning the foreign currency needed to pay for imported technology. That pushed them to the top of the political priority list.
And because high-performance computing for scientific, industrial and energy-related applications was exactly Control Data’s core market, the company saw a rare and potentially enormous opportunity.
For Control Data, this was not just another export market. It was a lifeboat: a chance to keep the company afloat while it adjusted to the new market conditions emerging in the West.
But when business opportunities arise from geopolitics, the rules are never purely commercial.
Every meeting has several layers. Every handshake may mean more than it appears to. Governments, companies, ministries, intelligence services and local intermediaries all have their individual reasons for wanting the project to succeed — or to fail.
Henrik arrives in Moscow believing he is there to sell computers.
He soon discovers a gigantic potential, but also that he has stepped into a system where technology, diplomacy, state interests and private ambition are all tangled together.
When one project becomes the lifeboat
The same technological development that makes the Soviet opportunity attractive is also undermining Henrik’s own company.
Control Data has missed important shifts in the market. Its products are losing competitiveness. The company needs major wins, and a large Soviet project could become the lifeboat.
That is dangerous.
When a company becomes dependent on a few major projects, judgement changes.
Things that would normally be rejected as too risky suddenly get a second look. Warning signs are rebranded as manageable complications. People stretch further than they should because the alternative is dreadful.
This is one of the recurring dilemmas in business.
Dependency weakens discipline.
When the pipeline is healthy, it is easy to talk about values, compliance and strategic focus. When the company’s future may depend on one deal, the conversation changes. The numbers start speaking louder.
When everything is at stake, the willingness to remove obstacles sharpens. With everything to win and everything to lose, cynicism is turned up a notch, and the finer sensibilities are quietly put aside.
What once looked questionable begins to look necessary. What once felt like a line not to be crossed becomes just another barrier to the company’s survival.
Henrik soon understands that the Soviet opportunity could save the company. He also understands that it will pull him into places where company policy and personal values are compromised. Is he prepared to go there?
The official rules are not the real rules
In an autocratic bureaucracy such as the Soviet system, the official rules are only one layer of reality.
There are procedures, ministries, approval channels, committees and written regulations. But next to them sits another system: favours, access, personal relationships, informal payments and quiet arrangements. Corruption is not just a deviation from the system. It has become part of how the system works.
Officials have found ways around the rules. Intermediaries know which doors matter. Decisions may be formally justified, but the real movement often happens elsewhere.
For a Western company, this creates a brutal dilemma. If you refuse to play along, you may lose everything. If you do play along, you risk crossing legal, ethical and personal lines.
And if your competitors are willing to do what you are not, purity can quickly become a luxury you cannot afford.
Henrik has seen versions of this before in Saudi Arabia. He knows that insisting on textbook procedures in a non-textbook environment is commercially fatal.
But he also knows that the first compromise is rarely the last.
Once you accept that “this is just how things work here”, you may soon find yourself defending actions you would previously have condemned.
Intelligence services with their own agendas
Where politicians see reform, and companies see sales, intelligence services see opportunities and threats.
In The Dollar Compass, Henrik must navigate not only Soviet ministries and American corporate expectations, but also the agendas of the KGB and the CIA.
Each operates according to its own logic. Each wants information. Each wants influence. Each is prepared to use people who may not fully understand the game they have become part of.
Henrik is not a spy. He is a businessman. But in the autumn of the Cold War, that distinction is not as clear as he would like it to be.
A foreign businessman with access to American technology, Soviet officials, Western embassies, and money is interesting to many people. He may not be useful today. But he could become useful tomorrow. That is how leverage works. It is collected before it is needed.
This is one of the darker themes of the book. Intelligence services do not only recruit people who already possess secrets. They also identify future possibilities.
A small favour. A minor illegality. A compromising situation. A helpful contact.
All of it can become useful later.
Henrik must learn to distinguish between hospitality, corruption, manipulation, and entrapment.
That is not easy when everyone smiles, and the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow seems so close.
When success is paid for with absence
International business has another cost. It rarely appears in spreadsheets.
Time away.
Large projects require travel, evenings, weekends, delayed flights, hotel rooms, dinners with strangers and phone calls home at inconvenient hours. In the short term, the sacrifice seems acceptable. The adventure is exciting. The project is important. The opportunity is rare. The money is attractive.
But family life does not pause while business accelerates.
Henrik has a wife, Sammy, two young children, a home life, friendships and a rock band that also demands his time. Each individual choice may be easy to defend.
One trip. One meeting. One gig. One late night. One more push.
The problem is the accumulation.
The values that matter most eventually are often the ones most easily sacrificed in the short run: presence, trust, shared responsibility, time with children while they are still children, and the small routines that hold a family together.
When the green carrot dangles in front of us, we regularly forget to ask what we are sacrificing to chase it.
Why business fiction can teach what theory cannot
I also write traditional business books. I believe in frameworks, models and structured thinking. They help us see patterns and make better decisions.
But practice never fits theory perfectly. The devil is always in the details. Not in a Boston Matrix, but in the meeting where someone says something ambiguous. In the dinner where a favour is implied. In the hotel lobby, a casual conversation changes the entire balance of power. In the budget meeting, where everyone knows the target is unrealistic, but no one wants to say it aloud.
At the moment when doing the right thing may cost the deal.
That is why I believe we may learn a great deal about business by following Henrik Bertelsen — his initiatives, decisions, mistakes, rationalisations, and compromises.
Business doesn’t behave like the models we have designed.
It is affected by people under pressure, with incomplete information, mixed motives, personal ambitions and private worries.
The Dollar Compass may be a Cold War thriller. But it is also a business novel about trivial business decisions, international sales, unpleasant dependency, blatant corruption, corporate survival, family costs and moral erosion.
A compass using money as its north star may lead you to interesting places.
It may even make you rich.
But it will not necessarily lead you home.
The Dollar Compass is available where you normally get your books and in your preferred format.
It will be free for Kindle from 22 to 26 June, Pacific Standard Time, here:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GRSBXN1T
