The Chairman — Dwight E. Foster

Book IV, The Chairman, is the fourth book in a cycle of seven books entitled Shattered Covenants. Shattered Covenants narrates the formation, rise, decline, and fall of McKenzie Barber, a global management consulting firm. The Chairman, Ernie Grey, after eighteen years as McKenzie Barber's CEO is beginning to reflect on succession. He is standing without opposition for his fourth six-year term as the Chairman of McKenzie Barber. The Chairman is narrated from Ernie Grey's point of view. He has been absolute monarch of McKenzie Barber. Instinctively, Ernie recognizes that the market for consulting services has changed, and that McKenzie Barber can no longer grow organically. Ernie Grey made an early choice in Hamilton Burke III, not unlike the manner in which John McKenzie, the founder, had picked out Ernie early in his career. He has moved Burke overseas through the French and the UK practices and brought him back to the US as McKenzie Barber's first Partner in Charge of Strategic Planning. The old line Partners fail to recognize Burke's emergence as a serious Chairman successor. Burke is the ultimate swashbuckling successor, a bachelor, former decorated Green Beret with a French mistress who owns a steel mill and who has an eye for receptive ladies. He is bigger than life with a matching ego. Ernie Grey has commissioned Burke to serve as the change agent to structure the McKenzie Barber in the 1980's. Book IV introduces Ernie Grey's initial flirtation with Toni Alter, a young woman junior in age to his own daughter. Ernie's wife, Millie, is carrying on an affair with Cornelius Vanderkelen, the powerful Chairman of International Petroleum Company (IPCO). The Vanderkelen fortune has been built on oil. Ernie is invited to join the IPCO Board while the Chairman, Cornelius Vanderkelen, is sleeping with his wife. Book IV, the Chairman, covers a three-month period during which Ernie Grey makes a decision on his successor.Prior villains and knaves introduced in the earlier