Victoria faced Monica. "Use it. No celebration, no attack on the reporters, and no anonymous complaints about difficult negotiating partners. If our team leaks another opinion disguised as a fact, I want to know."
Monica nodded and hurried away. Grant turned toward the windows, jaw tight. His plan for the day had once involved a ceremonial photograph, a preliminary announcement, and a private dinner with investors. Now he was watching a driver direct the communication strategy while he struggled to keep pace. What Grant resented most was not Daniel's competence. It was the possibility that Daniel's competence exposed how long Grant had mistaken command for control.
The first real test of the new framework came forty minutes later, when Bennett's finance department reviewed its effect on the projected investment returns. Evan Bell brought a spreadsheet to the screen and highlighted a row marked PROCUREMENT SYNERGIES. The joint venture's forecasts assumed a substantial saving from consolidating suppliers during the first three years. Some of those savings were reasonable. Others depended on Bennett being able to move contracts away from Mizuhara's established partners quickly, without giving them a meaningful opportunity to adapt.
"If we replace the blanket five-year commitment with a protected-review process, we can preserve part of the savings," Evan said. "But the model doesn't work if every incumbent supplier effectively has a lifetime guarantee."
"Nobody has asked for a lifetime guarantee," Tanaka replied. "We have asked you not to replace a qualified supplier just because a financial model contains a cheaper theoretical supplier."
An argument began, technical enough that several people stopped listening. Evan displayed cost curves; Tanaka described how qualification testing differed from the prices quoted in preliminary bids. Grant pointed to the investor presentation and warned that changing the assumptions could make Bennett appear indecisive. On an ordinary day, Daniel might have sat through the exchange and made one suggestion. Today he heard the same old failure returning in a more sophisticated form: two sides defending the usefulness of different evidence without agreeing on what question they needed to answer.
"Could we stop for a moment?" he asked.
Grant's eyebrows rose. "What now?"
"We are using the word supplier as if every supplier creates the same risk. They don't. Some provide standard packaging; others manufacture components that take months to test. Why not classify them by technical criticality and transition cost before we argue about the length of the protection?"
A young Bennett engineer named Priya Shah, who had remained quiet until then, looked up from her notebook. "We already have that classification," she said. "It's in the manufacturing diligence appendix."
Elena asked her to find it. Priya opened an engineering report that had been attached to the transaction files weeks earlier but never brought into the executive summary. It divided suppliers into three categories and noted that replacing certain sensor manufacturers could require a year of qualification work and on-site safety trials. The projected savings model had treated several of those replacements as if they could occur after a routine pricing review. Evan stared at the mismatch. He had not built the engineering assumptions, and the person who had had not known which cost targets would become central to the financing.