Read Online Learning curves by Gemma Townley - Free Book Online Page B

and wished that the ground would swallow her up.
    Daniel Peterson forced himself to look anywhere but at the girl from the charity dinner. The girl he’d thought about on and off all week, smiling each time he did. He’d expected a boring dinner full of suits—hadn’t even wanted to go, and wouldn’t have either, if his chairman hadn’t booked a table—and he’d been right, too. Except for her. She hadn’t been boring at all.
    Don’t look at her,
he said to himself like a mantra.
You’re a lecturer. Focus on the task at hand.
    He didn’t know why he found this lecturing lark so difficult. Sure, he wasn’t an academic; he didn’t have any teaching qualifications, but he managed to give presentations at work all the time without any problem.
But of all the places for her to turn up.
    He put his hands through his hair for the third time in five minutes, a reflex action that he did when he was nervous and that sometimes meant he had to wash his hair twice a day, particularly when he was stressed.
    Okay,
he told himself,
you’ll just have to make the best of it.
He looked around the room and saw a rather overweight young man in the front row. Perfect, he told himself. Focus on the fat guy.
    He shouldn’t have asked her to pick an industry, he thought ruefully, but somehow he hadn’t been able to stop himself. He’d been thinking about her all weekend, and now there she was, right in front of him, and he found himself utterly unable to look elsewhere. But Jesus, why did she have to choose a condom manufacturer? Was it so bloody obvious that he was staring at her? Of course it was. She was taking the piss. It was her way of telling him to back off.
    Or was she flirting with him?
    The fat guy was looking at him. He looked like he’d just said something. Damn it.
    “Great points, articulately presented,” he said quickly. He had to move away from condoms and back to mission statements. He found his eyes wandering and pulled them back to the front row. “But what I’m really trying to explain here is that the mission statement isn’t just a few words cobbled together to look good. It sets out the strategy. And if the mission statement says you’re aiming at doing good in the world, and your tactics involve getting products manufactured in sweat shops, then there’s an obvious problem there. Either the mission has to change or the tactics do.”
    “Surely business isn’t there to do good in the world,” the fat guy said. “Surely business is there to make money.”
    Daniel frowned and unconsciously put his hands through his hair again. “Yes, well,” he said seriously, “ethics is a rather big subject for me to cover today. But there are businesses whose key selling point is that they are ethical or environmentally sound or whatever. Take the growth in organic food or fair-trade coffee. It can be quite a compelling offering to customers.” He saw Jen stare at him furtively, then look away.
    “But then the motivation is still making money; you’re just doing it by being good,” the fat guy continued. “If people stopped wanting fair-trade coffee, the company wouldn’t go on selling it, would they? They’d switch to whatever customers were buying. Business needs to be profitable, otherwise it can’t survive.”
    “Bollocks!”
    Daniel looked up quickly. It was the girl. He arched his eyebrows.
    “I’m sorry?” he asked, trying to keep his face even and normal—whatever normal looked like. Right now he couldn’t remember.
    “It’s just that he’s talking total rubbish,” Jen continued, her voice full of passion and her lips dark red as the blood rushed to them. Daniel wondered what it would be like to kiss them, then shook himself. “Companies have to be responsible—they can’t just operate like they don’t have an impact on the world. Otherwise you’d say that corruption is fine so long as customers don’t mind . . .”
    “Well, it is,” the fat guy said glibly. “Government